Last night I made a YUMMY vegetable curry with a recipe my MUMMY gave me - here is the link: http://www.tescorealfood.com/recipes/vegetable-curry-and-aromatic-rice.html . If I'm honest, I didn't bother with the aromaticing of the rice as I don't have cinnamon sticks and cardamon pods chilling in my unsubstantial student spice collection, and I added a dollop of curry paste to make it a bit more gloopy, but it was still delish and much appreciated by my TUMMY. This meal is ideally eaten before a read of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, which mentions many lovely curries and chipatis alongside fairly grim tales of poverty and social unrest. I studies A Fine Balance as part of my course this year, but it is exactly the kind of book I would have sought out anyway. It's very thick and very brutal, but incredibly well written made milder as a result. It does take a dedicated few weeks to get through it I think, especially if you want to be able to appreciate it properly (which is something an English degree can really spoil - reading because you have to read and not because you want to is a strange feeling), but it is so worth it and I can almost guarantee the ending will stay with you for a long while! In terms of tunes, The Dhol Foundation's Gra Gan Chrioch (itunes it...youtube does not provide) is great - verging on dub, so maybe not everyone's fave, but personally I love a bit of that every now and then, so it works nicely alongside the grime of the novel.
Prizes for those who spot the hidden rhymes.