This is the tastiest meal I’ve made since I started food blogging, even though it sounds the least exciting. The rice pilau dish from Bhopal is a Madhur Jaffrey recipe. It’s basmati rice with carrots and peas, and is astonishingly complicated to make despite that simple description. However it’s also incredibly fun, stretching over 2 hours of cooking including a lot of vigorous stir-frying. The flavors are subtle and aromatic, the result of a lot of whole spices fried in ghee, including black cardamom, cloves, black cumin seed, cinnamon stick and whole mace.

It was so more-ish that I didn’t use most of the intense pickles in the pictures (as much as I love Indian pickles). The main accompaniment was an apple yogurt relish. This uses toasted black cumin seeds, which delivers one of the more intoxicating smells known to mankind, plus grated granny smith apple, ginger, cayenne and salt in a high-quality yogurt. High-quality yogurt should look something like the picture below.

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