Why you should get yourself some thali dishes (part one)

Oooh: look at these. This is a stainless steel shop in Chennai (Madras) and, I must tell you, I have a splendid collection of stainless steel dishes, plates and tumblers. Favourite of all, though, would be my thali dishes.

Thali are large silver platters which are either flat -- for you to place little matching silver pots full of different dishes on the platters-- or the thali dishes have different sections into which you put your food. It is the latter I favour and, reader, I use them day in and day out and not just for curries.(Although you can see a selection of curries and fresh pickles in my last entry -- a regular dinner in our Anglo-American household, curiously enough...)

So here's an idea: why don't you pop over to Spices of India at http://www.spicesofindia.co.uk and find yourself some dishes like these; you'll find them listed as dinner plates and then use them for all sorts of things? For example, dinner last night for assorted under 8s. A thali dish into which went little handfuls of crisps, carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, peanut butter sandwiches cut into stars, cubes of cheese, some chipolatas and a big mango hedgehog. The mango hedgehog is, as you might know if you've been reading this for a while or have read my book, simply a fat slice of mango, skin still attached, scored and bent back on itself. Looks like a hedgehog, see? Well, sort of. My point is, the dish looks novel and hugely cheerful, like party food every day, but is practical and a good way to eke out odds and sods and make them look special. Ker-ching!

And for our dinner tonight, the thalis will be used by Mr Nedved and me and they will be heaped with a prawn curry (curry leaves, cumin seeds, fresh coriander, chopped red chilli, garlic), in the central section will be a mound of basmati rice, in another, some Greek yoghurt, just slightly flavoured with some 'chaat' powder and in another section, a little fresh pickle of finely chopped cucumber with sea salt, black pepper and fennel seed. Fire lit (have you looked outside? My five year old got blown over in a field just now while we were dog walking); dinner on lap. Try it. We might be watching --against Mr Nedved's will, the X factor: awful but I cannot seem to look away. I digress. The thali dish, by the way, tends to be native to Southern India (see the beautiful thali of Southern Indian vegetarian food above), but you do see it elsewhere. And I've given you (to left) another stainless steel picture (how I love these shops) and one of my own thalis. In the dish below, you can see a nan (or naan) bread, which is speckled with kalonji -- the spice you might know as onion seed or nigella; there is a rather thick massor (red lentil) dhal with curry leaves, some aloo paalak (potato and spinach curry), a hot lime pickle, some cucumber batons which I had barely sprinkled with anardhana (pomegranate powder), some fresh lime slices, a hot lime pickle and a little fresh pickle (or you might call it a salad) or tomato, green mango, onion, saunf (fennel seed), fresh mint and dred chilli. These are North Indian foods.Get cooking. x

Many thanks to McKaysavage and LadyJake at Flickr for, respectively, the stainless steel shots and that of the South Indian thali, about which I will tell you in a more scholarly future chapter.