Aloo Tikki Potato Fritters with Sizzled Tomatoes

AVE we Irish got a taste for spices or what! Thirty years ago, when I first started the Ballymaloe Cookery School, garlic was still considered by many to be daring and exotic.

It was ten years before most of us dared to experiment with chilli not to speak of spices other than a few cloves in an apple tart or ginger with rhubarb in jam or gingerbread.

Somehow in the mid 80s I heard about Madhur Jaffrey and found her BBC Far Eastern Cookery book. I was hooked and longed to learn more about spices so I picked up the courage to telephone her in New York and invite her to teach at the Ballymaloe Cookery School — she agreed. I was beyond thrilled and my spice odyssey began.