Cookery School : Home-style chicken curry

As said before, I come from a vegetarian household. The family treasure-chest of pass-down-to-the-next-generation recipes has absolutely no mention of anything remotely non vegetarian (not even egg)

So for a chicken-lover like me, learning to make chicken curry meant banging on my neighbouring Aunty's door and demanding a lesson :D The said lady, Aunty H, has been ferrying across delicious dishes across the apartment landing for yours truly for years now. Her fried fish, stuffed fish, fish curry, spicy cabbage cake, chicken curry have been culinary highlights of my growing-up years. So it was inevitable that I roped her in to teach me her fabulous meat-and-fish recipes!

Our cookery school flagged off yesterday and Aunty, flustered at my actually wanting lessons, coralled her cook into making an unscheduled visit so that she could teach me. (Aunty claims the cook's mastery in the kitchen far outstrips her own) So off we started - with me clicking pics amidst giggles (from the cook) and exclamations of horror at the 'mess' in the kitchen (by Aunty).

The recipe is hearty yet amazingly simple, uses no exotic difficult-to-get-your-hands-on ingredients, and is ready in under half an hour. What more can one want?

Ingredients:

1 chicken, cleaned and cut into 10 pieces
3 mid-sized tomatoes
3 mid-sized onions
a big handful coriander leaves+tender stalks
3 green chillies (to taste)
1.5 inch chunk of fresh ginger
2 heads of garlic (15-20 cloves), peeled - yes, there's a LOT of garlic here!
3 teaspoons Malvani masala (readily available in stores) - if not available, its my guess that 3 teaspoons of a mixture of equal parts of garam masala and red chilly powder should do
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
Salt, to taste

Method:
Whiz the coriander, chillies, ginger and garlic in a blender with some water to make a smooth paste.


Rub this paste onto the chicken and let it marinate for 30 minutes or so.


In the meantime, whiz the onions to a fine paste. Keep aside.


Ditto with the tomatoes (skins on - don't bother with peeling and de-seeding. :D )

In a saucepan/large-ish vessel, add the oil and let it heat. Add the onion paste and saute till the oil starts separating from the onions and they start taking a golden hue.


Add the tomato puree and stir, again till the oil starts separating (at the sides) from the tomato-and-onion mix.


Add the malvani masala (or equivalent) and saute - yet again, till the oil separates and you get a gorgeous thick red gravy.

RED Malvani masala........

....gives a gloriously red gravy!

Dump the marinated chicken pieces and salt into the pan and stir so that the gravy coats the chicken pieces evenly.


Add about a cup of water and let it simmer gently on a low-to-medium flame till the chicken is cooked through.

Adjust the seasoning, take it off the flame and garnish with fresh chopped coriander leaves.

Serve piping hot with pao (dinner rolls) - NOT sliced white bread. This curry is yummy ladled over fluffy white rice as well.

The piece de resistance!

Cooking the chicken on the bone means that the meat is so lusciously tender that it slides off the bone when you prod it with a fork/spoon/your fingers. You can make this curry with boneless chicken cubes as well, but then you MUST be very vigilant about not letting the chicken overcook - especially chicken breast which starts getting dry and stringy very rapidly once its past the just-cooked stage.

My personal take on this dish is that its a great contender for a party dish. You can cook up a large vatful in minimal time and with minimal effort; its versatile; does not use too many or too exotic ingredients - and finally - its absolutely delicious. :)

Enjoy!

Kitchen Experiments: Mini-Muffin Mania

I recently acquired a mini-muffin tray. Of wobbly silicone. In a briaght-and-pretty-cherry red. Of course I had to use it!

So mini-muffins it was a la maison today. I chose muffins over cupcakes because:

1. We’d already had 2 kinds of cake around here in the last 2 weeks
2. There’s something so wholesome and virtuous about the idea of biting into a sturdy muffin along with a tall glass of milk for breakfast, rather than say, nibbling at a dainty-prettily iced-and-fluffy cupcake

(An aside – while Googling for the exact difference between muffins and cupcakes, I came across this hilarious yet true differentiator on several websites and forums – “If you hit a wall with a cupcake, you’ll get a ‘poof’ sound, but if you hit it with a muffin, you’ll get a ‘thud’ sound!” Hahahahaha – I still cant stop chuckling at that one…)

So it was muffin-recipe hunting for moi and while several chocolate chip recipes beckoned enticingly, I steadfastly turned my back on them, so determined I was to be good and virtuous. (The fact that the chocolate-mango cheesecake from a few weeks ago and an unblogged chocolate cake just last week had given me mild chocolate-chip ennui is incidental…: P)

I came across a simple banana-and-butterscotch muffins recipe on Nigella’s website (it’s her recipe, not a guest’s one) and it was love at first sight – it was so easy! I didn’t have the required butterscotch morsels, so substituted them with almond flakes and chopped cashewnuts. Also, I used half-atta-half maida (the next time I make these, I’ll go atta all the way – a muffin is supposed to be sturdy!) instead of only maida. Topped the muffins with a half-moon cashewnut each and popped them into the oven.

25 minutes later, the whole house was redolent with the comforting smell of banana-and-fresh-baking. Yummm...

A confession – I clean forgot to add the stipulated 100gms sugar in the batter and poured the sugarless batter into the greased muffin tray. I was about to shove it in the oven when I realised my mistake….and was too bored to scoop out the batter again to mix in the sugar. So I added honey in half the muffin moulds and sugar in the rest, stirred them up then-and-there (I used my finger, ssssssh!), popped them in the oven and left them to Providence. :D

I was going to initially make banana-and-walnut muffins and a second batch of mango-and-almond ones. But the lack of walnuts and a reluctance to make 2 batches of sweet muffins coupled with my experimental side waking up and sniffing the air for a challenge meant that my second lot of muffins was a chilly-cheese-coriander savoury variant.

I improvised based on Nigella’s recipe but since I simply throw things together when I experiment, I have no fixed quantities. (They aren’t needed – except for the essential ingredients like flour-oil-eggs-baking powder). I made the basic batter as per her recipe and then added a handful of grated Cheddar, about 2-3 sprigs of chopped coriander, a squirt of HOT Sriracha chilly sauce (you can use any hot chilly sauce) and a finely chopped green chilly. And yes, some salt too, for taste.

Baked them for 25 minutes till golden brown and let them cool on a wire stand. Gobbled one up with a dab of Sriracha sauce while still warm. :)

Note: While the savoury muffins are tasty, they lack a dominant flavour (say like banana or chocolate in sweet ones). They need either a component with a strong flavour that can give body to the entire muffin (chopped prawns or grilled-and-sliced sausage come to mind) or a dominant flavouring (like vanilla or nutmeg in sweet muffins) – pav bhaji masala or mint chutney seem like workable options here. I WILL fine tune the savoury muffin recipe – it’s too good and versatile to let go!

If you have any flavour ideas either for sweet or savoury muffins, please post them here as comments!