Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

Last weekend, a couple of old friends that I hadn’t seen for over a year were coming round for dinner. They both liked curries so I decided to make a range of dishes for them to sample.

I made a spicy potato and cauliflower, chicken jalfrezi and dhal, all from the great menu of delicious Curry Focus recipes.

My friends were bringing round some fresh fruit for dessert so I chose to make some Indian ice cream (kulfi) to go with the fruit.

I know that there are machines that make ice cream. But I don’t have one of them. And the Curry Focus ice cream recipe doesn’t need anything more complicated than a whisk.

I bought the ingredients, conscious that there was a lot of fat and calories going into this simple dish. But I don’t have ice cream very often and it’s a bit of a treat.

The recipe was simplicity itself to follow.

The only thing that I had to work out was the freezing and unfreezing of the ice cream.

Before I added the last ingredient (of whisked egg whites), the ice cream needed to be 80% frozen. I had to make a guess at what this meant. I kept checking the mixture every 10 minutes after an hour of freezing and finally decided it had frozen enough after 90 minutes.

I then left the ice cream in the freezer overnight.

The next morning I checked out the ice cream and found that it had frozen solid. I couldn’t chip out any ice cream to test. The ice cream must have frozen solid because there are no added preservatives – supermarket bought ice cream never freezes completely when you have it in the freezer and this must be the result of some additive in the ice cream.

I left the ice cream in the kitchen for an hour to let it thaw. After an hour, the ice cream could be spooned out of the bowl but still had a fair amount of ice inside it.

I needed to go out of the house for the rest of the day and put the ice cream back into the freezer (I didn’t want it to melt back into its original state).

An hour before we were scheduled to start eating, I removed the ice cream from the freezer again. It was completely frozen. When the time arrived for dessert, just over 1.5 hours had gone by and the ice cream had thawed almost perfectly. I mashed the ice cream with a fork to make sure that the few solid bits were broken up and then served it with the fresh fruit.

I had another hit on my hands!! Everyone loved the ice cream and it received an excellent rating of 8 out of 10.

If you are partial to ice cream, why not try this easy recipe?

My daughter surprised me last week by asking me where curries come from. She’s only six and previously hasn’t shown any interest in curries. I replied that curries come from the Indian restaurant at the end of the street. But what she really wanted to know was from which country curries came.

That was an interesting question with multiple answers.

The most obvious answer is that curries come from India.

But that’s not the full story.

In fact, curries come from lots of different countries, the most famous (in my mind) being India. But curries also come from lots of countries including Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Japan and even Jamaica. Each country has its own styles of curries.

Each country produces at least one type of curry and some, such as India, have lots of different types of dishes to tempt your palate.

What ingredients are put into curries? Well, almost anything edible. The main ingredients are chillies, spices, onions, ginger, meat (including fish) and vegetables. Rice is usually served with a curry.

Today you can get a curry in almost every country in the world. Indeed, there is usually a choice of types of curry in most big cities around the world.

I’m not sure that my answer meant much to my daughter but we had fun finding all of the curry countries in an atlas.

Hi, Ray here again.

Once again, it’s time to make a yummy curry from the great range of recipes on the Curry Focus website. My local supermarket was advertising a beef special so I chose the Beef and Potato curry to take advantage of the good price.

This is yet again another very easy curry to make and all that has to be remembered is that the curry simmers for around 2.5 hours – so if dinner is scheduled for 7pm then making the curry needs to start at about 4pm.

I cut up the beef and mixed it in with the salt and turmeric.

Then I peeled and prepared the onions, garlic and ginger. Now I was ready to start cooking.

I stir-fried the onion, garlic and ginger for around 10 minutes. Then I added the beef with the spices and stir-fried for 5 more minutes.

Then in went the water. I brought the curry to a simmer, covered it and left it for 2 hours, returning to stir the curry every 10 – 15 minutes.

I peeled and cubed the potatoes just before the 2 hours were nearly up and then added the potato cubes to the curry, stirring the curry well and covering the frying pan again.

I started to microwave rice after 5 minutes and the curry and rice were both ready just 20 minutes after the potato was added.

I served up the Beef and Potato curry to the lone other diner (there was only 2 of us for dinner tonight) and we tasted the results of the cooking.

And it was a good curry. Not a great curry, but a good one. The spice rating was mild to medium and the beef was really tender. There wasn’t much color on the plate so I maybe could have garnished the curry with some fresh cilantro to add a touch of color. The curry was given a good score of 7 out of 10.

There was way too much curry for just the two of us so we ate the same curry the following night and it tasted a little bit better than the previous night (it’s funny how curries do that). And we still couldn’t finish the curry so we put the remaining curry into a container and popped it into the freezer for another day.

I can definitely recommend this curry if you want to try an easy curry that is not too spicy.

Our writers have been busy this month reviewing recipes and taking a closer look at some of the ingredients used.

Ray puts together some of the things he has learned in the last twelve months making curries and produces a full meal - Putting It All Together.

Passatta. What Is It? - Passatta is a cooked tomato concentrate that we talk about in this article.

Cauliflower and Potato Recipe Review - A great side dish that is not only tasty but easy to make.

Poppadom Recipe Review - Poppadoms end up being a challenge to cook.

Beef Pasanda Recipe Review - If you like a mild curry and red wine then this could be just the curry for you.

Lamb Rogan Josh Recipe Review - this curry did not turn out as expected so we are looking for more Rogan Josh Recipes to review.

Top 5 Recipes for July

1 Balti Chicken
2 Chicken Curry (Kodi Kura)
3 Easy Chicken Curry
4 Naan Bread
5 Chicken Curry

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a new recipe here and a restaurant here.

It’s been just less than a year since I began trying the recipes on the Curry Focus website.

In the first few weeks, I followed the recipes extremely carefully and was sometimes unsure as to what would actually be served at dinner time.

In the early weeks I was probably testing myself as much as testing the recipes and couldn’t adapt if I made a mistake when cooking.

And I also could not tell that some recipes were wrong or not quite correct.

A year forward still sees me carefully following the recipes because I need to ensure that the recipes on the website actually work.

But I’m a more adaptable now and can improvise as I’m cooking.

If a recipe doesn’t work then I can often work out why and then try it again once I’ve changed the ingredients or adjusted the cooking times.

But during these months I have only cooked one dish at a time (I won’t pretend that rice is a dish). I cooked a chicken, pork, beef, lamb or vegetarian curry.

But last weekend I made a meal instead of a single dish.

I picked the saag gosht as the main because it simmers for 90 minutes for the last cooking stage and gave me enough time to make the other dishes.

Before starting the saag gosht, I mixed up the dough for some naan and left it to rise.

Then I made a batch of mango lassi and put it in the fridge to cool.

Whilst the naan dough was rising, and the mango lassi was chilling, I got ready the ingredients for the saag gosht and then relaxed and read the paper for a couple of hours.

After a good read, I started to cook the saag gosht.

Once the saag soght had started to simmer, I rolled out the naan bread and baked the bread. I had already preheated the lower oven and put the ready naans into the oven to keep them warm. I baked all of the naans although I only needed 4 for dinner and put the surplus naans aside to cool – once the naans had cooled I put them into individual plastic bags and then put them into the freezer for another day.

I infused some saffron threads in hot water by putting 10 saffron threads into an egg cup, pouring in some boiling water and leaving them for 10 minutes.

Then I made the Aloo Gobi (cauliflower and potato) as a side dish.

Now it was time to cook the rice so I put it into the microwave after having mixed the infused saffron with the rice and water.

And everything was ready at the scheduled dinner time.

We had saag gosht on saffron rice, with a side of aloo gobi, naan bread and a delicious mango lassi.

It was a wonderful meal.

Everything worked well and there were no problems during the cooking.

So I’ve come a long way in a year but I’m not complacent. I’ve still got a lot to learn before I can really call myself a cook. But it has been fun getting to this stage and most of the food has been very yummy.

Passatta is a contentrate that is made out of cooked tomatoes.

There are lots of different recipes for passatta. Some recipes have the tomatoes cooked with meat, such as pork and bacon, whereas some have purely vegetarian ingredients such as onion, carrot and celery.

A vegetarian passatta would obviously not include any meat.

Some cooks simply peel and deseed tomatoes and then process them in a food blender to make a puree that can be kept in the fridge for a few weeks until it is needed.

If the recipe that you are following only uses a little passatta, you could just substitute with a tomato paste, or puree, that you buy from a supermarket.

You can buy ready-made passatta from supermarkets or good food stores. You should find passatta in the tinned and pureed tomatoes section.

Hi, Ray here again.

I needed to get back into the cooking saddle again pretty quickly after last week’s bad experience with the poppadom recipe.

This time I went for the Cauliflower and Potato recipe from the great curry range on the Curry Focus website.

The only ingredient that I didn’t already have was the cauliflower so this was going to be a very cheap meal to prepare.

This is really a simple dish to make and it tastes absolutely delicious.

I followed the recipe, step by step, and pretty soon I had a plate full of delicious food (I was dining alone tonight).

And the food was delicious. There was a divine spice taste and everything was cooked to perfection. There was easily enough curry for 2 (I had the second plateful the next day for lunch) and this would be a great side dish for a dinner party of 4.

A few days later I had friends around for dinner and decided to cook saag gosht again. The recipe was a big hit the last time I made it and this time I had a great side dish to go with it.

I ran a bit late with the cooking and the guests were very eager to sample the food when I eventually served it up.

The saag gosht went down well but the big hit was the cauliflower and potato side dish.

The word “stunning” came out of the mouth of one of the guests which was high praise indeed.

The dish had a little bit of a spicy kick to it but wasn’t too hot. And the textures and flavors were great.

The cauliflower and potato dish scored a great 9 out of 10 with a heat rating of medium.

This is the recipe for you if you want a great side dish that is easy to make.

Try it for yourself.

Hi, Ray here again.

I’d recently been looking through some of my curry recipe books and was struck by the lack of recipes for Poppadoms. Some books even said just to buy some from a shop and then just cook them. I have a vague memory of somebody saying that poppadoms were difficult to make.

So I had found a challenge. I did good at making naan bread so poppadoms should be easy enough.

There’s an easy looking Poppadom recipe on the Curry Focus website.

I got the ingredients together and started by making the dough.

It was much too dry. Way, way too dry.

So I added more water, a little at a time, until I got what I thought was the correct consistency.

But it was obviously wrong. The dough was very sticky.

So I added more flour to dry it up a bit. Eventually I thought that I had it right.

I rolled the dough out into a log and sliced it into equal sections and put a dab of oil on the top of the slices.

Then the fun began. The dough kept sticking to my rolling pin. I put flour on the work surface and the rolling pin but the poppadoms kept attaching to the rolling pin and splitting.

I was ending up with strips of poppadoms.

I rolled up all of the dough together a couple of times and tried again but no luck.

I don’t know whether I messed up the recipe or that the recipe doesn’t work. I am fully prepared to accept that the problem was me. I don’t have a real rolling pin and use an empty wine bottle but can’t see that the blame can be put on the rolling pin. Maybe I wasn’t careful enough. Or maybe I’m not adaptable enough in the kitchen – I assume that real cooks automatically compensate for dough inconsistencies.

It wasn’t a big problem because I had bought some ready-made poppadoms earlier.

I’ll try the recipe one more time and I’ll buy a proper rolling pin to see if that makes a difference.

And if the recipe doesn’t work, I’ll hunt down another one.

I won’t be beaten. I need to find a basic recipe that works so that I can create my own flavors.

Hi, Ray here again.

This week I decided that I wanted to try a recipe for a dish that I’ve never eaten before. I searched thru the great recipes on the Curry Focus website and chose the Beef Pasanda.

The beef had to be marinates overnight and so I made sure that I got all of the ingredients in plenty of time.

The marinade is simply half a bottle red wine. Here I had a difficult decision to make. I didn’t want to buy an expensive bottle of wine just for cooking (I know that is probably the wrong decision to make) but I didn’t want to buy cheap and nasty wine either (because there would be a couple of glasses left over to drink). I eventually went for an average merlot.

I have to say that this is easily the noisiest curry that I’ve ever made. I don’t have a meat tenderizer and so I ended up putting the beef onto the kitchen work surface, covering it with a plastic meat preparation board and pounding the board with a hammer. I made a lot of noise but the beef was flattened just fine.

I put the marinading beef into the fridge overnight.

The next afternoon, I started to make the Pasanda.

I prepared the onions, garlic and ginger and stir-fried them for 10 minutes. The mixture gets very dry so needs to be kept moving at all times. There was a lovely aroma from the ginger when the cooking stopped.

I mixed up the spicy paste whilst the onion mixture was cooling.

After a while I put the onion mixture, along with the cilantro and coconut, into the food processor and made a puree.

After that the spicy paste was stir-fried for 90 seconds to be joined by the puree to be stir-fried for 5 minutes.

I mixed in the ground almonds and tomato paste and then removed the mixture from the heat.

The oven had already preheated and the beef, marinade and cooked ingredients all went into a large casserole. After mixing everything well, the casserole went into the oven.

I checked and stirred after the 30 minutes and cooked it for another 30 minutes.

I checked the Pasanda once again and all was good.

I returned the Pasanda to the oven whilst the rice was started.

After a five minutes I turned off the oven, leaving the Pasanda to cook for another 10 minutes.

The pasanda was served up to the waiting dinner guests.

The sauce was rich, thick, smooth, nutty and tasted of the red wine. And the beef was very tender. The Pasanda was eaten quickly enough but failed to ignite much enthusiasm. One of the guests commented that it would have been better with some yogurt. I did a quick search on the internet and most of the Pasanda recipes did indeed use yogurt for the marinade. So I need to find another Pasanda recipe to try. One of the guests was looking for some red wine to go with the food but I had already drunk the remainder of the wine whilst cooking – it’s thirsty work in the kitchen and the wine is a valid cook’s bonus.

Overall, the Pasanda was very tasty and scored 7 out of 10 with a heat rating of mild.

If you like a mild curry and red wine then this could be just the curry for you.

Another busy month as we try more recipes, look at how to match wine to a curry and continue to add new features to the website. We’ll let you know about the new features once they are ready. If you think of something that would make your visits to the website more enjoyable, just give us your ideas from the Contact Us page.

Last week we were asked where our website visitors come from. To be honest, we didn’t know the complete answer - we knew where most people lived but not them all. So we checked with Google and the answer was that we have had visitors from 145 different countries. Now that’s a lot of countries. Most of the missing countries in the world are from the African continent - maybe we need some more spicy African curry recipes on the website?

Ray cooks and reviews a delicious Jamaican Chicken Curry Recipe

Time to try out another great recipe from the Curry Focus website. I liked the look of the Lamb Rogan Josh recipe but hadn’t looked at the recipe early enough. The lamb needs to marinate overnight and the dinner guests were arriving in 6 hours. So, instead, I went for the Jamaican Chicken Curry that looked pretty easy to make…. read more

Cumin Chicken Curry Recipe Review

Time to try out another great recipe from the Curry Focus website. This time it’s the Cumin Chicken Curry recipe.

I only had to buy the chicken – the other ingredients were already in the kitchen.

This is really a very easy curry to cook… read more

Top 5 Recipes for June

1 Easy Chicken Curry
2 Naan Bread
3 Chicken Curry
4 Chicken Curry (Kodi Kura)
5 Balti Chicken

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a new recipe here and a restaurant here.