Hi, Ray here again.
Now that the holiday season is over, it’s time to return to my favorite hobby of cooking delicious curries. The Curry Focus website has a recipe for Sri Lanka Chicken Curry which looked easy enough, in spite of the long list of ingredients.
I thought that 3 lbs of chicken was just too much chicken for the meal so only bought 2 lbs of chicken.
Jointing a chicken looked a tricky for somebody with my limited food preparation abilities, so I bought a pack of chicken thighs from the supermarket.
I needed to get a couple of spices (and the curry leaves) and got them from my usual Indian store, along with a pack of frozen paratha to have as a side dish.
I peeled and prepared the onion, garlic and ginger root when preparation time arrived.
I set up some plates with most of the ingredients – one plate held the onion, garlic and ginger – a second plate had the turmeric, chilli powder, coriander, cumin, fennel, paprika and salt (an egg cup was set up beside this plate with the vinegar) – a third plate had the tomatoes, cardamom pods and lemon rind. All very organised.
When all of this was ready, I started the actual cooking.
I heated the oil and stir-fried the fennel and curry leaves.
When the curry leaves started to go brown, I added the onion, garlic and ginger and stir-fried for 5 minutes.
Then I added the ingredients from the plate with the turmeric along with the vinegar I mixed everything up really well and did another stir-fry for a minute.
Then I added the chicken and made sure the meat was well coated with the spice mixture.
Next I added the ingredients from the plate with the tomatoes and mixed them in well.
The mixture looked pretty dry so I added half a cup of boiling water to make sure that the curry didn’t stick to the pan.
After this, I reduced the heat, covered the frying pan and let the chicken cook.
After 30 minutes I started off the rice in the microwave.
After the 45 minutes of cooking the chicken, I added the coconut milk and lemon juice and cooked the curry for a further 5 minutes without the pan cover, to let the sauce reduce and thicken. During this time I quickly heated up the paratha.
When it was all ready, I served the curry on a bed of rice along with a plate of paratha for the dinner guests.
The curry was delicious. It wasn’t too spicy and had a wonderful blend of coconut and spices.
Overall, the curry scored an excellent rating of 8 out of 10.
I can recommend that you try this curry – it’s easy to cook and very easy to eat.
