Hi, Ray here again. Time to cook another delicious chicken recipe from the Curry Focus website. This time it’s Chicken Bhuna, one of my all time favorites.
As usual, I had most of the ingredients and only had to pick up the chicken and I also grabbed a pack of frozen chilli and garlic paratha to have as a side dish.
I had previously avoided trying this recipe because it looked so complicated – there were so many lines in the method part of the recipe. But I thought that my newly acquired vast cooking experience would triumph and making the dish was surprisingly easy.
As usual, I prepared everything before starting to cook. One of the guests volunteered to help so I had my assistant chopping up the onion and ginger whilst I prepared the chicken.
I prepared a small plate of spices and then chopped up the garlic and green chillies – I only used 2 green chillies because one of the dinner guests didn’t like spicy hot curries.
Then the cooking started.
I heated the butter and mixed in the garam masla. Then I coated the chicken in the mixture. I didn’t need to do the chicken in batches because my large frying pan was big enough to hold everything with ease.
The oven was already preheated by the time I had coated the chicken. I put the chicken and half a can of tomatoes into the casserole, mixed them up, put the lid on the casserole and put it in the oven for 20 minutes.
After 10 minutes I cooked the onion and ginger in the butter (there’s a lot of butter in this recipe – yum).
Then in went the plate of spices for a stir-fry.
After that I added the cup of water and simmered for 5 minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients.
I then tipped everything into the casserole, along with the chicken, and mixed it all up and popped the casserole back into the oven for the last 25 minutes of cooking.
Whilst this was happening, I chopped up the bell peppers and started cooking the rice.
And then I messed up – I forgot the chopped fresh tomatoes and left them happily in the fridge. I didn’t realise this until the next day when I was reviewing the recipe. Doh!! Never mind, I don’t think it detracted from the curry.
When the rice was nearly ready, I quickly heated up the paratha.
I served up the chicken bhuna on rice, garnished it with the sliced red peppers and served up a plate of paratha for the assembled dinner guests.
It was another success and the bhuna had a wonderful flavor. Except the guests thought that the garnish of uncooked red peppers was a bit odd. The peppers “lacked flavor” and would have tasted better if they had been quickly fried to soften them up. There are critics everywhere!!!
One guest commented that a bowl of raita would have gone down well with the bhuna – the bhuna was only a medium “hot” but they felt that the tastes would have complemented each other. Maybe they were right – I love raita. And at least this was a positive comment.
All in all, the meal was voted a success and scored a rating of 7.5 out of 10 with a medium heat ranking.
Another successful meal from the Curry Focus website.
