Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

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.

Hi, Ray here again.

Last week I had wanted to make a Rogan Josh curry but had left it too late to make because I had forgotten that the lamb had to be marinated overnight.

So this week I was better prepared to make the Lamb Rogan Josh from the Curry Focus website.

I made the marinade and mixed in the lean lamb and then put it into the fridge to marinate overnight.

Two hours before dinner, I started to prepare the ingredients which only involved getting ready the onion and second garlic clove.

Then the cooking started.

I stir-fried the cumin seeds and then the bay leaves and cardamom pods.

Then I stir-fried the onion and garlic for 5 minutes before adding the cilantro, cumin and chilli powder.

Soon the lamb went into the frying pan.

And not long after this, in went the chopped tomatoes, tomato paste and water.

Everything well mixed and brought to a simmer.

The lamb simmered for 90 minutes and the basmati rice was timed to be ready at the same time as the curry.

Whilst I was serving up the Rogan Josh, I quickly heated a couple of stuffed paratha in the microwave.

The Rogan Josh was served on rice and was met with only mild enthusiasm.

The lamb was really tender but this wasn’t the curry that we expected. The curry had a lot more liquid than usual and, to be honest, it was more like a thin stew than a curry. And it was very mild.

The Rogan Josh was awarded a sympathetic 6 out of 10 with a spice heat rating of mild.

I carefully reviewed the recipe to make ensure that I had followed the steps correctly. And I had. Maybe leaving the frying pan lid would have allowed the curry to reduce and thicken a bit. But the spice level was too low – I’m used to a Rogan Josh with some bite.

But this failure won’t stop me. I’ll be searching for another Lamb Rogan Josh recipe to try because it is usually such a tasty dish.

I’ll let you know what I find in due course.