Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

I love scrambled eggs, with it being such an easy and filling breakfast to make, and it’s a frequent Sunday breakfast in my house. Usually I just add cheese and have the eggs on toast with bacon and tomato.

I noticed a spicy scrambled eggs recipe on the Curry Focus website earlier this year but just hadn’t got around to trying it out.

So this morning I printed the recipe and checked it out.

I already had the ingredients and all I had to do was go into the kitchen and start.

If you look at the recipe, you’ll see how few ingredients you need and how easy it is to make the meal.

After only a few minutes, I had prepared the eggs, onion, chillies, tomato and cilantro and started the cooking.

It’s really simple stir-fry recipe – the onions and chillies to start, followed by the tomato and, finally, the eggs and cilantro.

I started the toast just after the tomato went into the saucepan.

In a little less than 10 minutes, the scrambled eggs were served up on the toast and being eaten by my flatmate and myself.

And they were delicious.

This is a really filling breakfast with a great spice taste.

The spicy scrambled eggs received a good rating of 6.5 out of 10 and a spice/heat rating of medium hot.

If you need a spicy, simple, breakfast then I definitely recommend that you check out this great recipe.

Hi, Ray here again.

I continued my recipe reviews with another Curry Focus lamb curry, after last week’s wonderful Keema Lamb Curry. I love the flavor that cilantro gives to a curry and decided to try the recipe for Cilantro Lamb Korma.

The recipe is for a large curry and serves from 6 to 8 people. I had lots of space in the freezer so the leftover curry can be stored away for later.

Yet again, this is a very simple recipe.

I prepared the first set of ingredients, mixed them up in my largest saucepan, and it wasn’t too long before the curry was nicely simmering.

I think that I may have put too much water into the curry because there was a lot of juice in the curry when it was only half way through the simmering phase. So I took off the lid completely to let more of the liquid to evaporate. The curry thickened up quite a lot because of this so I had made a good call.

I started to microwave the rice with about 15 minutes of simmer time still to go.

I added the milk and ground almonds into the curry when the simmering was finished. After mixing well, I mixed in the cream and cilantro.

The korma was served to the diners on the rice.

The curry was well liked. There was a lovely creamy taste with a great flavor of cilantro and almonds.

I was a bit worried about the large amount of onion in the curry. But there wasn’t a problem because there was not an overpowering taste of onions.

One thing that did confuse me was the addition of ½ cup of vegetable oil. Why was the vegetable oil needed? I can only assume it has something to do with the combination of flavours that are in the cooked curry. If you know why the oil was added can you email me and let me know?

The Cilantro Lamb Korma curry received a score of 7.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of mild.

This is a great curry that is very easy to make, with delicate flavours, and won’t destroy your tastebuds.

Another month passes by and September was another busy month at Curry Focus headquarters with more and more delicious recipes, reviews and information added to the site.

We add fish to the menu this month with a review of the tasty Fish Cakes Recipe.

Diwali, its that time of year again so read more about the Festival of Lights.

If you like hot spicy curries you need to read Ray’s Review on our Beef Madras Curry Recipe.

Here’s an excellent chicken curry that we recommend you try! Remember to buy the right chicken though as Ray finds out the hard way when cooking this dish. Read the Jaipur Chicken Curry Recipe Review

Ray tries a vegetarian dish and finds it edible, but a little disappointing, read the Gujarati Potato Curry Recipe Review.

One of our site visitors had a great idea, which was to provide a “hotness” or “spice” rating to the recipes on our site. We think that’s a fantastic idea and are already beginning to work on the addition so keep an eye out for this exciting new feature in the near future. If you have any ideas of features or things you would like to see on the site, please contact us and tell us about it!

The 2008 British Curry Awards will be held in London on October 19th. We’ll keep you posted on who won the awards around the UK so you can see who makes award winning curries - maybe you could go and try a meal at one of the restaurants to see what great food is all about.

As mentioned earlier, it’s Diwali at the end of October. Try and get along to a celebration near you for good food and entertainment.

Chicken curries rule the roost yet again!!!

Top 5 Recipes for September

Chicken rules the roost yet again.

1 Easy Chicken Curry
2 Naan Bread
3 Chicken Curry
4 Chicken Tikka Masala
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.

I’ve been checking out some really impressive curries from the Curry Focus website recently.

After last week’s review of the Curried Beef Sausage recipe, I again decided to test a recipe for a simple dish. I was also hoping for results that were a lot better than I got with the curried sausages.

I went for the Keema Lamb Curry. I really don’t know many people who don’t like ground meat and peas and a spicy version should be great.

I immediately thought that it would be a bit of a mission to find ground lamb but my local supermarket surprised me by having a lot of it. Maybe the ground mince is there all the time and I haven’t noticed before.

This is really a very simple recipe.

As I’ve often done before, I prepared the onion, ginger, garlic and chillis (it really is amazing how often a curry recipe starts with preparing these ingredients).

Then I started the cooking.

First, I stir-fried the prepared ingredients in the oil.

Then I added the curry powder and the whole mixture became incredibly dry.

Next, I added the lamb and stir-fried for 3 minutes, making sure that the mixture was always moving so it wouldn’t stick in the pan.

Then I added the peas, salt and lemon juice.

All OK so far except that now I had to simmer the curry for 15 minutes. But there was next to no liquid in the pan. So I added a cup of boiling water and simmered the curry at the same time as I cooked the rice in the microwave.

The curry was ready to eat in less than 30 minutes from starting to cook it. It was a very easy recipe to follow and a very quick meal to prepare.

I served up the Keema Lamb curry on the rice and the waiting diners quickly ate up the meal.

The diner’s comments ranged from “very good” to “tasty”. The curry had a great spice taste and was highly rated by the diners.

The curry received an excellent rating of 7.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of medium to hot.

As said previously, I needed to add some hot water so that the curry would simmer without burning the curry. Maybe I had the heat turned up too high. After the 15 minutes of simmering, all of the water had been absorbed into the curry. I changed the recipe so that it has the hot water as an extra ingredient – I’m sure that the submitter, J Baynes, won’t mind this small change to the recipe.

Hi, Ray here again.

I was checking out the recipes on the Curry Focus website and saw the was one for Curried Beef Sausages.

I eat lots of sausages and decided to make the very easy recipe.

I boiled the sausages in water, let them cool and then removed the skins from them. This really was about the most complicated part of the recipe.

I made the beef stock and prepared the onions and apple and then started to do the cooking.

The recipe was easy to follow and I didn’t have any problems.

The curried sausages were served on rice to the waiting diners.

And the verdict was that the meal was bland. There was not much spice/heat in the meal. Everything was cooked correctly but it was just too bland. In even looked bland and some colour would have helped.

And the portions were big. There were 3 sausages each and that is a lot. I think the curry would easily have served 6 people, rather than 4, as written in the recipe (I have changed the recipe to say that it serves 4-6).

Overall, the meal got a very average rating of 5.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of mild.

This was a very disappointing meal, especially since I like sausages so much.

If you do try the recipe, then perhaps you could spice it up a bit with a couple of teaspoons of garam masala and a teaspoon of cumin – the spices could be stir-fried in the butter for a minute before adding the onions, apple and curry powder. And also maybe some grated fresh ginger root. And it wouldn’t do any harm to add a bell pepper (red or green) and garnish with cilantro to add a bit of colour.