Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

Even though last weeks recipe of Dhal with Spinach Curry was disappointing, I chose another vegetarian curry this week – the Vegetable Korma.

I could see that the curry was going to be mild by checking the list of ingredients and that would be a healthy curry with all those vegetables.

I had most of the ingredient and only had to buy the fresh vegetables.

This is a very easy recipe to follow seeing that there are only a few, simple, steps in the method

The curry takes less than 20 minutes to cook.

As usual, I served the curry on a bed of basmati rice to the dinner guests.

As I had guessed, the curry is very mild and the vegetables turned out to be still quite crisp when the curry was served. This is OK by me because I like my vegetables cooked that way. You would need to extend the final simmering phase by around 5 minutes to get a regular vegetable firmness.

One of the diners described the curry as being “just spicy vegetables” and this started up the recent argument as to what made a curry (see the review of the Beef and Onion curry).

The curry was not received well and only got an average score of 6 out of 10 with a spice rating of mild.

But not everyone wants a spicy curry, as I’ve said before.

If you enjoy a mild curry, and want to have a healthy curry, why not try this recipe?

Hi, Ray here again.

This weekend I chose a healthy looking vegetarian curry, the Dhal with Spinach. I love dhal and spinach so the combination looked like a winner.

I already had all of the ingredients for the recipe and this shows that I’ve got most of the essentials for making a good curry.

I let the chana dhal soak for a few hours and then prepared all of the ingredients.

The dinner guests arrived just as I started to cook the meal and I handed out some beer to keep from wandering around in the kitchen – I don’t have a large kitchen and it doesn’t have room for people to hang around in it.

The dhal was soon cooked and it didn’t take long for the rest of the curry, and the rice, to be underway.

By the time the dhal was added to the curry, the mixture was very dry and so it really was a matter of stir-frying right up to the end of cooking to make sure that the curry didn’t stick in the frying pan (I usually use a frying pan to make curries, even if the recipe says to use a saucepan).

The rice and curry were ready at the same time and were served up to the waiting dinner guests, who by now were on their second beer.

The first thing to note was that there was no liquid at all in the curry – it was totally dry.

The second was that it was very bland with almost no spice heat at all.

Although the curry was healthy, it didn’t receive a high score, getting only an average of 5.5 out of 10.

But if you do like very mild dry curries, this may be the dish for you.

Merry Christmas to all our readers from the CurryFocus team!! What a fantastic year 2008 has been and we are looking forward to offering even more recipes, articles and features in 2009.

We hope you enjoy this months articles and recipe reviews!

Yeast Envelopes and Cakes. What Are They? From time to time, I’ve come across a recipe that contains yeast (such as the great Curry Focus recipe for Naan Bread). And quite often, the recipe calls for fresh yeast..read more.

Beef and Onion Curry Recipe Review Ray reviews this curry and if you like a mild curry that is easy to cook then why not make this Beef and Onion Curry? You won’t regret it.. read more

Jeera (Cumin) Chicken Recipe Review This is a stunning curry. It was very tasty with a great cumin taste on well-cooked chicken thighs. I always think that chicken cooked on the bone is better than when it is cooked off the bone and this is particularly true with chicken thighs.. read more

Lamb Biryani Recipe Review The biryani had a lovely delicate flavour and was well received by the diners, with “tasty” being the most frequent comment. The biryani had a medium heat rating and scored a good 6.5 out of 10… read more

Have you used the recipe search feature of the Curry Focus website?

It is located in the left panel of nearly every page in the website (it is not on the recipe print page because the recipe print page has been reduced to the bare essentials so that you only print the recipe details that you need, saving on expensive printer toner).

All you need to do is key a word into the Recipe Search box and click on the Search button (or press ENTER/RETURN). The search takes place and you are shown a page of results that have hyperlinks so you can go directly to an identified recipe.

If nothing is found then you are shown a page that tells you this and also lets you try another word.

The search looks at the recipe name and the recipe ingredients for a match.

Let’s see the function in action.

If you key the word “Vindaloo” into the Recipe Search box and press enter then you are shown a list of vindaloo recipes in the website. At present there are 4 (chicken, lamb, beef and pork). If you want to see details of a recipe then just click on the recipe name hyperlink and you go to the page that shows the ingredients and how to make the dish.

It’s really that easy.

If you put in a word that doesn’t match any recipe, you get a page that says there are no matches – the page has a box so you can try another word. So if you key the word “burger”, you’ll find no results (this is a curry website, not a general food website).

Can you input more than one word? Yes. For example, if you key “Pork” and Vindaloo” then you’ll see all of the pork recipes AND all of the vindaloo recipes. You only see one entry on the results page if you match on more than one word (so in the previous example, you only see one result entry for Pork Vindaloo).

There’s an extra feature in the search whereby common alternative spellings of words are used to look for matches. For example, sometimes people search for the word “Madrass” when other people search for the word “Madras”. The word “Madrass” does not appear anywhere in the recipes but if you search for “Madrass”, you’ll receive a results list as if you had keyed the word “Madras”.

And the search ignores some of the more common words that are in nearly every recipe, such as “and”.

As well as looking for your favourite recipes, such as Pork Vindaloo, the search will let you know what recipes exist on the website for a specific ingredient. Imagine that you have a mango in the fridge and you want to use it up (maybe you bought it to go into a fruit salad and you forgot to use it, or it was surplus to requirements). Just key the word “mango” into the search and you’ll see recipes that contain mango. All you need to do then is check the recipes that you like and see if you’ve got the other ingredients.

Why not give the search a try? It’s on the top left corner of the website pages.

Tell us, from the Contact Us page, if you’ve got any ideas for new pages on the website and we’ll see what we can do..

Top 5 Recipes for November

Chicken rules the roost yet again.

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

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