Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

I needed a curry making success after the last few disappointing recipe reviews. I looked through the Curry Focus recipes and there was the obvious winner – the Malay Beef Stew.

It had the ingredients that always give me good results – beef, potato and spices.

And even though it was names a stew, it had all of the looks of a very good curry.

I went out to shop for the ingredients and found everything that I needed easily enough. One item that really surprised me was the cost of the lemon grass – the lemon grass cost almost the same as the beef.

I located all of the ingredients easily enough.

I saw how long it would take to make the curry and moved into the kitchen two hours before the planned start time for dinner.

I peeled the potatoes and cut them up while the saucepan of water was boiling and pretty quickly the potatoes were parboiled.

As is usual with the Curry Focus recipes, the recipe was very straightforward and easy to follow.

The dinner guests arrived just as I was adding the potatoes to the curry and soon the rice was cooking as well.

I quickly heated up a few poppadoms (bought from a store, not made by myself) and served the Malay Beef Stew on a bed of basmati rice.

This is a great curry. The beef was really and tender and the curry had a delicious taste. It’s really hard to beat the taste of a good beef and potato curry.

All of the diners agreed and the curry received an excellent rating of 8.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of hot.

You should really try this recipe if you like a spicy beef curry – it’s easy to make and has a great taste.

In last month’s newsletter, we mentioned that last year saw a big increase in visitors over the previous year.

We received a couple of emails asking where the visitors came from so we did a bit of investigating.

Some 79% of you were from the UK and just over 93% were from the main English speaking countries (UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Ireland).

Not surprisingly, most UK visitors were from London (with just under 30% of the UK visitors) with Birmingham coming second with just under 4% of visitors.

And just under 200 locations in the UK had a single visitor to the site from such diverse places as Morecambe, Kilwinning, Flint, Inverurie, Herne Bay and Bakewell.

The top 10 countries for visitors, in order, were UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Ireland, France, Spain, India and Germany.

Altogether, we welcomed visitors from 164 different countries and territories – pretty much the whole of the world except for around 6 South American countries, 10 Asian countries and a belt of countries across the poorest part of Africa.

We had to do a bit of searching for some of the more less known parts of the world to find out where they are (at least, less known to us). Thank you Turks and Caicos Islands (in the West Indies) for visiting 3 times. And cheers Aruba (also in the Caribbean) for dropping by twice. Svalbard and Jan Mayen (territories of Norway) had a single quick look, as did the Aland Islands (a mixed up place that is administered by Finland but where the main language is Swedish).

We had a lot of fun searching these smaller parts of the world and learnt a bit about their history from the internet.

We are only a few weeks into 2009 and have already had visitors from 5 new countries!!! Who are they? We’ll let you know at the end of the year.

We hope you all keep dropping by to check out the latest recipes and news.

Tell your friends about us. Spread the word.

Latest Articles

Review of the Keema Mattar Recipe
Review of the Malaysian Chicken Curry Recipe
Searching For A New Frying Pan
Review of the Pumpkin Curry Recipe
Review of the Peshwari Naan Recipe

Top 5 Recipes for last month

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.

Hi, Ray here again.

I spotted a recipe for Peshwari Naan when I was looking through the great recipes on the Curry Focus website. Peshwari naan is a bit favourite with my girlfriend so making the naan would be a big hit all round.

As is the case with most bread recipes, a lot of rolling and kneading is involved along with experimentation.

I made up the dough and left it for over an hour rather than the 20 minutes in the recipe.

Before starting the rolling and folding, I cut up the raisins and crushed the nuts with my rolling pin.

Then I just followed the recipe and rolled, folded and rolled again.

The oven was already heated up by the time that I’d finished the final rolling of the first naan

The first naan did not seem fully cooked after 10 minutes and I eventually let it bake for 16 minutes before taking it out of the oven. It was awful – overcooked, crunchy, too thick and very dry. I broke the naan up and threw it into the yard where it was much appreciated by the birds.

I made the second naan thinner and popped it into the oven. I only baked it for 12 minutes this time. The naan was thinner than the first and tasted a bit better but was still dry and crunchy at the edges. The birds enjoyed a second serving.

The third naan was rolled just as thin as the second and was baked for 10 minutes. I served this naan up with dinner. This eas the best naan so far but I still did not rate it very highly. Once again, it was too dry.

The fourth naan cooked whilst we were having dinner and was pulled from the oven after 10 minutes. I did everything the same for the fourth naan as for the third but it did not taste as good. Who knows why?

The dinner guests had widely opposing views about the naan. One person thought that it was great whereas another person just loathed it and would only try one mouthful.

The overall consensus was that there should be more raisins and less nuts. And the naan was much too dry – perhaps more oil on the naan would make it more moist.

The scores for the naan had the widest range that I’d received for one of the Curry Focus recipes, going from an excellent 7.5 down to a bad 4. The naan averaged a score of 5.5 out of 10 – not very good. There were no spices in the naan so there was no spice/heat rating.

I will try out a pashwari naan recipe again in the future because it’s just too good a dish to ignore. And I will roll the dough out even thinner, use more raisins, with less nuts, and be more liberal with the oil.

Let me know if you have any ideas on how this recipe can be improved.

Hi, Ray here again.

Once again it’s time to test one of the great curry recipes on the Curry Focus website.

I scanned the recipe lists and decided to make the Pumpkin Curry for two reasons. First, it seemed like a very simple recipe to follow. Second, I thought it was unusual in that it contained coconut. I don’t think that I’ve ever eaten vegetarian curry with coconut in it, so now is a good a time to try one.

This really is a very easy dish to make.

Overall, the actual cooking time is only around 15 minutes.

The only slight mishap I had was when I was chopping up the pumpkin and nearly sliced into a finger with a new sharp knife that I’ve just bought.

I prepared the ingredients and waited until the dinner guests arrived before starting to cook the curry.

The curry was ready in quick time and I served it up on a bed of basmati rice.

And how was the curry? The main comment is that it was more like a soup than a curry. And the coconut taste was really strong – nobody could taste the pumpkin.

And the curry was very mild – it was much too mild for my own taste.

It was not one of the most well received curries that I’ve made and was awarded an average rating of 5.5 with a heat/spice rating of mild.

I must be honest - I didn’t like this curry. There was way too much coconut and it was too mild.

I’ll be keeping an eye open to see if a new pumpkin curry recipe appears on the website.

After 14 years of reliable service, my favorite frying pan was on its last legs. It had recently become scratched and rust was beginning to appear around the scratched area.

I make almost all of my curries in this pan and it was sad to see it was due to be replaced.

But instead of being unhappy, I figured that this would give me a opportunity to ring myself up to date. There must have been a lot of advancements in kitchen utensils over the last 14 years?

Saturday morning found me searching in the kitchen supplies sections of a two department stores.

To be honest, I was at stunned at how many electric appliances had entered the kitchen. There was a wider range of electric frying pans and electric woks than the non-electric type. The electric versions were a lot more expensive than the non-electric type, usually more than double the price.

But I avoid such electric products. They need to be cleaned and can’t just be put into the dishwasher, because of the electric connectors. They need to be washed carefully to keep the electric connectors dry. I assume that this is so. Maybe I’m wrong. But in my simplistic mind, electricity and water don’t mix.

Going by the electric frying pans and woks, I also noticed some models of slow cookers that looked interesting. But I wasn’t looking for slow cookers. I wanted a good frying pan.

And I was really in for a big disappointment here. None of the non-electric frying pans came with lids. I could buy a lid separately but these lids were flimsy looking affairs and wouldn’t be an integral part of the frying pan. My frying pan has a lid that fits snugly around the edge and the lid has a release valve that releases steam if I open the valve.

And, to be honest, most of the frying pans were thin, flimsy pans. Not surprisingly, all of the brands on sale were made in China.

I wanted something a lot more substantial than those on sale and didn’t see why I should have to accept anything but the best.

I went back home and checked out the bottom of my old frying pan and found the brand name. A few minutes of surfing on the net quickly found the manufacturer’s website and very soon after that an email was on the way requesting a list of retailers that stock their brand.

Deep within myself, I know that I’m going to buy a twin of the frying pan that I’m replacing although the new pan will not doubt be shinier and, I’m sure, a more expensive than the one that I’ve got.

But you have to pay for quality that will last for 14 years of hard use.

Hi, Ray here again.

Well, the weekend is here again and time to test another recipe from the great Curry Focus website collection.

I hadn’t made a chicken curry for a few weeks and so I read thru the list of chicken recipes until I found one that I hadn’t tried – it was the Malaysian Chicken Curry recipe. I’ve had some great Malaysian curries over the years so it was time to make one for myself.

All of the expected curry ingredients were in the recipe, including coconut milk, but I couldn’t find Malaysian curry paste anywhere. I looked in all of my usual stores and even called a couple of places to see if they had any. But no luck. In the end, I compromised and bought a jar of Thai curry paste.

The recipe didn’t say whether the chicken thighs were to be boneless or skinless. I decided to buy skinless chicken thighs with the bones.

I prepared all of the ingredients, including making the paste, before actually starting to cook the curry.

I started to cook the curry about 45 minutes before the scheduled meal time.

This is an easy recipe to make and there weren’t any problems during the cooking.

I didn’t know it but the dinner guests were running late. It isn’t like them to be late for a curry tasting, n fact I think that this was the first time. Luckily one of them had a mobile phone and I was told they would definitely arrive for the scheduled meal start time – nothing bad had happened to them, they were just running late.

So I started the rice about 15 minutes before it was needed and finished cooking the curry.

Just as the microwave finished cooking the rice, the dinner guests arrived. They had left it almost to the last moment!!

I served up the Malaysian chicken curry on the basmati rice.

The curry had a lovely, delicate taste. I think I put too much cilantro into the curry because the cilantro flavor was definitely a bit too strong. There was quite a lot of liquid in the curry, maybe the cooking heat should have been a bit higher to make it reduce a bit more.

The curry got an average score of 6 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of “mild to medium”.

The curry might have been better if I had been able to find some Malaysian curry paste. I’ll have to look harder next time.