Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

Over the last few weeks, my housemate and I had been emptying the freezer (by eating the contents), so that we could start filling it again fresh food. We had finally reached the last pack of meat, which was chicken.

A quick check in the chicken curry recipes on the Curry Focus website showed that I hadn’t made the Thai Green Chicken Curry.

Everything was in the house except for the vegetables – I even found a small amount of fish sauce in the fridge door.

I prepared the green paste an hour before we were due to eat and it was very green, and pungent, with a great smell of cilantro and basil.

I soon got the rest of the ingredients ready and then it was time to do the cooking.

This is very easy recipe to follow, just like most of the Curry Focus recipes.

Before long the chicken was sealed, the bell pepper was stir-fried and the chicken was cooking again with the green paste.

Just then my girlfriend, Wendy, arrived to say that two friends of hers were going to be delivering very soon. For some reason, there was no fixed time for the furniture to be delivered (this was not really a great surprise to me because I had been expecting the furniture to arrive for the last two weeks) and so I stopped cooking the curry once the chicken was cooked and shut down the kitchen. I just hoped that the furniture did arrive before too long because I was really hungry.

The furniture arrived within 20 minutes and a some lifting, grunting and staggering soon had the furniture safely stored in the spare room.

The furniture delivery team left just as the dinner guests, who were running late, arrived and so I started cooking started again. I reduced the liquid while the rice was cooking in the microwave.

Before too long, the Thai Green Chicken Curry was served up on a bed of rice and the eating began.

Now this is a very green curry and a bit the sauce was a bit thicker than I expected. Most of the Thai curries that I have eaten have a sauce that is a lot thinner than the one in this curry. Maybe I had reduced the liquid too much? One comment that I received was that the curry “wasn’t appealing to the eye”. But it tasted good, although it needed salt (I’ve added salt to the recipe) even though it was not one of the great curries that I’ve made. It had a mild to medium heat/spice rating and with an average score of 7 out of 10.

If you like Thai curry then you should try this recipe. One or two extra chillies would certainly spice up the meal and it would definitely taste better if the liquid is not reduced so much.

A little while ago we got an email asking if we could supply a list of the vindaloo recipes on the website. We replied with a list of the recipes and pointed out that they would get this by themselves if they used the recipe search feature of the website (just key the word “vindaloo” into the field and click on the Search button).

But this set us thinking about how to improve the recipe searching on the website. We decided to give a recipe the capability of belonging to more than one category. So “Pork Vindaloo” would be in the “Pork” category but also in a “Vindaloo” category.

We have now developed this feature in the website and have started to add the extra categories to the existing recipes. It will take us a while to work our way through all of the recipes.

The first new category is called “Vegetarian Side Dishes“, which has most of the “Side Dishes” recipes in it.

More categories will follow shortly, you can view all our categories here.

Let us know if you have an idea for a new feature on the website.

Latest Articles

Review of the Malay Beef Stew Recipe
Review of the Vegetable Pulao Recipe
Choosing A Cooking Oil
Review of the Spicy Fish Cakes Recipe

Top 5 Recipes for last month

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.

It’s been too long time since I’ve tried a fish recipe from the Curry Focus website. Eating fish is supposed to be good for you so I thought it was time to be good to myself. I read thru the fish recipes and went for the Spicy Fish Cakes recipe. It has been a long time I’ve eaten fish cakes and I was looking forward to making this simple recipe.

I bought some average road white fish and didn’t need to buy anything else except for the spring onions (scallions).

I precooked the fish whilst the potatoes were cooking. I mashed up the potatoes and left them, and the fish, for a while to let them cool down.

I rinsed and chopped the spring onions and fresh cilantro and prepared the ginger and garlic while the fish and mashed potatoes were cooling.

This is a very easy dish to make.

Everything was ready 30 minutes before the scheduled eating time so I relaxed for a while with a beer.

Soon it was time to make the fish cakes so I mixed everything together, including the first egg.

I made 16 equal sized balls from the mixture. I know that the said 20 but the ones that I made were pretty much the same size so I went with the 16.

Before too long, I was dipping the balls into the beaten egg, flattening them into cakes and covering them with breadcrumbs.

The diners arrived just as I finished making the fish cakes so I kept going and cooked them. I had already started to preheat the oven so that I could keep the cooked cakes warm whilst I was making another batch.

I heated up the oil in my favourite frying pan and cooked the fish cakes in batches of four at a time. When the batch was cooked, I put them on some kitchen paper, started cooking the next batch of fish cakes and then dabbed the excess oil off the cooked fish cakes before keeping them in the oven to keep warm.

Before too long, the fish cakes were ready and I served them with raita, that I had made earlier and roti, that I had bought earlier.

The fish cakes were excellent, if I say so myself. They had a good firm texture, were well cooked and, most important of all, had a great taste. They had a mild spice heat. Everyone enjoyed the fish cakes and they received an excellent score of 7.5 out of 10.

If you like fish cakes then do try this recipe – I’m sure that you won’t be disappointed.

Of all the cooking oils in the supermarket, which is the best for cooking curries?

You can probably guess that there is no “correct” answer.

I’ll give you a few basic details for you to think about but you should remember that I’m not a doctor, nutritionist or chemist – I just make curries.

There are 4 main types of oil – polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, saturated and trans fats. Of these types, saturated oils and trans fats are bad for you because they have a bad effect your cholesterol levels (either raising your LDL levels or lowering your HDL levels).

Ignoring saturated and trans fat oils leaves polyunsaturated and monounsaturated oils to choose from.

One problem is that a cooking oil is not completely polyunsaturated or monounsaturated or even saturated free. Oil is a mixture of all of the types of fat.

You need to look at the percentage of the good types in cooking oils.

The following table shows the 5 oils with the least amount of bad fat, along with old favorites such as butter, ghee and lard.

The first thing to notice from the table is that the old favorites (butter, lard, ghee and margarine) are to be avoided, no matter how good they taste.

So I’ll drop the bad fats from the table and show the amount of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat in the oils. Why do you need to know this? Generally speaking, monounsaturated oil is better than polyunsaturated oil.

Looking at the above table, it appears that you need to decide between canola oil (which has only 6% of saturated fat) and olive oil (which has 73% of monounsaturated fat).

I use canola oil because, in my opinion, there is little to choose between canola oil and olive oil and also because canola oil is a lot cheaper than olive oil.

There is a lot of information on the Internet about cooking oils and some are easier to understand than others.

But whatever oil you choose to use, make sure you continue to enjoy cooking.

Hi, Ray here again.

I had 2 vegetarian friends were coming to dinner this weekend and so I checked out the vegetarian recipes on the Curry Focus website. The Vegetable Pulao recipe looked very easy to make.

The vegetable pulao did not have any unusual ingredients and I already had all of the ingredients needed in the recipe.

It was a quick curry to make, only needing around 25 minutes of cooking, and I prepared the ingredients just before my friends arrived.

I cooked the curry and it was really easy. The one thing that I find a bit difficult about rice dishes that absorb the water is not having a quick look under the lid to see how things are progressing. As it happens, the rice was not properly cooked when the 10 minutes of cooking time had one by and so I quickly added another 1/2 cup of boiling water and cooked the dish for another 5 minutes.

Even despite the extra 5 minutes needed, the vegetable pulao was ready in very quick time and I served up the meal to the eager diners.

This is a very mild curry. In fact, it is so mild it’s almost impossible to taste the spices and it was just like eating rice and vegetables.

This is not my definition of a curry. I know that curries don’t have to “blow your head off” but there should be some spice tastes to enjoy.

Nobody really enjoyed the meal, which was disappointing, and it received a derisory score of 3.5 out of 10 (a sympathy vote) with q spice/heat rating of very mild.

This is not the only time that I’ve been very disappointed with a so-called curry. So I’ve made a rule – I will not try a curry recipe unless it contains the 3 basic ingredients of onions, ginger and garlic and it must contain at least 3 spices, such as chilli, cumin, cilantro, cinnamon, cardamom, etc.