Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

The weekend is here again so it’s time to try out another of those delicious Curry Focus recipes.

The past few weeks have seen me making meat dishes and that led me to look at the vegetarian recipes for a new recipe to try. I simply adore biryani recipes and found a Vegetarian Biryani recipe that was posted on the website only last month. The recipe uses a lot of vegetables so the curry must be healthy, right?

I made a note of the ingredients to buy and went to my favorite local vegetable store to get the fresh vegetables.

I had a closer look at the recipe when I got home and saw that there was an obvious error in the recipe. All up, the recipe had 1 1/2 lbs of vegetables, some large potatoes, 2 cups of rice and 1/2 cup of lentils. The recipe said that this was a curry for 4-6 people but this amount of food would easily feed double that number. And with all those ingredients, do you really need potatoes? I like potatoes as much as the next person but 6 large potatoes is way too much. So I changed the recipe to make it only 3 potatoes and made the potatoes totally optional.

As usual, I prepared all the ingredients before starting to cook and found that this is, like most of the Curry Focus recipes, a really easy recipe to follow. About the only difficult thing to do was fit all of the ingredients into my favorite large frying pan - I cook most curries in this great frying pan that I’ve had for years (it cost a lot of money when I bought it but has lasted well and still looks like it will outlast me).

It’s really important to make sure you use a large frying pan, or saucepan to make this curry otherwise it will not fit.

One major success for me was that the rice was perfectly cooked after 25 minutes in the final phase of cooking – I often end up with under cooked rice with the absorbtion method and it’s a delightful surprise when the rice turns out well.

I served the Vegetable Biryani to the assembled diners and there was a large serving for all with lots of healthy vegetables. All of the ingredients were cooked just right and the curry tasted wonderful – you could even taste the lentils. All of the diners enjoyed the biryani and it got a taste score of 8 out of 10 with a spice/heat score of “medium to hot” (I must admit, I only found the curry to be medium but one person said that it was hot and I record the real scores to try and let everyone know what to expect – after all, my medium could be somebody else’s mild).

It occurred to me that this would be a great dish to make if you’re making a large family meal, or supplying one dish in a family meal, where people can help themselves to a selection of food and everyone gets some great biryani. I ended up freezing 4 servings of curry to save for work lunches. Wicked.

It’s nearly the end of January and we’ve noticed that we’re still getting visitors looking for leftover turkey recipes. We hope that you’re not eating leftover turkey from last Christmas otherwise there’s a strong possibility that you will be very ill. If you’re using freshly cooked turkey then all will be OK.

What is the best drink to drink with Curry?

Most of us, when we eat a curry, combine it with a few lagers… however, although beer can help to quell a “tongue on fire”, fizzy drinks are not always the best idea for drinking with a curry. We are going to look at exploring this further in articles to come.

Latest Articles

Curry Goat
Review of the Fish Curry with Lemon Grass Recipe
Visitors to Curry Focus in 2009
Review of the Dry Chicken Curry Recipe

Top 5 Recipes for last month

1 Naan Bread
2 Easy Chicken Curry
3 Left over Ham and Rice Curry
4 Leftover Turkey Curry (version 1)
5 Chicken Phal

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

Browse Categories

Hi, Ray here again.

Another weekend is here and time to make another curry from the many yummy Curry Focus recipes.

I spotted that there were 3 chicken breasts in the bottom of the freezer that should be used and I looked thru the chicken recipes until I found one that I hadn’t previously tried. The Dry Chicken Curry looked to be a good curry to make and so I printed the recipe and removed the chicken breasts from the freezer so that they would defrost in plenty of time for this evening’s meal.

The curry only takes half an hour to cook and there are only a few ingredients that need any kind of preparation. I started to get the ingredients ready about half an hour from the planned dining time.

I quickly prepared the onions, garlic and ginger and cut up the chicken.

Then I cooked the curry and the recipe was as simple to follow as it looked.

The one thing to be wary of with a dry curry is that they need a lot of stirring to stop them from sticking to the frying pan. And this curry was no exception as it became very dry when I added the spices.

He diners arrived just as I started to microwave the basmati rice and they sat in the lounge chatting and drinking some beer whilst I toiled on in the kitchen (it wasn’t hard work but I wasn’t going to let them know how easy it was).

I threw a big handful of cilantro for the last bit of cooking and then served the curry on the basmati.

And what was the verdict? Generally, the curry was very popular. The chicken was well cooked and there was that great cilantro taste to blended in with the curry The Dry Chicken Curry got an average rating of 7.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat score of “mild to medium”.

This was a well-received curry that was easy to make. It you enjoy eating a dry curry then this is a recipe that you must try.

There was a very large increase in visitors to the Curry Focus website in 2009 (over the 2008 number). In 2009, the number of visitors rose by 121%. This is a really amazing jump in visitor number and tells us that we’re meeting a need to know about curry recipes and curry ingredients.

The main characteristics of the recipes on the website is that they are easy to follow and that the Curry Focus team tries out a new recipe most weeks and writes a review of the recipe.

In 2009, 77% of visitors were from the UK and 91% of visitors were from the main English speaking countries (UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Ireland).

The top 10 visitor countries, in visitor number sequence, were UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Ireland, France, Spain, India and Germany. This is the same country sequence as in 2008.

Most US visitors came from California (Los Angeles), New York (New York City) and Texas (Houston).

Most UK visitors came from London (which had just over 35% of visitors), followed by Manchester (5% of visitors) and then Birmingham (4% of visitors).

We had visitors from 166 different countries and territories with 21 new visitor sources. The new visitor locations include Antigua and Barbuda, Cape Verde, Ivory Cost, Saint Helena, Ecuador, Guadeloupe, Mali, Swaziland, Togo, Tonga and Uruguay.

The Curry Focus website has more recipes, recipe reviews and blog articles than before and new recipes, reviews and blogs will be added as you tell us about your favorite recipes and we hear more curry news and gossip from around the world. If you have a favorite recipe, that you want to share with us, then you can give us the details on the Add Recipe page and then we’ll share it with the curry-loving world.

We have quite a list of features that we want to add and change on the Curry Focus website and you’ll be seeing these changes throughout 2010. If you have any suggestions or ideas for the website, then let us know by using the Contact Us page and we’ll see if what we can do. Remember, the website is for you as much as it is for us.

We send out a FREE monthly email newsletter that lets you know about the latest events on the website. If you want to get this email, then go to the Curry Focus homepage and input your email address in the “Recipe Newsletter” registration box in the top right of the page.

Meanwhile, we hope you keep coming to, and enjoying, this great FREE website.

And tell your friends about us. Spread the curry word.

Hi, Ray here again.

Another weekend arrives and so it’s time curry time again. I checked out the great Curry Focus recipes and found a recipe for Fish Curry with Lemon Grass that should be simple to make (I like easy cooking).

I picked up some great fresh fish fillets and got a couple of stalks of lemon grass from my local food store.

This is a very easy recipe that cooks in only about 30 minutes. I misjudged the time to head to the kitchen and prepared the ingredients as I was cooking. Luckily there are few ingredients and everything was ready for cooking on time.

I made basmati rice to have with the fish curry and before long I was serving the food.

Now this is a very pale curry with the fish curry being yellow and the rice is white. Luckily the chopped tomatoes and cilantro gave the dish a bit of color. The fish was well cooked and the curry had a slight taste of ginger along with the great cilantro taste. The curry has lots of onion and is surprisingly filling. Everyone liked the Fish Curry with Lemon Grass and it got a good taste score of 7 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of very mild.

This is a really easy recipe that you should try if you like a mild fish curry.

One of the Curry Focus website visitors gave us our first goat curry recipe yesterday (thanks Pavi). Nobody in the Curry Focus team has eaten curried goat before and so I was assigned the task of finding out some details from the Internet.

Goat meat is marketed under the names of goat (obviously), kid (a goat under one year old), cabrito (a goat under 3 months old) and chevon (goat meat). Goat is a red meat that is low in cholesterol and has less fat than chicken (ounce for ounce).

Goat meat is widely eaten around the world with goat meat curries being popular in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sir Lanka and Jamaica. One website that I visited claimed that goat meat is over 60% of all of the red meat that is eaten in the world.

From what the websites say, goat meat is tenderer and has a milder flavour than lamb.

One difficulty people may have is being able to buy goat meat. I don’t remember seeing goat meat for sale from my local butcher or in the meat section of supermarkets. There are some suppliers that sell goat meat online but some of them are small operations and only sell a minimum of half a carcass. You should be able to find goat meat for sale close to your favorite Indian supply store. I’m sure that you can find a supply if you look hard enough (searching on the Internet is pretty easy). I’ve noticed that some goat curry recipes say that you can substitute lamb for goat.

At the moment, we only have the Sri Lanka Goat Curry recipe on the Curry Focus website. If you’ve got a recipe that you’d like to share with us, why not submit the details on the Add Recipe page so that we can share the recipe with curry lovers all over the world?

The goat curry recipe that we have looks real easy to make and soon I’ll be looking for a goat meat supply so that I can try it out.