I won’t make a huge song and dance about this one, but it is actually a great one to have in your repertoire as a way of turning some curry paste into a curry with more flavour than those pre-created supermarket pastes tend to achieve on their own.
This is a thank you to the Hairy Bikers, and their book Great Curries. It is a great book, in that it has recipes with around three dozen ingredients taking 5 hours…. and recipes that don’t. This is, quite obviously, is not the one of those ‘authentic’ recipes, but certainly handy for batch making some work dinners.
I actually made it a little hotter by using madras paste, so be a bit careful if you’re a little worried about spice (although that is not a concern I share!).
Good things: Very easy, if not a quick one.
Bad things: not the most exciting curry recipe one could find.
Ingredients & requirements: a
- 5 tbsp of sunflower oil
- 3 onions
- 12 boneless skinless chicken thighs
- 4 garlic cloves
- 25g ginger
- 125g medium curry ppaste
- 800g chopped tomatoes
- 150ml cold water
- 1/2 chicken stock cube
- 1 tbsp mango chutney
- coriander
- sea salt
- ground black pepper
Preparation & cooking
Preparation
- Peel, halve and thinly slice 3 onions, set aside on a plate.
- Set aside together in a small bowl:
- Peel and crush the 4 garlic cloves
- Grate 25g of ginger
- Trim off the fat from the 12 chicken thighs and cut each piece in 4. Season with salt and pepper and set aside on a large plate (or in the original packing if you want to save on washing up)
Cooking
- Whack a large saucepan on a medium heat. Add the 2.5 tablespoons of sunflower oil and cook the sliced onions for about 8 mins. Make sure you’re stirringly almost constantly!
- Turn up the head heat cook the onions for another 6 mins.
- Add the crushed garlic cloves and 25g grated ginger – cook for 1 min.
- Add the chicken thigh pieces and turn in the pan for 5 mins.
- Stir in 125g of medium curry paste and stir for 2-3 mins.
- Then add the following and briefly stir in:
- 800g of chopped tomatoes
- 150ml cold water
- Crumble in half a stock cube
- 1 tablespoon of mango chutney
- Cover with loosely fitting lid and simmer gently for 50 mins or so. I’d stir every so often, and a bit more regularly at the end.
- At some point during the cooking do remember to chop up the coriander.
- Take it off the heat. Skim off and discard fat. Stir in chopped coriander leaves and serve with rice.
Reflections:
Apologies for the terrible photo below. I threw the rice and curry together with a dollop of mango chutney with such little regard for how it actually looks I probably shouldn’t share it.
It really has been a strong choice for my work lunches – and the use of well cooked onions, garlic and ginger, do give the curry a flavour that you wouldn’t expect a simple curry paste job to give.
