Yesterday A. and I decided to try to cook Indian so we went off to global groceries and tried to round up all the essential ingredients.
It wasn't as bad as I thought...we were only missing one thing (methi leaves). Anyway what follows is the documentation of our experiment as well as some notes on how things went. The recipe we used was Chicken Madras from the Curry House website. For the exact recipe for the links, I'm just going to comment on the pictures and the general process.
First we start out making the basic curry sauce. We started out by cooking up onion, gingers, and chiles in ghee (which I think is some weird type of butter). The recipe called for three tablespoons. We used two and probably could have gotten away with one (the stuff is really bad for you!).
After about 15 minutes of slow cooking we add corriander, tumeric, and cumin which makes the entire mess turn yellow. We continued to cook it for a bit longer.
Then we took the whole mess off fire and put it in a blender with some water and a bit of pureed tomatoes. When we ended up pouring it back into the pot it looked like this.
Starting on the Chicken Madras: We cut the chicken up into fairly large cubes and then stir fried it in a skillet while continuing to let the sauce cook down.
We took the chicken off the fire and then stir fried some dried chiles in oil and over low heat slowly added a tablespoon of the curry sauce along with cumin, coriander, cayenne, and paprika continually stirring so that it did not burn. You dump the whole thing into the curry sauce pot.
We let the whole thing simmer and ten minutes before the end added the garam masala and methi powder (we ended up substituting a 1/4 of a teaspoon of methi powder for a teaspoon of methi leaves). During this period we ended up having to add water to mixture to keep it at the right consistency but this didn't seem to affect the taste. We also added a significant amount of cayenne. It ended up changing color to a much darker orange brown before finish.
Finally, we served it with nann (indian flatbread), rice, and white wine. MMMMM!
It wasn't as bad as I thought...we were only missing one thing (methi leaves). Anyway what follows is the documentation of our experiment as well as some notes on how things went. The recipe we used was Chicken Madras from the Curry House website. For the exact recipe for the links, I'm just going to comment on the pictures and the general process.
First we start out making the basic curry sauce. We started out by cooking up onion, gingers, and chiles in ghee (which I think is some weird type of butter). The recipe called for three tablespoons. We used two and probably could have gotten away with one (the stuff is really bad for you!).
After about 15 minutes of slow cooking we add corriander, tumeric, and cumin which makes the entire mess turn yellow. We continued to cook it for a bit longer.
Then we took the whole mess off fire and put it in a blender with some water and a bit of pureed tomatoes. When we ended up pouring it back into the pot it looked like this.
Starting on the Chicken Madras: We cut the chicken up into fairly large cubes and then stir fried it in a skillet while continuing to let the sauce cook down.
We took the chicken off the fire and then stir fried some dried chiles in oil and over low heat slowly added a tablespoon of the curry sauce along with cumin, coriander, cayenne, and paprika continually stirring so that it did not burn. You dump the whole thing into the curry sauce pot.
We let the whole thing simmer and ten minutes before the end added the garam masala and methi powder (we ended up substituting a 1/4 of a teaspoon of methi powder for a teaspoon of methi leaves). During this period we ended up having to add water to mixture to keep it at the right consistency but this didn't seem to affect the taste. We also added a significant amount of cayenne. It ended up changing color to a much darker orange brown before finish.
Finally, we served it with nann (indian flatbread), rice, and white wine. MMMMM!
