If music be the food of love then surely food is the music of something or other and a bunch of NOOLers recipes should be good.
So I'll start shall I?
Steve's non-specific but bloody authentic tasting curried chicken. I use the wasters measuring system, where actual amounts are never mentioned, work it out yourself. Oddly enough any chef i ever talked to works in "a wee bit" "some" "a good lot" terms too :)
You will need If you can get the various spices fresh do it, I use mainly yer bog standard off the shelf shit. A large joint/beer (hell, treat yourself to a veinfull if that's your thing) Some chicken Turmeric corriander cumin paprika Tamarind paste (optional) Chillies(MUST BE FRESH) Garlic (lots) Onions (more than you can possibly imagine) tin of tomatoes A pot or 2 of Creme fraiche or natural yoghurt
put a big shitload of garlic and a couple of fresh chillies (both chopped) (I grow my own, 2 is quite enough, if you're using Bird eye ones from the shops, about 6 should do) in a pestle and mortar, chuck in a lot of cumin and then a bit less of corriander paprika and turmeric. Add a good teaspoon of salt, one of tamarind (if you have no tamrind fire a bit of mango chutney in, no fucker will notice) and a dash of oil (chillie oil is good, castrol GTX is a non starter) Beat the shit out of it all until you have a fine paste. Chop the unfortunate avain pieces into curry sized chunks, chuck the paste (but keep about 1/4 of it) onto it, roll it all about and chuck it in the fridge. How long you leave it in the fridge is up to you, these are strong flavours, and will marinade pretty quick, if you leave the stuff about 6 hours the chicken will almost be cooked by the marinade. Even leaving it an hour does wonders.
Next, chop onions til you are bored. You're basically using the onions as your entire sauce base, so seriously chop a lot of them, about 8 small or 4 large ones. Chop them to atoms. Iuse one of those thing you pound on top of and te wee blade goes up and down and sort of moves round a touch each time, a foodprocessor will do the trick.
Now heat some oil in a pan (if you have Ghee to hand use it, if you go and buy some vegetable ghee, it's meant to smell that way and no, the food wont taste of pineapples and puke). Don;t be afraid to use a lot. Powdered spices not only absorb oil, but burn easily. chuck in most of the onions and the little paste you left aside. Cooked this on a high heat keeping it moving to avoid burning, when you see that the onions have reduced to a caramelisde mess fire your marinaded chicken in.
Keep the heat high and keep the chicken moving. Once it's nearly but not quite cooked through, reduce the heat a little. Hopefully this will encourage some of the water to come out of the chicken into the sauce. The trick is that once you stop frying, and start sort of broiling in the oils and the chicken juices, you DON'T let the pan dry out, it'll wreck everything. Once you've got some chicken juice bubbling, add a little water (or a lot if the chicken didn't juice out too much, a long marinade tends to stop it producing too much water.), use this to deglaze the pan (that's get the little bits of burnt in meat juices and spices off the pan and back in the sauce, works a bloody treat on chops or steak too), if you have to work at anything leave it...tastey pan stains come off easy, the stubborn ones are pure carbon, leave em :) Now fire your tomatoes in. One of the cheap brands is best, top uality tomatoes are only for Italian food, for curry or chillie the crapper the better.
Bring it up to the boil, then simmer, but do not abandon, if a dish like this sticks, it stinks. Once about half the liquid has reduced, switch off ana walk away.
A few hours later, heat it again gently until boilding, then switch off. At this time check to see if salt is needed, also don't be at all afraid to add a teaspoon of sugar, sugar is more effective than MSG at making flavours shine out. Do this as often as you can resist eating it. the best solution is to make it one afternoon for the following evening, at least 24 hrs is preferable, with at least 3 cookups in that time.
When it comes time to heat it for serving. Prepare some rice (plain or basmati, up to you), adding a dash of your fvourite flavoured oil to the salted water (I rather like lemon and dill oil). A bay leaf also imparts the ODDEST cool sort of taste to rice. While the rice is boiling (don't use fucking boil in the bag it tastes like it was boiled in a bag), heat the curry to boiling, knock it off the heat and add the onions you left aside (the less cooked onion actually tastes like onion unlike the caramel morass we cooked up earlier). Then stir in your creme fraiche or yoghurt, it really depends how much of that slightly sour bite you want to it. I hate yoghurt, but use it in curry all the time, so don;t worry if you hate it too. Never boil the shit out of it after adding either of these, a wee boil and simmer is fine, but if you give it 20 mins of witch's cauldron stylee, it'll split and turn into sick. this should give you a curry of a nice consistency, neither too thick nor too runny, and with a nice ratio of meat to sauce.
Options: Toss in anything you want, veg, other meats, next door's yappy little poodle the world's your overpriced shelfish. Another thing to try is to do away with the dairy addons, and make our sauce entirely with onions and tomatoes (or just one or the other). that's more in keeping with many hotter Indian dishes.
BTW it's a nonspecific curry cos it's a bit of jalfrezzi, and a bit of korma and a bit of madras and so on.
Nobody start cooking this til it's been up a while, you know what I'm like for forgetting important bits of sente and having to edit later.
if you;re good I'll share my chillie recipe.
You are good value Cambo,for a mentalist:D
