Chicken korma

A few people have made nice comments about my thai green curry (cheers, guys!), so I thought it would be mentioning a different curry I made a couple of weeks ago.

With a recession looming, and ways to save money being in the forefront of our thoughts, we worked out just how much we were spending on takeaways in an average month (Indian food every Friday without fail, the occasional mid-week pizza, dinner with friends…) and were pretty horrified by the result.

The solution? Start making my own curries.

My one and only previous attempt to make a curry from scratch resulted in one of the most delicious Indian dishes I’ve ever tasted, but it took several hours, made a lot of mess, and left me with aching feet and back from standing over the hob all afternoon.

When I stumbled across this much simpler recipe in Good Food magazine, our vow to cut back on the Friday night takeaways provided the perfect excuse to test it out.

The verdict: If you’re not a greedy-guts like me, and manage to feed four people with this recipe rather than serving double portions (later regretted when neither of us could move from the sofa), it works out at less than £5 a head, even with the full garnish and using top-priced ingredients (in this instance, Waitrose). It was as tasty as a takeaway korma (and definitely not as sloppy or greasy). And it was straightforward and mess-free enough that I’d be more than happy to cook this again and again.

I’m now looking forward to trying out some different (hotter) curry recipes. I’d like to make some traditional dishes to see how they compare to what we would normally order in (jalfrezi, for example) but I also think it will be fun to not worry about it being ‘authentic’ and just play with different combinations of ingredients based on the same recipe, tweaking it until I have a dish that perfectly suits out tastes.

Chicken korma - serves 4

Ingredients

4 chicken breasts
2 onions
1 green chilli
A thumb-sized piece of fresh root ginger
A small bunch of coriander
400g chickpeas
Groundnut oil
Knob of butter
145g korma curry paste
400ml coconut milk
A small handful of flaked almonds, plus extra for serving
2 heaped tbsp desiccated coconut
Salt and pepper
Small tub of natural yoghurt

Method

Cut the chicken into large bite-size pieces. Finely slice the onions. De-seed and finely slice the chilli. Peel and finely chop the ginger. Pick the coriander leaves and set aside, and finely chop the stalks. Drain the chickpeas.

Heat a few tablespoons of oil in a casserole dish over a high flame, and when the oil is hot add the chicken, cooking until lightly browned. Add the onions, chilli, ginger, coriander stalks and butter. Keep stirring the contents of the pan, cooking for 5-10 minutes until everything turns golden, but take care not to let it burn.

Add the curry paste, coconut milk, chickpeas, desiccated coconut and half the flaked almonds to the pan, plus 200ml water (to save you measuring this out in a jug, just half-fill the empty chickpea can). Stir and bring to the boil, then cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Keep checking that the curry isn’t drying out, and if it is just add a little more water.

Season with a little salt and pepper, and serve with a few spoonfuls of yogurt, and the remaining almonds and the coriander leaves scattered on top.