Chicken Kerala

I have been craving curry recently. It has been a while since I made a curry of any description, although I have made few spicy soups. When searching around for recipes, I found this one on the BBC website by Manju Malhi which caught my attention, mainly because I had pretty much all the ingredients already to hand, and also because it looked particularly quick and easy to make.

This recipe tasted great, and was extremely easy to do. I tend to do all the preparations before I start cooking, that way I can just empty the various bowls of ingredients in, TV-style, as I'm going along. It means I have more bowls to wash up, but it helps me to not forget any ingredients and make sure things go into the pot when they're supposed to.

Recipe for Chicken Kerala (Serves 3-4)

• 4 tablespoons Groundnut Oil
• 1 Onion, sliced
• 3 Green Chillies, finely chopped, seeds and all
• 2" Root Ginger, finely grated
• 2 cloves of Garlic
• ¼ teaspoon Hot Chilli Powder
• 1 teaspoon Ground Coriander
• ½ teaspoon Ground Turmeric
• ½ teaspoon Salt
• 400g Skinless Chicken Breasts, cut into bite sized pieces
• 2 medium Tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 3-4 Potatos, cut into 3cm cubes
• 330ml Coconut Milk
• pinch of Garam Masala

Heat up 3 tablespoons of the oil in a heavy based pan and saute the Onion and Chilli for a few minutes. Then add the Ginger, Garlic, Chilli Powder, Coriander, Turmeric and Salt and stir into the Onions and once all covered, add the Chicken and fry gently for about 8-10 minutes. If the pan gets too dry and stuff starts to stick to the bottom, add a dash of water. Next add the Tomato and Potato and stir in for another couple of minutes before adding about a third of the Coconut Milk along with about 200ml of boiling water. Leave to simmer for about 6 minutes, then add the remaining Coconut Milk and further simmer for about 10 minutes until the potato and chicken are cooked. Then sprinkle of the pinch of Garam Masala.

I served this with Basmati Rice and garnished with some, maybe, overly browned shallots and curry leaves, however, for the photo, I just stuck a couple of Coriander leaves on top, because the shots with the onion just didn't look as nice.