The last recipe of the month is for a chicken curry that I was inspired to make by and for a long-time reader of the blog, Dan Davies (who goes by yak_lord on Instagram and whisky_yak on Twitter). He has made and posted pictures of a number of my recipes over the years and I have always appreciated it: it gives me great pleasure when my recipes enter other people’s repertoires. Last month a post he made on Instagram citing one of my recipes caught my eye. He noted that he’d not used garlic and had substituted fennel for onion. At first I was foxed by this. But, of course, there was a good reason for it: a dietary restriction in his household that makes cooking with onions, garlic and other alliums untenable. This got me thinking and I resolved to come up with a chicken curry recipe that centered fennel and omitted onions and garlic from the get-go. The recipe also eschews red chilli powder and tomatoes and the spice mix includes quite a lot of poppy seed. This makes for a “white” gravy that is mild yet flavourful: the fennel brings a bright sweetness, the pepper and ginger a bit of bite and the whole garam masalas and green chillies add fragrance. For best results use chicken on the bone as without onion or garlic you need more depth of flavour in the gravy than boneless chicken will give you. Continue reading →

Here is a recipe for a very simple chicken curry. Not very many ingredients and not very much work. And what work there is can be divided into two parts. Marinate the chicken the evening before and the next day all you have to do is saute the onions till they’re nicely browned and softened, mix in the chicken with the marinade, cover the pot and let it cook itself over low heat. There’s no added water and so you end up with a thick but flavourful gravy that goes wonderfully with a pulao like this one or with parathas. It’s one of those curries that’s both great as weekday/weeknight comfort food and holds its own on a dinner party menu. Give it a go. And if you do, you might want to watch the inevitable Instagram Reel I made of the last time I made it to give you a better idea of the steps. (You do follow me on Instagram, don’t you?) Continue reading →

This is not a finesse recipe. But the results are very tasty indeed. A variation on my usual “red curry” chicken that is a favourite of my children, this came about last month as part of a desperate attempt to use up the endless flood of tomatoes from my garden. It uses two pounds of tomatoes for one chicken. And the chicken cooks only in its own juices and the tomatoes as they cook down. That’s a lot of tomato flavour and so it is necessary to deploy a lot of masala to counter and balance it. I start by browning the onions to an almost dark brown, adding a healthy dose of fresh ginger-garlic paste and then a lightly toasted and powdered masala featuring cumin, coriander and pepper. A bit of jaggery and a few slit green chillies and the result is happiness, especially when eaten with rice. As you’ll see, the recipe also calls for a large chicken. We get our birds from a local small farm and the smallest from the last batch was the 6 lb’er I used to make this iteration of this curry. If the chickens you get are smaller you could either double ’em up or supplement one with a few drumsticks and thighs. I leave this decision to you. Continue reading →

This recipe is basically the byproduct of having made my friends Anjali and Pradnya’s recipes for bharli vangi a number of times this summer. It also owes something to the baghare baingan recipe from the The Essential Andhra Cookbook that I’d posted late last year. I really enjoy the mix of sweet, sour and spicy in all those dishes and the richness that comes from the use of peanuts and/or sesame seeds. In this recipe I use both peanuts and sesame seeds (though no coconut) and instead of tamarind I use sweet black vinegar. The heat comes mostly from black pepper—the byadgi chilies are used mostly for colour and for a light smoky flavour. If you don’t have byadgi chillies you could substitute Kashmiri or even ancho chiles. If the latter strikes you as too fusiony a choice keep in mind that this recipe—in addition to Chinkiang vinegar—also uses Sichuan peppercorn. I never have its southwestern Indian cousin tirphal on hand and it’s a more than plausible substitute. But it’s best not to think too much about these things and just roll with it. The results, I can promise you, are delicious. Continue reading →

“Red curry chicken” is my children’s name for the chicken curry that has been my gateway to slowly Indianizing their palates for the last few years. It is one of their absolute favourites of all the things I cook for them (though Marcella Hazan’s pesto is in unassailable first place). The “it” however is not a stable referent. By which I mean that this is a recipe that has been subtly, progressively tweaked to bring them along into an appreciation of spicy/spicier food without their quite realizing it’s been happening. Please note that when I say “spicy/spicier” I am not referring to capsaicin heat but to a fuller flavour via the use of a greater body of spices: cumin, coriander seed, fennel seed, cinnamon, black pepper, cardamom etc. And, yes, also increasing amounts of red chilli powder. That said, though they eat hotter food than most of their Minnesotan peers, the current iteration of this curry is not very hot either. But over the last four or five years it’s gone from being a fairly bland chicken stew with tomatoes to becoming something that the missus and I enjoy eating alongside them. Here is the current iteration for your enjoyment as well. Continue reading →