First Meal in my New Flat

I'm back!!! I finally have internet in my new flat so I have loads to share with you... There's still some meals from my trip around Eastern Europe and a family holiday to Pollenca and, of course, tons of recipes from my own cooking and books!

I thought the best place to start would be the first meal I cooked in my new kitchen... it's a lovely open plan kitchen/dining/living room - perfect for entertaining as I can cook while still chatting to my friends! So the dish is just a very simple Chicken Tikka Masala - not fancy but absolutely fool proof and very tasty! So welcome back everyone, pour a glass of wine and enjoy the recipe!

 

Chicken Tikka Masala

Serves 3 (great for 2 people with leftovers for the freezer!)

olive oil
2 chicken breasts

1 onion (I used red this time but I normally use white)
large tablespoon of tikka masala paste
2/3 cup of rice
1 red pepper
6-8 mushrooms
tin of chopped tomatoes
handful of flaked almonds (optional)
handful of fresh coriander leaves
1 naan bread
2 tablespoons of natural yoghurt (optional)



Chop all of the ingredients and get a pan of water boiling ready for your rice.

Put a deep frying pan on a medium heat and add a dash of olive oil. Add the chicken and fry until it has turned white.

Add the onion. As the onion softens add the tikka masala paste and stir until it is covering all of the chicken.

Cook the rice according to packet instructions (I usually put it on at this stage and the timings tend to work well).

Add the peppers and mushrooms to the pan and fry for a few minutes, mixing with the chicken, onions and paste.

As the veg softens, add the tin of chopped tomatoes, most of the almonds and coriander. Leave to simmer and absorb all of the flavours for about 5 minutes. If you are serving with naan bread then put it in a preheated oven.

If you want a creamier curry then add natural yoghurt, but it is still delicious without!

Drain and serve your rice and spoon on your curry. Sprinkle the remaining almonds and coriander over the dishes and eat!



So there you have it... the simple and tasty dish that I made for my friend as the first meal in my new kitchen! It's a really great basic recipe that you can mix up with different meats, different veg and chilli if you want to add some more spice - delicious with spinach added towards the end of cooking if you fancy a tikka saag!

A good one for a Saturday evening if you fancy making it tonight or it can even be a fairly quick mid-week meal... have a lovely weekend folks and enjoy!

Anjum Anand's Light Cumin-Flavoured Chicken Curry

Anjum Anand 'I Love Curry'

This colourful curry book, published by Quadrille, has gorgeous full page photographs for every recipe. I'm quite a visual person so I like to see what my dish is (hopefully!) going to look like, and I often pick to cook recipes with a photo over those without.

The dishes all sound delicious, and I think I picked one of the least exciting ones (not out of choice, but down to the stock left in my Sainsbury's local at 7pm on a Tues!) - I certainly plan to cook my way through most of these.

With sections on 'To Start: Bites', 'The Curries' and 'Accompaniments', this book offers an easy meal plan as I always love to make a starter if I'm cooking for someone or for an occasion. And the curries and accompaniments are then broken down into several different chapters, so you can pick to suit ingredients you may have already got in the fridge.

I often whip up a curry with one of the Pataks curry pastes and either some chopped tomatoes or coconut milk... and this produces a consistently tasty curry. But this is a lovely, well laid out book, that I can see myself using every time I want to spend a bit more time over making a curry and fancy some more interesting flavours. (I should just say that I'm really not a fan of the cover - I think the colour combination makes the book look cheap and in-authentic, which it's not - but under the dust-jacket is a plain mint green that looks much much nicer!!)

Light Cumin-Flavoured Chicken Curry

... in my case it was a turkey curry, but that's because I was making it on a budget! I think it would have been much more flavoursome with the chicken on the bone, as recommended in the recipe, but hey, it was pretty good anyway!

I also chose to add green pepper, because I wanted to bulk it out a little and so that we had a bit of variety as I was simply doing this with naan bread as a late dinner for me and a friend.


It's a long recipe so I won't write it out, but basically marinade the chicken/turkey in a mixture of plain yoghurt, garlic, ginger, ground cumin and ground coriander... and leave (for much longer than the 10mins I did!)

 Fry off the onion and cumin seeds, then add garam masala, chillies (and pepper).

 Add the marinaded meat.

 Add water and simmer. Add fresh coriander (which Sainsbury's had unfortunately run out of!) and serve.

Anjum Anand words it much better than that, and there are a lot of details that I have missed out, but this is the general idea!  And the result was good - maybe not 'the best Indian curry I'll ever cook' - but light, simple and tasty. A definite one for the future.