curry chicken

curry chicken (picture by Joe Sevita)

curry from scratch

Who needs a curry from scratch when you can buy a jar of curry sauce from Trader Joe’s with simple good ingredients. BUT I don’t have any left and I don’t go there anymore since they did away with delivery.

I remembered a delicious Curry Chicken from scratch that I made a long time ago and hoped that I can still find it online. The recipe was from Mad Hungry, a TV show that I used to love. It was part of the Martha Stewart empire. I lost track of it but was so happy to find its website and that their brand continues! The host / star / chef Lucinda Scalia Quinn is a mom of three boys and she believes in the power of home cooking. Wow I devoured everything on the website and I love everything about it!

So I set about gathering the ingredients for the recipe I love. But first and foremost I do not want to brown the chicken. Browning is simply to messy, smelly and greasy and I try to avoid doing so as much as possible. From past experience, I know that boneless and skinless chicken thighs being dark meat will make great tender stews, braises or curries. All the tender delicious curries that I’ve had are not browned first. Next, since the recipe is a West Indian /Jamaican curry, it called for lime, and scotch bonnet peppers. I didn’t have Scotch a bonnet peppers so I decided to use some dry chili pepper (I had a large jar in my pantry).

So some shortcuts and modifications later, a delicious and beautiful curry emerged

I hope you try this with your inspirations and share how yours came out.

ingredients

• 3-4 lbs boneless skinless chicken thighs
• 2 limes, juice and zest
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 3 medium onion, chopped
• 4 garlic sliced (or chopped in you prefer)
• 5 tbsp curry powder
• 3 small tomatoes or 1/4 cup tomato sauce
• 1 dried chili pepper
• 2 tsp salt
• 3/4 tsp ground pepper
• 5 cups water

steps

1. Juice and zest the limes. Add juice to the chicken along with the zest. Coating chicken with the juice.

2. Heat olive oil In large 12-14 in sauté pan, add crushed chili pepper and cook until fragrant. Add onions and garlic and cook for about 1 minute. Add curry powder, stir and toast for 1 minute.

3. Add tomato or tomato sauce, salt and pepper. Stir and scrape the bottom of the pan. Add water and mix well. Tuck in chicken pieces. It may seems like a lot of water but it will make a curry with lots of sauce to flavor the rice.

4. Bring to boil, cover and simmer for 1.5 hours or until chicken is tender and falling apart.

5. Serve with basmati rice.

TIP & TRICK: if your family do not like biting into chopped garlic, slice or cut garlic into bigger pieces. This way, people can pick out the visible pieces of garlic. But the garlic flavor will still be in the dish.