Antonette's Chicken Curry

So we made chicken curry today. The hardest part is cutting up all the stuff but its not that bad if you are drinking and have a friend to cut stuff up with (you can split the work). So cut up chicken (3 thighs), potatoes (we did 4, by the way, potatoes are 1.97 for 10 lbs at vons. stock up), 1/2 onion, 4 cloves of garlic, and chilis (we used 2 jalapenos and 1 habenero).

Heat oil in a shallow sauce pan (i'm not really sure what kind of pot i use, it kicks ass though). Add cumin seeds (i added too much, its really dependant on what kind of taste you want. Cumin is probably the taste you think of when you think of curry) and mustard seeds (so for the first time, we crushed the seeds first, i'll bring up how this affected the taste later). Once the mustard seeds start popping (wear sleeves!) add the onion. Before the cumin starts burning add the chilis. You are trying to get all four flavors into the oil. Once the onion starts to brown add the meat. Add cardimom (interesting sweet flavor, tastes great on meat, you have to crush the seeds and i used like 16 seeds), turmuric (1/2 a teaspoon), ginger powder (1/2 a teaspoon), and garlic (finely chopped) to the meat and cook til 1/3 way done. Add i'd say add 1/2 cup of yogurt (you can use what ever you want here, water will be more liquid curry and yogurt is creamier curry. Any flavor yogurt works because all the other flavors will mask the taste of fruit). And cook the meat till 1/2 way done. Add the potatos (you need liquid to cook the potatos til soft). Basically simmer (keep adding water) until potatos are cooked to your liking. Add tomatos at the end cuz tomatos are good. Serve over rice.

The important thing about liquid is if you do it in small amounts you can always add more. If you add too much liquid, just boil it off. But you have to be patient. Just watch a laker game in the background or john tucker must die or something. But just realize that its easier to add small amounts of liquid at a time you are bound to get the consistency you want.

So normally our curry has a real cumin taste which is kind of a bitter, indian curry taste (you'll know if if you try it). But crushing the mustard seeds really released the flavor from there so our curry had an amazing american taste (like mustard, what do you know). It lost the curry taste but had the consistency so it looked a lot like curry. The chilis added a lot of spice which i think makes everything taste good. Cardimom was lost as was ginger but we wanted it that way to test the taste of mustard. The spice and mustard completely dominated everything.

All in all real good meal. Cheap, tasted great, and we fed probably 3 people. The best part of curry is that the ingredients i mentioned up top are the base of curry so changing one can totally affect the overall taste (we learned that today!). Next time we are going to try Chicken Tikka Masala so we'll see what we can do.

come over tomorrow, we have to finish a keg before saturday so Ziggy can't steal it for a party and if she does that i actually have to go out and i don't want to do that.

peace!