Chicken Curry and Beyond – The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

I like sausages. I know that the days of full meat sausages are long gone (vegetarian sausages? – you’re kidding me). So when I found out that Wendy wouldn’t be around for Sunday dinner I could almost hear the sausages calling out for me. Wendy won’t eat sausages.

There are some easy sausage curry recipes on the Curry Focus website and it didn’t take me long to find the Simple Beef Sausage, Potato and Pea Curry recipe. Hardly a curry recipe title that trips off the tongue but this curry certainly had some great ingredients – sausages, potatoes and peas. Lovely jubbly.

I picked up some sausages on Saturday morning. Everything else was already in the kitchen.

There aren’t many ingredients in this curry and the cooking steps are easy as well.

I precooked the sausages and parboiled the potatoes. Apart from peeling and crushing the garlic and slicing up the sausages, that was pretty much all of the needed preparation.
And really, making this curry was a breeze.

The cooking went almost exactly to plan with the only deviation being when a slice of sausage leapt out of the frying pan and onto the floor. Yes, I did throw the piece of sausage away even though there were no witnesses to this tragedy.

This is a really big curry and will easily feed 8 people once the rice was included.

So I served up the Simple Beef Sausage, Potato and Pea curry on the usual bed of basmati.

And it was good. Even great. There was plenty of food on the plate and everything was well cooked. Everyone enjoyed the meal and it received a taste score of 8 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of “Medium”. I thought that the curry rating should have been “Mild to Medium” but the heat sneaked up on you and left a nice tingle on the lips. Maybe the curry would have been better with a couple of more cloves of garlic.

The curry would never win any beauty prizes with the large slices of sausage. Maybe the slices could be halved in size to give a more pleasing appearance.

You’d certainly never get this curry in a restaurant. Which is a pity, because I loved it.

Hi, Ray here again.

I seem to have gone through a few weeks of bad recipe tests and am gagging for a decent curry recipe to enjoy.

There is a large number of chicken curry recipes on the Curry Focus website so I decided to try out one of them. Chicken is basically a staple curry ingredient in non-vegetarian curry recipes. I saw the Quick Chicken Curry recipe and decided to try it out. The words “quick” and “easy” are overused in curry recipe titles but “Quick” definitely attracted me to this recipe. I’m not sure that “quick” is an accurate description for this recipe seeing that the cooking time is about 35 minutes. It takes time to prepare the ingredients but I thought that I couldn’t really go wrong with this recipe – maybe it should have used “Easy” instead of “Quick”.

I did notice a couple of things about this recipe. First, there wasn’t much chicken in it. There was only 400g (14 oz) of chicken. This is a paltry (ha ha) amount of chicken. Most chicken breasts in the supermarket are around 300g (10 oz) – chickens have got bigger over the last few years.

The second thing that I noticed was that this recipe used lots of vegetables. There were peas, courgettes (zucchini) and spinach (saag). Lots of green ingredients so it must be healthy.

Saturday morning saw me buying the bits and pieces that I would need for the curry.
Nothing really special and everything was easy to find.

As I said earlier, the cooking time was about 35 minutes so I started to prepare the ingredients about 45 minutes before the scheduled eating time and I started to cook the curry as soon as everything was ready.

And nothing went wrong with the cooking. As usual, I used my favourite big frying pan and all went smoothly.

The dinner guests arrived well before the meal was ready and settled in the kitchen drinking Cobra and Kingfisher beer whilst watching me do all of the work.
And pretty soon I was serving up the Quick Chicken Curry on basmati rice to the eager diners.

And it was good. The curry is very green with lots of healthy-looking vegetables. So it must be good for you! Everyone liked the curry. It was light and lovely. It was surprisingly hot. But with 2 chillies and the ginger, it was hardly surprising. I’ve noticed that vegetable curries tend to be hotter than non-vegetarian curries, for some reason.

Anyway, the curry was very popular. Everyone commented on the green colour of the curry and agreed that the spinach was a great ingredient. There was not much chicken in the portions and everyone said that the curry recipe could easily be converted into a vegetarian curry recipe.

Somebody said that some potato would be a good additional ingredient in the curry but everyone seemed happy with what had been served up. The curry received a great taste score of 8.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat level of “Hot”.

As I said earlier, there was a lot of talk about converting this to a vegetarian recipe or adding more chicken. Whatever your preference, you could give it a try. Or just follow the recipe as it is written. Your call.

Hi, Ray here again.

I don’t know about you but I like a good pulao. They are usually very easy to make and taste great.

So I smiled when a new pulao recipe arrived on the Curry Focus website a couple of weeks ago. It was a recipe for a pea and mushroom pulao. Rice and peas – yummy. It seemed to have a lot of rice for 4 people (2 cups of basmati would easily feed 6 to 8 people) but, as usual, I would follow the recipe to the letter to give it a fair test.

So this weekend would have a healthy curry and I picked up some mushrooms when I was out and about doing my weekly food shopping.

I washed and soaked the basmati for 30 minutes and prepared the other ingredients whilst the rice was soaking. Not that I needed 30 minutes as it only takes a few minutes to peel mushrooms and garlic and to get all of the ingredients together.

And the actual cooking only presented one problem and that was the water disappeared within 5 minutes of being added. No doubt all of that rice absorbed the water pretty easily and so I ended up adding more hot water during the cooking so that the pulao wouldn’t stick and burn to the saucepan. Luckily I always have a kettle of boiling water to hand when cooking a curry, just for when I need it. So I added more water during the cooking phase (and changed the recipe method to say that more water might be needed).

As I suspected, the cooking was pretty simple and in less than 30 minutes I was serving up the Pea and Mushroom Pulao to the hungry diners.

And how was the pulao? Well, pretty disappointing to be honest. There was a lot of rice but not much pea or mushroom content. The pea and rice content could easily be doubled in this recipe and, realistically, the amount of rice could be cut back to about a half.

I found the pulao to be very bland. I know that you can’t put too much spice into a mushroom dish without overpowering the mushroom taste but there was hardly any spice at all in this meal. No chilli (or chilli powder) in sight. And no onion!

The pulao was given a pretty low taste score of 5.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat level of “Very Mild”.

Will I make this pulao again? It’s not very likely. But if you like a very mild pulao then this might be the recipe for you.

Hi, Ray here again.

My last recipe review was on the Vegetarian Green Curry recipe. I had noticed that the Vegetarian Green Curry recipe called for 4 fresh green chillies, which is a lot of chillies in a recipe, even for a big recipe.

So I decided to make a raita to have with the curry. I looked at the raita recipes and decided to make the Cucumber and Carrot Raita.

Like most raita recipes, this recipe is simple and easy to follow.

I bought the ingredients that I needed when out shopping on Saturday.

Sunday afternoon saw me making the raita before starting to make the curry so that I could chill the raita before dinner time (thinking ahead – amazing).

And the whole process of making the raita was very quick because nothing needs cooking. A raita is so easy to make.

All that is needed is to prepare the ingredients and then mix them up in a big bowl before covering and putting the bowl into the fridge. Easy peasy.

I served up the Cucumber and Carrot Raita with the curry.

And the raita was good. It tasted good, was refreshing and went well with the curry. The raita definitely cooled down the curry although, due to the spice/heat level of the curry, it was a bit like throwing a glass of water onto a bonfire.

Despite this, the raita was very popular and received a good taste score of 8/10 with a spice/heat level of mild.

I will definitely be making this raita again.