Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

I don’t know about you, but I just love scrambled eggs and it’s a regular Sunday breakfast in my household. Normally I just add some cheese and eat it on toast with tomato and bacon.

Earlier this year I had noticed a spicy scrambled eggs recipe arrive on the Curry Focus website but, for one reason or another, I hadn’t got around to trying it out.

So this morning I printed the recipe and tried it out.

I already had all of the ingredients so all I had to do was wander into the kitchen and get on with it.

If you look at the recipe, you’ll see how few ingredients you need and how easy it is to make.

Within a few minutes of going into the kitchen, the eggs, onion, chillies, tomato and coriander were prepared and the cooking had started.

It’s just a straightforward stir-fry – the onions and chillies first, then the tomato and, finally, the eggs and coriander.

I popped on the toast as the tomato went into the saucepan.

In less than 10 minutes, the scrambled eggs were on the toast and being eaten by my flatmate and myself.

They were delicious.

This is a very filling breakfast with a great spicy kick to it.

It was given a good rating of 6.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of medium hot.

If you like a really easy, and spicy, breakfast then I can recommend that you try this great recipe.

The British Curry Awards for 2008 were made last Sunday (19th October) at the London Grosvenor House Hotel.

This is the fourth year for the British Curry Awards and they go from strength to strength, reflecting the seemingly insatiable appetite for good curries.

This year there were a huge 28,000 nominations for over 3,000 restaurants all around Britain.

The UK was divided into 10 regions and the finalists were whittled down to 100 restaurants before going through the final judging panel to find the regional winners, who were:

Scotland / Northern Ireland: Cinnamon Club, Aberdeen
North East: Last Days of the Raj, Gateshead
North West: Indian Ocean, Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire
East Midlands: Mem Saab, Northampton
West Midlands: Lasan, Birmingham
Wales: Bokhara Brasserie, Bridgend
South East: Maliks, Cookham, Berks
South West: Rajpoot, Bath
London Central & City: Tamarind, Mayfair
London Suburbs: Brilliant, Southall

The Newcomer of the Year Award went to Aagrah in Sheffield (restaurants need to have been open for less than 3 years to be in the running for this award).

A special Most Innovative Restaurant Award went to Tiffin Bites, which has 4 restaurants in London.

The awards were presented in front of an audience of 1,200 restaurateurs, celebrities, politicians and diplomates at the sumptuous ceremony.

Oops Bollywood provided the entertainment both before and after the awards ceremonies.

Everyone at the awards ceremony had a great evening.

So if you want to eat a great curry at an award-winning restaurant, why not go to your local award winner and see what all the fuss is about? You won’t regret it.

Hi, Ray here again.

I decided to continue my recipe reviews with another lamb curry, after last week’s great Keema Lamb Curry. I love the flavour that coriander gives to a curry and chose the Coriander Lamb Korma recipe for this week’s meal.

The recipe has a lot of lamb in it and feeds from 6 to 8 people. Luckily there’s plenty of room in the freezer so I can put the excess away for another day.

Once again, this is a very easy recipe to follow.

I prepared the first batch of ingredients, mixed them up in my largest saucepan, and got the curry simmering away.

Now I don’t know whether I put too much water into the curry, but it was a lot of liquid in the curry half way through the simmering. So I removed the lid completely to allow more liquid to evaporate. The curry thickened up quite a bit because of this so my call was good.

I started the rice with about 15 minutes of simmer time still to go.

When the 90 minutes was up, I added the milk and ground almonds into the curry, mixed it in well and then added the cream and coriander.

I served the curry on rice to the waiting diners.

And the curry was well received. There was a lovely creamy taste with a great flavour of coriander and almonds.

One thing that worried me a little was the large number of onions in the curry. But there wasn’t an overpowering taste of onions at all.

And one thing that confused me was the addition of ½ cup of vegetable oil. Why was the vegetable oil needed at all? I can only assume it has something to do with the combination of flavours that are present in the cooked curry. If you know why the oil was added can you email me and let me know?

The Coriander Lamb Korma curry received a rating of 7.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of mild.

This is a great curry, with lovely, delicate flavours, that is very easy to make and won’t burn off your tastebuds.

Another month passes by and September was another busy month at Curry Focus headquarters with more and more delicious recipes, reviews and information added to the site.

We add fish to the menu this month with a review of the tasty Fish Cakes Recipe.

Diwali, its that time of year again so read more about the Festival of Lights.

If you like hot spicy curries you need to read Ray’s Review on our Beef Madras Curry Recipe.

Here’s an excellent chicken curry that we recommend you try! Remember to buy the right chicken though as Ray finds out the hard way when cooking this dish. Read the Jaipur Chicken Curry Recipe Review

Ray tries a vegetarian dish and finds it edible, but a little disappointing, read the Gujarati Potato Curry Recipe Review.

One of our site visitors had a great idea, which was to provide a “hotness” or “spice” rating to the recipes on our site. We think that’s a fantastic idea and are already beginning to work on the addition so keep an eye out for this exciting new feature in the near future. If you have any ideas of features or things you would like to see on the site, please contact us and tell us about it!

The 2008 British Curry Awards will be held in London on October 19th. We’ll keep you posted on who won the awards around the UK so you can see who makes award winning curries - maybe you could go and try a meal at one of the restaurants to see what great food is all about.

As mentioned earlier, it’s Diwali at the end of October. Try and get along to a celebration near you for good food and entertainment.

Chicken curries rule the roost yet again!!!

Top 5 Recipes for September

1 Chicken Curry
3 Chicken Biryani
3 Chicken Jalfrezi
4 Chicken Bhuna
5 Easy Chicken Curry

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a new recipe here and a restaurant here.

Hi, Ray here again.

I’ve been working through some pretty impressive curries from the Curry Focus website just lately.

After last week’s Curried Beef Sausage recipe review, I once again decided to try out a recipe for a simple dish. And I was also hoping for better results than I got with the curried sausages.

So I chose the Keema Lamb Curry. I don’t know many people who dislike mince and peas and so such a dish with spices should be good.

I thought that it would be difficult to find lamb mince but my local supermarket surprised me by having loads of it. Maybe they have it all of the time and I haven’t noticed.

The recipe is really, really simple.

As usual, I prepared the onion, ginger, garlic and chillis (it is amazing just how often a recipe starts with preparing these ingredients).

Then the cooking started.

First, I stir-fried the prepared ingredients in the oil.

Next I added the curry powder and the whole mixture became totally dry.

Then in went the lamb and I stir-fried for 3 minutes, making sure that the mixture was always on the move so that it wouldn’t stick to the frying pan.

Then in went the peas, the salt and lemon juice.

All well so far except that now I was supposed to simmer the curry for 15 minutes. But there was hardly any liquid in the frying pan. So I added a cup of boiling water and simmered the curry whilst I cooked the rice in the microwave.

The curry was ready in less than 30 minutes from starting to cook. It was a very easy recipe to follow and a quick meal to prepare.

I served the Keema Lamb on the rice and the waiting diners quickly got stuck into the meal.

The comments ranged from “very good� to “tasty�. The curry had a good spice kick to it and was very well received.

Overall the curry received an excellent rating of 7.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of medium to hot.

As I said before, I needed to add some hot water to allow for the simmering to happen without burning the curry. Maybe I had the heat turned up too high. But all of the water that I had added was absorbed into the curry by the time that it was cooked. I have changed the recipe so that it has the hot water as an extra ingredient – I’m sure that the submitter, J Baynes, won’t mind this small change to the recipe.

Hi, Ray here again.

I was looking through the recipes on the Curry Focus website and saw that there was one for Curried Sausages.

I love sausages and so decided to try out the very simple recipe.

I boiled up the sausages, let them cool and then removed the skins. This was about the most complicated part of the recipe.

I prepared the beef stock and the onions and apple and then started the cooking.

The recipe is pretty easy to follow and there were no surprises or problems.

I served up the curried sausages on rice to the waiting diners.

And the final verdict? Pretty bland. There was not much spice heat to the meal. Everything was cooked OK but it was just bland. In fact, it even looked bland and maybe some colour would have helped.

And the portions were pretty big. There were 3 sausages each and that is a lot. I think the curry would easily have served 6 people, rather than 4.

So, overall, the meal received an average rating of 5.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of very mild.

I must admit that this was a disappointing meal, especially as I like sausages so much.

If you do try the recipe, then maybe you should spice it up a bit with a couple of teaspoons of garam masala and a teaspoon of cumin – the spices could be stir-fried in the butter for a minute before adding the onions, apple and curry powder. And maybe some grated fresh ginger root. And it wouldn’t do any harm to throw in a bell pepper (red or green) and garnish with coriander to give a bit of colour.

Restaurant nominations for the 2008 British Curry Awards closed on 21st July and the gala awards ceremony will be held on Sunday 19th October at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London in front of an audience of more than 1,000 people.

The awards ceremony is sure to be an evening for the curry industry not to miss with great food and live entertainment as well as the awards for the best restaurants around Britain.

Details of the finalists will be released soon and we’ll let you know them as soon as possible.