Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

After the disappointing results from the last few weeks of recipe reviews, I decided that I needed a sure-fire winner. And there it was, lurking amongst the Curry Focus recipes. It was shining like a beacon – the Malay Beef Stew.

It had the basic ingredients that have always given me good results – beef, potato and spices.

And even though it was called a stew, it seemed to be a pretty good curry.

I went shopping for the ingredients and found everything easily enough. The one thing that surprised me was the high cost of lemon grass – it was almost the same price as the beef.

Anyway, I found everything easily enough.

I calculated how long it would take to make the curry and headed to the kitchen a couple of hours before the scheduled start time for dinner.

I got the potatoes peeled and cut up while the pan of water was coming to the boil and the potatoes were parboiled before I knew it.

As is often the case with the Curry Focus recipes, the recipe was pretty straightforward and easy enough to follow.

The dinner guests arrived just as I was adding the potatoes to the curry and pretty soon the rice was cooking as well.

I heated up a few poppadoms (bought from a shop, not made by myself) and soon served up the Malay Beef Stew on a bed of basmati rice.

This is a simply stunning curry. The beef was lovely and tender and the whole curry had a delicious taste. I reckon that you need to go a long way to beat a beef and potato curry.

The dinner guests agreed with me and the curry received an excellent rating of 8.5 out of 10 with a spice rating of hot.

You really must try this recipe if you like a spicy beef curry – it’s easy to make and has a great taste.

In last month’s newsletter, we mentioned that last year saw a big increase in visitors over the previous year.

We received a couple of emails asking where the visitors came from so we did a bit of investigating.

Some 79% of you were from the UK and just over 93% were from the main English speaking countries (UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Ireland).

Not surprisingly, most UK visitors were from London (with just under 30% of the UK visitors) with Birmingham coming second with just under 4% of visitors.

And just under 200 locations in the UK had a single visitor to the site from such diverse places as Morecambe, Kilwinning, Flint, Inverurie, Herne Bay and Bakewell.

The top 10 countries for visitors, in order, were UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Ireland, France, Spain, India and Germany.

Altogether, we welcomed visitors from 164 different countries and territories – pretty much the whole of the world except for around 6 South American countries, 10 Asian countries and a belt of countries across the poorest part of Africa.

We had to do a bit of searching for some of the more less known parts of the world to find out where they are (at least, less known to us). Thank you Turks and Caicos Islands (in the West Indies) for visiting 3 times. And cheers Aruba (also in the Caribbean) for dropping by twice. Svalbard and Jan Mayen (territories of Norway) had a single quick look, as did the Aland Islands (a mixed up place that is administered by Finland but where the main language is Swedish).

We had a lot of fun searching these smaller parts of the world and learnt a bit about their history from the internet.

We are only a few weeks into 2009 and have already had visitors from 5 new countries!!! Who are they? We’ll let you know at the end of the year.

We hope you all keep dropping by to check out the latest recipes and news.

Tell your friends about us. Spread the word.

Latest Articles

Lamb Rogan Josh Recipe #2 Review
Jims Beef Curry Recipe Review
Keema Mattar Recipe Review
Malaysian Chicken Curry Recipe Review
The Search For A New Frying Pan
Pumpkin Curry Recipe Review
Peshwari Naan Recipe Review

Top 5 recipes for last month

1 Chicken Biryani
2 Chicken Bhuna
3 Easy Chicken Curry
4 Chicken Jalfrezi
5 Mushroom 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.

Scanning the list of recipes on the Curry Focus website, I spotted a simple one for Peshwari Naan. My girlfriend loves Peshwari Naan so making this recipe would make me more popular (probably only for 5 minutes!!) as well as supplying some yummy food.

As with most bread recipes, there is a lot of kneading and rolling and experimentation.

I mixed up the dough and left it for a good hour – the 20 minutes in the recipe seemed just a bit too short.

I chopped up the raisins and used my trusty rolling pin (an empty wine bottle) to crush the nuts.

From then on it was a matter of rolling, adding the nut mixture and then rolling again.

I had already preheated the oven so in went the first naan. It didn’t look cooked after 10 minutes so I let it go for longer. In fact I let it bake for 16 minutes before pulling it out of the oven. It was disappointing. It was a lot thicker than the peshwari naans that get served in the curry restaurants. And it was crunchy and overcooked. Probably not surprising after having been in the over for 16 minutes. Although I didn’t like the naan, the birds out in the garden loved it.

I rolled the second naan out a bit thinner and put it into the oven. This time I only baked it for 12 minutes before pulling it out. The naan was thinner than the first one and had a nicer taste but it was still a bit crunchy at the edges. Once again most of the naan went out to the birds.

Dinner time was getting close now so the third naan went in, was baked for 10 minutes and then pulled out again. This was the best naan of the lot although I wouldn’t rave about it. It was a dry.

I baked the fourth naan whilst eating a curry and it was ready after 10 minutes. It was a bit like the third but not quite as good – I don’t know why.

The dinner guests tried the naan and it received very mixed reviews. One person loved it and another hated it. Generally it was felt that there were too many nuts and not enough raisins. And the naan was too dry. Maybe it needs more oil rubbed on it before it goes into the oven.

So it was a pretty mixed bag of reviews. And the range of scores was the widest I’d seen so far, ranging from 7.5 down to 4. Overall, the naan received a rating of 5.5 with a spice rating of “none� (there were no spices in the recipe).

I think that I will try the recipe again in the future but will roll the naan out thinner, use more oil and have mostly raisins rather than nuts in the filling.

Let me know how you get on with this recipe or if you have any tips that might make it work out better.

Hi, Ray here again.

It’s time to try out another of the recipes on the Curry Focus website. This time I decided to try the Pumpkin Curry for two reasons. Firstly, it looked easy to make. Secondly, it looked unusual because it had coconut in it. I don’t think that I’ve ever tried a vegetarian curry with coconut in it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Now this is really an amazingly easy recipe to follow.

And the cooking time is only about 15 minutes.

About the only dodgy moment I had was when I was chopping up the pumpkin and I just missed slicing into a finger by a fraction. Got to be careful with those really sharp knives.

With such a short cooking time, I prepared the ingredients and waited until the dinner guests arrived before starting to cook.

The curry was ready in double quick time and I served it up on basmati rice.

And how was it? Well, it was more like a soup than a curry. And the coconut taste was overpowering – you couldn’t taste the pumpkin.

And it was very mild – much too mild for my taste.

It wasn’t one of the most popular curries that I’ve made and only got an average score of 5.5 with, as I said earlier, a heat rating of mild.

Personally, I didn’t like this curry. There was far too much coconut and it was far too mild.

I do like pumpkin soup so won’t give up on pumpkin curry entirely. I’ll be watching out to see if a new pumpkin curry recipe appears on the website.

After 14 years of excellent service, my trusty frying pan was on its last legs. It had recently become a bit scratched and was showing the first signs of rust.

I cook most of my curries in this frying pan and it was sad to see it was on the way out.

Rather than be despondent, I thought that this would give me a chance to modernise. Surely there has been a lot of progress in kitchen utensils in the last 14 years?

So Saturday morning found me wandering around the kitchen supplies sections of a couple of department stores.

I was at first amazed at how many electric appliances had entered the kitchen. There was more of a range of electric frying pans and electric woks than the non-electric type. The electric versions were more expensive than the non-electric type, usually more than double the price.

But I have an aversion to such electric products. They have to be washed and can’t just be put into the dishwasher, because of the electric connectors. So they have to be washed carefully to keep the electric connectors dry. I assume that this is the case. Maybe I’m wrong. But in my mind, electricity and water don’t mix.

Passing by the electric frying pans and woks, I saw a few different models of slow cookers that looked interesting. But I wasn’t looking for slow cookers. I wanted a good frying pan.

And I was in for a disappointment here. None of the non-electric frying pans came with lids. I could buy lids separately but these lids were flimsy looking affairs and wouldn’t be an integral part of the frying pan. My frying pan has a lid that fits snugly around the edge and the lid has a release valve that lets steam escape if I open the valve.

And most of the frying pans were pretty flimsy affairs. All of the brands on sale were made in China.

I wanted something more substantial than those on offer and didn’t see why I should have to accept second best.

So I headed back home and looked at the bottom of my trusty frying pan and found the brand name. A few minutes on the internet quickly found the manufacturer’s website and an email was on the way asking for a list of retailers who stock their brand.

I just know that I’m going to end up with a twin of the frying pan that I’ve got although the new pan will obviously be a lot shinier and, I’m sure, a lot more expensive than the one that I’ve got.

But you have to pay for quality.

Hi, Ray here again.

The weekend has rolled around again and so it’s time to try out one of those great Curry Focus website recipes.

I haven’t had a chicken curry for a while and I scanned through the list of chicken recipes until I found the Malaysian Chicken Curry recipe. I haven’t had a Malaysian curry for a long time – too long.

All of the expected ingredients were in the recipe but I did have trouble with one. I couldn’t find Malaysian curry paste anywhere. I tried all of my usual shops and even rang a couple of places to see if they had any. No luck. In the end, I compromised and bought a jar of Thai curry paste.

The recipe said to use chicken thighs but didn’t say whether they were to be boneless or skinless. In the end I went for skinless chicken thighs with the bones.

The recipe itself is pretty easy to follow.

I prepared all of the ingredients, including making the paste, before starting to cook the curry.

I saw that it would take about 45-50 minutes to do the cooking and I started to cook the curry half an hour before the dinner guests were due to arrive.

As I said before, it’s a pretty simple curry to make and there weren’t any problems during the cooking.

I didn’t know it but the dinner guests were running late – not like them to be late for a curry tasting. Luckily one of them had a mobile phone and I was told they would arrive for the scheduled meal start time – nothing had happened to them, they were just running late.

So I started the rice about 15 minutes before it was needed and finished cooking the curry.

Just as the microwave finished cooking the rice, the dinner guests arrived. Talk about leaving it to the last moment!!

I served up the Malaysian chicken curry and it was well received.

The curry had a lovely, delicate taste. I think I put too much coriander into the curry because the coriander flavour was definitely a bit too strong. There was a fair amount of liquid in the curry, maybe the heat should have been a bit higher to make it reduce more.

The curry received an average rating of 6 out of 10 with a heat rating of “mild to medium�.

Maybe the curry would have been better if I had been able to find some Malaysian curry paste. I’ll need to find some for next time.