Chicken curry recipe

This recipe uses a few spices that can be hard to get hold of, but your local ethnic foods store should be able to help you out. If you want to recreate those authentic indian restaurant tastes, you need to look a bit further than your local supermarket for some of the ingredients.

This recipe uses a lot of spinach, which can be expensive to buy. But spinach is easy to grow. See growing spinach in our gardening section.

Ingredients

Stage 1:

• 300-400g chicken
• 1 Tbsp butter
• One medium onion
• One Tbsp grated ginger root
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2-4 chopped chilies or 2-4 tsp dried chili flakes
• 1 ½ tsp turmeric powder
• 2 black cardamom pods, slightly crushed
• 5 cloves
• 1 cinnamon stick or ¼ tsp cinnamon powder
• 1 tsp coriander powder
• ½ tsp cumin powder
• ½ tsp fenugreek powder

Stage 2:

• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar or honey
• 2 Tbsp flour
• ¼ cup tomato sauce
• One 400ml can coconut cream
• About 50g spinach

Method

Cut the chicken into cubes and set aside. Fry stage 1 ingredients in a heavy-bottomed pan over a medium heat for 5-10 minutes. Add chicken and fry until meat is sealed (about another 10 minutes on medium heat).

Combine stage 2 ingredients in a blender. Blend until the spinach is very fine (not too many large chunks left). It is important to get the spinach as fine as possible so blend another 10-20 seconds for good measure.

Add the mixture from the blender to the pan with the chicken and spices. Simmer on a low heat for 20-30 minutes. It is important not to let the mixture boil too much or the coconut cream will go oily.

Remove the cinnamon stick and cardamom pods (if you can find them) before serving.

Serve with rice.

The spices and meat frying in the pan

The blended spinach and coconut cream mixture

Just after combining all the ingredients

20 minutes later. Ready to serve.

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