Friday Night Curry
For my birthday last year I was lucky enough to be given a subscription to The Spicery, an amazing monthly delivery of spice kits to create an exciting recipe with. You can go online each month to see what the choices for your next box are, but I tend to stick with the 'Discoverer' boxes, which are usually interesting dishes from India or South-East Asia. This month my box was for Chicken Tikka (yum!) and some accompaniments, which is screaming out for a Friday night curry and film night, so I set about it.
Each kit tells you how long the prep and cooking will take and if I'm honest they do usually take AGES - but are worth the wait. However, this recipe was a super speedy hour or so and one you could easily make on a rushed week night. The downside of The Spicery kits is that the spice blends mostly come pre-made, so you don't always know what is in them and it can make it hard to recreate. Chicken Tikka is pretty easy though, so you can make a good guess at blending ground coriander, cumin, chilli etc for yourself to marinate the chicken in; or you could really cheat and buy a supermarket tikka garam masala type thing.
Anyway, you marinate the chicken (any cut will work but I used thigh fillets as they're my fave) in the spice blend, some natural yoghurt and a good squeeze of lemon for half an hour or so and then put it in a very hot oven / grill or bbq to cook. The Spicery wanted me to make a tamarind chutney to go with it, which involves just their spice blend, some sugar and vinegar. Sounds hard, but isn't. The Spicery recipes come with instructions like "boil until you have a thick sauce that leaves a trail when you stir a spoon through it" - they really are incredibly simple to do and you do not need to have any previous cooking knowledge, so I'd recommend the kits if you're looking to learn to cook. I digress. They also required me to make a raita, which was just yoghurt and some little spices to stir through. You could always do an easy yoghurt/mint/cucumber combo though with some salt. Finally, there was a little salad of tomato, onion, cucumber and coriander with some chaat spices. I couldn't make the fancy onion ring bhajis they suggested due to a complete lack of cooking oil but I had some leftover naans (NOT homemade, breads are one of the things I am appalling at making) and obviously we had it with cauliflower rice: standard.
So there we are, a very simple Friday night curry. And probably for a third of the calories of a takeaway.