Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Tuesday night - Curry story

A few days ago, my friend in Canada mentioned that he was making chicken curry. It's not something I regularly make myself, but I thought I'd give it a try. Over the weekend, they had boneless, skinless chicken breasts on sale at Publix and I bought three packages and froze two. Tonight I decided to make the curry. Last night I had sliced the breasts thin and marinated them in the juice of two limes, some chopped onion, garlic, sea salt, a little oil, and some chicken broth.

Tonight I put all that in a big frying pan and started simmering it, after adding a can of V-8 (my "Joy of Cooking" recipe calls for stewed tomatoes) and spices (curry powder, along with some cumin, ground cloves, ground ginger and mustard seed). After simmering 20 minutes, it was pretty much done and the flavor was excellent. It was a little soupy, however, so I removed the chicken and boiled down the juice a bit, then added a couple of tablespoons of plain yogurt. Tasted even better. I could have added the chicken back at that point and it would have been fine, but I decided to thicken it up a bit with some gravy flour (Wondra).

As I was whisking the flour in, I noticed dark specks appearing in my sauce. I was horrified. There were dead weevils in the flour! (I'd never had those at this place before.) So I had to dump all that wonderful sauce down the drain. What a pisser. And it was so good. I'll definitely make it again. And it's simple. (Since it almost turned out good, I wrote down the recipe.) Meanwhile I'll buy some more flour and keep it in the fridge.

The chicken is still good, of course. I'll have to eat that dry. It's tasty, though, and tender. Marinating it first was a good idea.

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