Creamy chicken and cashew curry

My cousin LOVES butter chicken. In fact, as part of my payment plan for her giving me her Kings of Leon tickets, butter chicken and lasagne are the accepted currency. I made her a huge lasagne for when she had some friends coming over, which I'm told she LOVED. She also passed it off as her own, so it was lucky that the friends coming over were her boyfriends, not hers - they would have seen straight through that lie!

This time though my sister organised for us to have a pot luck -  she would being entree, I would make the mains and my cousin would bring dessert. So I decided it had better be butter chicken, as she'd been asking for it for a while, and I still hadn't made it. I used a recipe from taste.com.au and while the recipe was easy, using accessable ingredients and really tasty - a butter chicken it was not. That's why I've not labelled this post as butter chicken, it just didn't taste like it, as good as it was!

This was a delicious, mild curry, I liked the inclusion of ground cashews to thicken the sauce, which is the traditional thickening agent used in butter chicken. It's creamy and rich, and it's easy to increase portions to feed a crowd. I didn't add any chilli to this one, as my family are chilli-phobes, but it would be great with a hit of heat to warm the richness of the sauce.

Next time I think I will change this recipe. The way it is now is great for a quick meal to serve a family or friends when you haven't got loads of time (unless you follow the recipe which tells you to marinate the chicken overnight!). I think this sauce would benefit from being cooked with chicken frames to give them flavour - but grilling the marinated chicken and adding it towards the end of cooking to give more depth of flavour.

Don't be put off by the long list of ingredients - if you already cook curries, you should have most of this in the cupboard anyway!

Creamy chicken and cashew curry
Serves 4 with leftovers

Ingredients
1/2 cup natural yoghurt
1 tbs lemon juice
2 tsp turmeric
3 tsp garam masala
1 tsp chilli powder
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp grated fresh ginger
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1.5kg chicken thigh fillets, chopped
125g cashews, roasted
60g unsalted butter
1 tbs sunflower oil
1 onion, finely chopped/blitzed
1 tsp ground cardamom
1 cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
2 tsp sweet paprika
425g can tomato puree*
3/4 cup chicken stock
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 cup thickened cream

Serve with Turban Chopsticks Royal Festival Biriyani and naan breads.

Method

1) Combine yoghurt, lemon juice, turmeric, garam masala, chilli, cumin, ginger and garlic in a bowl. Add chicken and stir well. Cover and refrigerate overnight (This is optional, the curry is fine if you do it as far in advance as possible - I marinated it for about 30mins).

2) Place cashews in a food processor. Process until finely ground, and set aside. Since you have the FP out, blitz the onions too.

3) Heat the butter and oil in a pan over medium heat. Add the onion, cardamom, cinnamon and bay leaves and cook until the onion starts to soften. Reduce heat to low, then add chicken and marinade, paprika, tomato puree, tomato paste, half the cashew powder and stock. Simmer for 15 minutes. Stir in cream and cook for a further 10 minutes. Check the sauce, and if it is too runny add more of the cashew powder, and reduce it down a little further.

4) Garnish with whole cashews, chopped coriander (if you don't hate it like I do!) and serve with Turban Chopsticks biriyani.

Tomato and cumin soup - Movida Rustica

As a part of the Fitness for Foodies course, they gave us a meal planner that I've found really helpful. It's made me more organised and able to try some recipes from books I've been wanting to get stuck into, because I've been able to buy everything I need for each recipe in advance, on the weekend! There is now less trips to the shops when I realise I haven't got this or that, to make a recipe. It's made life much easier!

One of the books I've wanted to try was Movida Rustica by Frank Camorra and Richard Cornish. I've bookmarked quite a few recipes, and last week I tried a couple. One of them was this tomato and cumin soup, which I chose because it looked like an easy midweek meal, and we had made something similar before and enjoyed it. A twist in its serving, is the inclusion of an egg, poached in the soup just before you dish it up. 

This was such an easy meal to prepare, with few ingredients. It lived up to my expectation of being an easy midweek meal, but exceeded my expectations in flavour. This was a lovely soup, so light and full of flavour, but when you cracked open the poached egg and let the yolk be swirled through the soup, it became silky and gorgeous. The egg made this soup, without it, it is a tasty tomato soup flavoured with cumin and sweet red peppers. But with the egg, it's something much more special. It's simple and healthy, and it's deliciousness is enhanced by quality ingredients - you have nothing to hide behind when you create something so simple. I blended mine, which added to the smoothness, but it would equally as good were it left chunky as rustic, like the book intended.

Ingredients

50ml olive oil

1 red onion roughly chopped

1 red pepper (capsicum) seeded and roughly chopped

2 garlic cloves, finely sliced

1 kg ripe tomatoes

1 tsp cumin seeds, roasted and ground

2 tsp caster sugar

2 tsp sweet smoked paprika

2 tsp fine sea salt

6 eggs

Method

1. Score a cross in the base of each tomato, place in a heatproof bowl and cover with boiling water. Leave for 30 seconds then transfer to cold water and peel the skin away from the cross. Cut the tomatoes in half and scoop out the seeds. (Alternatively you can cheat and use canned tomatoes).

2. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and a pinch of salt and cook for 5 mins or until soft and translucent. Add the capsicum and garlic and reduce the heat to low. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally for 40 mins or until the mixture has a jam like consistency.

3. Stir in the tomatoes and 700ml of water and simmer for 25 mins or until the mixture has a soupy consistency. Add the sugar, 1 1/2 tsps paprika and the sea salt and mix well.

4. Crack the eggs, one at a time into a cup, then gently slide them into the soup around the edges. Cover and simmer gently for 6 mins.

5. Carefully divide the cooked eggs and soup among bowls and sprinkle with the remaining paprika.

This should serve six, but I made it for just 2 of us, and we took leftovers to work the next day!