Hi Mamta! Thank you so much for the wonderful information here. I have asked questions a couple of times in the past and now I want to tell you about a success I had this week.

I had about 3.5 pounds (about 1.5kg) of chicken I wanted to cook. I used your basic curry #1 and multiplied the ingredients by 3.5 (since the recipe says it's for 1 pound). Once I chopped up all of my onions I realized that my onions must be much bigger than the medium called for in the recipe! I had a LOT of onions! So I decided to increase the amounts of the other ingredients to compensate. I think I ended up making 5 times the original recipe in total.

I have a very nice curry powder from Penzey's Spices, so I used that in place of the individual spices, as you instructed. I also used some bay leaf and cinnamon stick in the oil at the beginning.

Then I cooked and cooked and cooked, waiting for the oil to separate from the mass. I am still not 100% sure if it completely happened, but it looked very good.

Then I put a layer of paste in the bottom of my slow cooker (Crockpot), and added some raw boneless skinless chicken thighs. I added another layer of paste, then another layer of chicken, and one more layer of paste. On went the lid and I cooked it on the low setting for about 6 or 7 hours.

Oh, it was so fantastic! The gravy was very plentiful. I took out the chicken and kept it warm. Then I poured my gravy into a pot and set it to simmer for a while to thicken it (I like it very thick!). There was still too much liquid for my taste so I spooned quite a bit off of the top and put it into a jar. I served the gravy over the chicken and served it with basmati rice and green beans and some mango chutney. I have 2-year-old twin boys and they loved it too! The gravy became incredibly flavorful from the long cooking in the chicken juices.

I put the leftover gravy into a jar. Today I had some leftover rice, so I spooned some of the gravy over it and had it for lunch. I had some heavily strained yogurt (I make my own) from this morning so I added a nice spoonful of it too. Ahhh heaven!

I had a lot of the original paste left, so I put it in jars and put them in the fridge to use another day. I know I won't be able to use it all in one week (my husband is from the American South and not at all accustomed to eating "exotic" things like curry, so I prepare these things a little at a time, once in a while to get him used to them!), so I am going to freeze the remainder of the paste.

Thank you again for the wonderful recipes and for always taking the time to answer questions!

Jenny

Raleigh, North Carolina

U.S.A.

How very lovely to hear from you, thank you from all of us here for letting us know how much you enjoyed our recipe!

Chicken curry (and the gravy) freeze really well, so you can always do that if you have too much sauce again next time. As you say, it's great over rice and I wonder whether you could cook some potatoes in it for a filling curry soup mish mash?

Good to know about your slow cooker variation too.

:-)

What a lovely post Jenny, Thank you for taking the trouble to write in. I am glad your curry came out well.

Restaurant curries often have a lot of gravy, compared to home made ones. Onions and tomatoes are cheaper than meat/chicken etc. and gravy makes a curry go a lot farther. You can do exactly what you did, or keep it in the fridge or freezer for use later on, either as it is or by adding other things to it. It is the Basic Curry sauce after all :-).

"Then I cooked and cooked and cooked, waiting for the oil to separate from the mass. I am still not 100% sure if it completely happened, but it looked very good.

If less oil is used, it is difficult to see a clear separation of oil. On the Basic Curry sauce recipe, in the first composite picture, see the middle one, the one says Curry Sauce without whole spices. You will see that it is looking shiny and the oil is beginning to separate at the edges. That is when it is ready.

Well done, Jenny! Thanks for sharing!

You should also have a go at the individual spices: it's such fun to mix different spices, and to have a proper spice rack. We had Anglo-Indian guests here, in our home in the south of France, who were amazed to see almost every spice used in Indian cookery (the French aren't that keen on spices, as a whole).

By the way, I've noticed that my American friends often don't distinguish between herbs and spices, referring to both as spices, and that includes a real foodie friend of mine at Berkeley University in California who can really cook well.

Is that generally true in the US?

He also told me that he didn't know the word 'offal', and that his fellow Americans call that 'innards'.

Phil

LOL Phil - yes, we do tend to say "spices" to mean all herbs & spices. There are purists, of course, but everyone here in the States knows what you mean if you refer to parsley as a spice.

I have a pretty extensive herb/spice rack (compared to everyone I know - you may have many more!). I buy all of my stuff from Penzey's and right now have 45-50 different items, not including blends and extracts. I have to admit that looking back at the curry #1 recipe, I do indeed have all of the ingredients (including garam masala) to follow the recipe, with the exception of cumin seeds. I have cumin powder. That said, I really do like the Penzey's curry powder. Next time I will use just the spices Mamta lists. :-)

The one I buy is listed as "sweet" curry, and doesn't have much heat. I love hot, hot, hot but my husband and kids are not as heat-loving as I am. The ingredients (and I don't know the proportions) are:

turmeric, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, ginger, nutmeg, fennel, cinnamon, white pepper, cardamom, cloves, black pepper and cayenne pepper. They say it's a Southwestern style.

As for offal - I do know what that means (I'd say "awful" LOL) but we do generally call it innards when talking specifically about the intestines. We call the other stuff organ meat - kidney, liver, heart...

Unless, of course, you are the chef at a very fancy restaurant and want to justify charging $45 for a plate of innards. Then you call it "offal" ! hehehe

I suppose there are people all over the States who would use all of those items, but I think the innards are mostly the domain of folks in the Southern/Southeastern part of this country. I'm not crazy about it at all. I find the texture just too gummy.

Hi Jenny

Sorry: didn't realise you had all those spices.

re cumin seeds, and pretty much any other spices, I much prefer to buy them whole, and grind each time. I find that ground spices quickly lose their taste.

Interesting re 'innards', and the regional variation in tastes you mention. I have mixed feelings about offal (yes, in most American accents , 'offal' and 'awful' are homophones). I hated cow's liver when I was a boy in Scotland: it was over-cooked an leathery. But I eat goose liver, in pat?s. I also like it when I buy saddle of rabbit and find the kidney in there: not too string a taste.

Talking of expensive meals in restaurants: we once paid a THOUSAND dollars for dinner at Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia! Four adults, two kids. The bill came to 880, but we had to tip! We're not rich folks, so that was a blow. We'd invited the American friends we were staying with. They were embarrassed, because they were seriously rich, having made a fortune on Wall Street. they offered to payn their share, but we declined, because we'd invited them.

We've kept the bill! I ran into the French owner as we were leaving the restaurant. he took me for one of his waiters, and told me to get a move on, because there were lots of customers in that Saturday night. I said 'Yeah, I know: I'm one of them!'

Phil

"Talking of expensive meals in restaurants: we once paid a THOUSAND dollars for dinner at Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia! Four adults, two kids. The bill came to 880, but we had to tip! We're not rich folks, so that was a blow. We'd invited the American friends we were staying with. They were embarrassed, because they were seriously rich, having made a fortune on Wall Street. they offered to payn their share, but we declined, because we'd invited them."

Oops, that must have been very annoying!

Gobsmacked!

Phil

Used Mamta's 'basic curry sauce recipe' for first time yesterday to make a chicken curry and it worked extremely well. As you do, I used what I had in and so added some creamed coconut and used passata instead of fresh/tinned tomatoes. It gave a rich orange coloured sauce which was delicious. I do not know if it was because I used passata but I did not see any separation of the oil even though I simmered it for quite a while. However it was definitely not oily and the five clean plates at the end of the meal prove how good the recipe was. The only problem was that as it was the first time of doing 'it' I only made one 'portion', a mistake I will rectify in the future.

I look forward to adapting the recipe for different meats/fish and seeing what variations I can come up with.

Does anyone have any suggestions/variations to produce the classic styles e.g. korma, dupiaza, jalfrezi, rogan josh etc.(apologies for my spelling of these dishes I am sure to have got at least one wrong).

The dish I made was quite tomato rich .... would it become more rogan josh type if I just reduced the amount of tomatoes or does it depend on the spice mix?

Sativum.

"as we were leaving the restaurant. he took me for one of his waiters, and told me to get a move on"..............LOL!!!