First Best Chicken Curry

Simple ...easy..Chicken Curry

Technically this is my second chicken curry. The first time I made it was in Bangalore. The only witness to the taste and make of the curry was Mr.Manyam Tej and myself. So not many can vouch for it and I doubt Manyam would give favorable review. Also I wasn't that satisfied with the output. It was slightly over burnt as the pieces were too large. Of course, the recipe again was from my mom. :)

This time around , in Paris, I got the chance to put into full force my culinary skills along with the super expert guidance of my mom. The result to say the least is super duper delicious..Just goes yummmmm......

Actually we were limited by so many factors, no ginger garlic paste, no cooker, no lemon which are considered essential ingredients. But I have realized moms are the greatest when it comes to do cooking with anything at their disposal. All you need to do is, for future reference, call your mom list out the ingredients you have, the time constraints, the cutlery, and they will tell you what to do in a jiffy.

Ok, here goes the recipe as given by mom 'word to word' (with slight alteration in formatting) -

Note: Steps 11 and 12 ought to be performed in sequence after Step 5. I had forgotten it.

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Hi kar,

Since you don't have the basic ginger garlic paste the curry may not taste great. If possible get some garlic and ginger,lemon,tomatoes from the mall. In my language basic ingredients are onions,garlic,ginger,lemons, you must have them for your non veg curries.

Ok do the following as soon as you reach the house.

1. First take out the chicken frm fridge and keep it outside.
2. You finely chop 2-3 onions.
3. Add oil in a frying pan-5-6 spoons,
4. Add 6-8 menthulu,avalu,jeera and if you have pepper add crushed 7-8 of them
5. After they splutter add the finely chopped onions, fry them till they bit brown. remember this forms the gravy. So you can add more or less,
6. After 7-8 min of frying add turmeric,chilly powder and then the chopped chicken pieces.
7. Fry for sometime and then add little water , not a lot . Keep it cover for 15 minutes.
8. Then once it is 3/4 cooked, taste the gravy.
9. If you feel it is little sappaga (bland) then add some red chilly powder. Now you add that briyani powder one and half spoon.
10. Then let it simmer for another 15minutes.
11. In case you get ginger and garlic then just crush 3-4 pods of garlic and a small bit of ginger crushed. You add them when onions are fried along with chilly powder. In the end squeeze lemon.
12. If you get tomatoes then you can add after frying onions and before adding red chillies, (if you don't get those don't worry).
13. You can add little bit of cobara podi (its a powder mixture of dry coconut, salt, chilli powder, heated in oil) which I have sent. It may give some good flavour, add that when chicken is 3/4 cooked

ok bye

amma

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My Sweetest and most lovable mom :)

Ingredients -

Chicken - 500gms

Onions - 4 Finely Chopped

Tomatoes - 2

Avalu - 1/2 Spoon

Jilakara - 1 Spoon

Chilli Powder - 1 1/2 Spoon

Biryani Powder - 1 1/2 Spoon

Ginger Garlic Paste - 1 Spoon

Even after such nice and details explanations I screwed it up. Here are the mistakes I did. Problem is I read these instructions 1 by 1. Fact of the matter is I did have tomatoes, paste of ginger and garlic (freshly made by yours truly by crushing and grinding them hard putting them under a flat surface , smashing them with a ladle) but did not use them. I had nicely cut onions, ginger-garlic, tomatoes and had them ready. I kept doing as it was specified in the above steps only to realize that sequence had broken and somewhere I lost the track. Anyways the final output has come excellent and we finished the whole gravy in just half an hour watching the wonderful movie - 'Ala Modalaindi'.

I am now very much confident of making this curry again and much more delicious. I realized I had put too much water instead of good number of onions. The trick of the trade always is onions form the base of the gravy. It ought to be properly cooked. Until the next best curry..Ciao!

Here goes the photos -

Chicken..of course..

Cumin seeds, Jilakara

Ginger Garlic Human Made Paste...Sadly unused

Tomatoes..another unused by product

Onions..the most important ingredient of all