Friday 6 March - Chettinad Chicken and Coconut Prawn Curry

A hunt for something different for our Friday curry session, and I found a couple of recipes in the Rick Stein India book - Chettinad Chicken, and a coconut prawn curry.
We had to find some curry leaves, something I've never used before - they smelled amazing!

For the chicken dish, we used breast, rather than the thighs specified in the recipe. The recipe started with grinding up a selection of spices to a powder - I keep a separate coffee grinder to do this, as we make a lot of curry!

We were unable to source dagarful, so used some additional cinnamon in the base of the curry as recommended in the recipe. The cinnamon sticks were fried with fennel seeds

 

Then onions and curry leaves were added, before adding the chicken, ground spices, salt, sugar and some water, and cooking until fairly dry.

 The prawn curry started with Indian bay leaves and onions, then a onion,garlic and ginger paste was added along with some chilli and turmeric

At this stage we should have added raw prawns and coconut milk, but I added the coconut, left the sauce to cook, and then popped the prawns in 5 minutes before we wanted to eat.

We served this with garlic rice - I fried slices of garlic in ghee until golden, then popped these into my rice cooker, along with soaked basmati rice, a couple of cardamom pods, cloves and a cinnamon stick, then left to cook in the normal way.

We served along with some raita, and also some frozen parathas which I cook with a little ghee.