Music To My Mouth

Passport & Plate - Sleeper Hit Chicken Curry with Almonds

Canada | Friday, March 6, 2015 | 5 photos

Ingredients
2 cups onions, sliced thinly
3 Tbsp of garlic, minced
2 inches of fresh ginger, grated
1/4 cup ghee (clarified butter)
2 thin green chilis, seeded and chopped

3lbs chicken, skinned, and cut into parts
2 cups roughly chopped fresh tomatoes
1 cup yogurt
1-2 cups water

1 Tbsp garam masala *
2 cinnamon sticks
1 Tbsp salt
½ tsp black pepper
1 Tbsp ground coriander
½ tsp ground cayenne pepper
1 tsp turmeric
1 Tbsp freshly ground cumin

For Garnish
½ cup fresh coriander leaves
¼ cup slivered almonds, toasted

For Garam Masala

½ tsp whole cloves
5 pods of black cardamom, shells removed
½ Tbsp cinnamon
3 Tbsp cumin seeds

 

How to prepare this recipe
Heat Ghee in heavy-bottomed pot. Brown the onions with the two cinnamon sticks, stirring constantly until onions have released most of their moisture and are a deep, mahogany brown, about 15 minutes.

Add garlic, ginger and chilis and stir for another 2 minutes.

Add the tomatoes and spices and stir over high heat until the oil begins to separate from the paste, about 5 minutes. Remove cinnamon sticks.

Add the chicken pieces, and stir into the masala paste for about 10 minutes. Chicken should look cooked on the outside.

Add cup of yogurt and 1 cup of water. There should be a good amount of liquid surrounding the chicken, but not immersing it. Add more water if there is not enough.

Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and cook on low heat, checking periodically. Curry should cook for about 15-25 minutes. Chicken is done when thighs are no longer pink.

Cool curry completely and remove bones from the meat.

Reheat, and serve with fresh coriander leaves and slivered almonds sprinkled immediately prior to eating.

Curry best enjoyed with Nan or rice and yogurt on the side for those who have gentle taste-buds like I did as a child!

 

The story behind this recipe
I was that kid. That kid who incessantly waves their hand in front of their mouth while whining, “too spicy!” It’s not such an uncommon hue and cry from a child, really, except that my parents had immigrated from Pakistan and my mother was a superb cook, to boot! I still remember the tower of yogurt that topped every bowl of my mother’s curry, meant to dull all of the layers of taste she had painstakingly created.

When I left Toronto for McGill University in Montreal, my mother typed out a few of her favourite recipes for me to have. Her instincts were spot-on though, I had caught the cooking, and more importantly, eating bug. As I left to pursue my degree in opera, with the music of Verdi and Mozart swimming around in my head, my recipe favourites were roasted meats laced with rosemary and sea salt and the pastel splendour of layer cakes. Europe defined my aesthetic, both musically and gastronomically. It was exotic, and my mother’s sunset array of spice jars was not.

Maybe you have to leave home to really crave it. Maybe you need enough space around it to walk back into it on your own terms. Somewhere along the way, my ears were drawn into the haunting music of Nusrat Fateh-Ali Khan, Pakistan’s superstar qawwali singer, and I found myself thumbing through piles of old essays to unearth my mother’s chicken curry recipe. I remembered my mother’s constant reminder that the onions are not browned, so much as “blacked”, that the waiting game for the oil to separate from the masala paste seems futile until, all of a sudden, it isn’t.

This recipe is much like the opera arias I first learned as a young singer. You’ve known it for so long, but it is still revealing itself to you. Even thought I could cook this curry with my eyes closed, I still keep the old, crinkled copy out on the cutting board while I’m chopping the onions and roasting the spices. Its physical presence reminds me how I almost passed it all by, how the sleeper hit was almost just a sleeper, between my college papers.