The scent of routine

Passport & Plate - Supermarket Chicken Curry

Spain | Friday, March 6, 2015 | 5 photos

Ingredients
2 chicken breasts
1 large yellow onion
2 garlic clover
2 carrots
100ml of thickened cream
100ml of whole milk
1/2 stock cube beef flavoured
1 large green pepper
4 tablespoons of curry powder
150gr of white rice
½ teaspoon of cinnamon
Salt, black pepper, paprika, and olive oil
Juice from one lemon

 

How to prepare this recipe
Marinate the chopped breasts for at least three hours in lemon juice, paprika, salt, black pepper, cinnamon and curry powder.
Boil the rice according to the package (I recommend 15 min in salted water), and wash it. Save for later.
Heat the olive oil in a large pan over medium heat, then add the chopped garlic and onion. When it is transparent, add the diced carrots. When they are soft, add the chopped green pepper and cook until it’s all roasted. Then, add the marinated breasts and cook until they are done.
Add the thickened cream, the whole milk and four tablespoons of curry (or more, as you like) and stir until it’s a whole.
Serve hot accompanied with the rice.

 

The story behind this recipe
To me, this recipe tastes like journeys and adventures but at the same time as home and soft blue nostalgia, to something I’d like to get and yet can’t. I’ll tell you why:
A couple years ago, when I left my hometown, my mother gave me a recipe book, handcopied from her own. This curry recipe was in it, which was odd: she had stopped cooking it when I was seven and refused to eat the “yellow food”. Years later, I decided to cook it for my roommates: a total success even with the lack of coconut milk and the addition of green pepper. So next time I called her I asked about the curry. Why was it so simple, so western?
She laughed and told me that the recipe was straight from India. “No way, mom”. Yes, she said. When she was young, younger than I am now, she travelled around the world with my father - they were my childhood heroes. What I didn’t know was the recipe’s origin.
“We were in Goa”, my mother told me “and we were friends with a local man, I don’t remember his name. It was our last day there, so he invited us for lunch with his family. We liked the meal so much that I asked his wife for the recipe. With a little help from our friend (she didn’t speak good English, neither did I), I wrote down the recipe and stored it in my belt pouch –which got stolen shortly after”.
I protested. So the recipe wasn’t from the Indian lady, at least not entirely. My mother, bold as ever, told me to shut up and listen to the rest of the story.
“Soon after we came back, your father asked me to make the curry. He was feeling down as he was now having to settle for a normal life after so much adventure, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had lost it a long time ago. Besides, we lived in a small Spanish town in the 90’s, so no coconut milk nor exotic spices, just what I had home, mild flavoured “curry” from the supermarket and what I remembered from the woman. It did the trick: your father didn’t notice and it was our favourite dish until you and your brother were born”.