Mama Grewal's Butter Chicken

One day during work, the tantalizing aroma of Indian cooking wafted up into my third-floor classroom, and after some chatting, I got this from the Home Ec department.

Here is the original recipe. Eddie and I did quite a few things differently.

For 2:
25 mL vegetable oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 skinless, boneless chicken thigh, diced
2 mL cumin
1 mL pepper
1 mL ground ginger
2 mL curry powder
125mL diced tomatoes with juice
50 mL milk

Sautee garlic, add chicken and brown slightly.
Stir in cumin, pepper, tumeric, ginger and curry powder.
Add tomatoes. Mix thoroughly. Cover and simmer 10-12 minutes.
Add milk and heat thoroughly. Serve.


Sounds simple, right? Here's what we did:

Ingredients (for 8-10):
olive oil
2kg boneless, skinless chicken breast, diced
3 tsp pre-chopped garlic
3 squirts of ginger paste
1tbs (probably) ground cumin (using mortar and pestle)
ground tumeric
curry powder
2 cans (800mL each) diced tomatoes
ketchup
sugar
cayenne powder
milk powder (we were out of milk)
flour

Method:
Start heating tomatoes in a large pot on medium heat.
In a pan, sautee 1 tsp garlic in olive oil. Add a third of the chicken and brown slightly.
Add in a squirt of ginger and some spices and sautee for a bit longer. Mix into the pot.
Repeat until all the chicken is done.
Cover the pot and simmer, stirring occasionnally.
When the chicken is cooked, taste and add ketchup, sugar, milk powder, and cayenne powder until desired flavour and colour is achieved.
Simmer on low, uncovered, until tomatoes fall apart. Stir occassionally.
When ready to eat, taste and adjust, and if the mixture is too soupy, add flour mixed in water to thicken. Heat through before serving.

Comments:
As you can see, we were not very rigorous with the recipe. It was pretty much all taste and adjust. We probably spent a good 5 minutes mixing and tasting and mixing and tasting.


There was a bitter finish to the sauce, which really bothered us while we were cooking (It wasn't as noticeable when served with rice and bread). It could have come from a number of factors:

• Possibility of burnt garlic (we weren't too careful about scraping off everything in the pan before browning the next batch of chicken.
• Cumin: we ground the cumin because we didn't want to chew on whole cumin seeds, so I probably could've used less. I also didn't measure out the cumin.
• In browning the chicken with the spices, we could've burnt the spices and not notice.

This was a lot simpler than my first recipe, which is not posted here.


Verdict:
Decent, but it didn't have the depth of flavour that I'm used to with Indian food. On a side note: Eddie makes a good sous-chef. Thanks for helping!