Post 159: Chicken Tikka Masala, (based from a Jamie Oliver recipe)

I went to the butchers and chicken legs were on offer. So, I snapped up 10 of them. The what to do with them came next, and I thought I'd have a go at Chicken Tikka masala and google brought up Jamie Oliver's recipe as hit no 1. I didn't have quite all the ingredients, so this ended up slightly more loosely based on Jamie's recipe than originally intended.

To make the marinade, I blitzed together: Ginger (2 - 3 tsps), Chillies (about a dozen dried), paprika (a good shake's worth), coriander stalks, vegetable oil and tomato puree - just enough to make it runny. I also added a bit of tamarind paste, just half a tsps. I confess this was something of a brainwave - Camilla Panjabi seems to use it a lot and I thought why not. I'd also forgotten garlic, so that was missing too (most unusual for me, not to have garlic)

Here it is pre-stirring with the chicken legs. It wasn't the most appetizing of starts to a meal. Jamie left his to marinade overnight, but I only had ~6 hours. Maybe this didn't help.

Next was the sauce:
- fry a big chopped onion (Yay, a proper recipe telling me to do my favourite onion frying!), along with a dash each of ground coridander and cinamon
- added 2 x tins of chopped tomatoes, 1 x 200g plain yoghurt and the marinaded chicken bits and simmered
Because I'd used  legs instead of breast, as this was simmering quite a bit of oil/fat came out of the legs, which took some spooning off.
- Once the chicken was cooked, I added some chopped coriander leaves and cream and stirred through.

This is what it looked like. Which is probably a pretty reasonable colour.

However, it just tasted like tomato-ey chicken in a mildly spices. The chicken legs weren't a success; the fault there is clearly mine, I should have skinned them or taken them out and grilled them at the end to make the skin nice. The tamarind paste, despite there only being 1/2 a tsps in came through far too strongly.

In short, it just wasn't like having a curry. Worst meal of 2010 to date.