One pot no spice chicken curry
I love one pot recipes - they are easy, hassle free, and more often than not, turn out acceptable. A dishwasher is a recently acquired luxury for me, and having grown up in a situation where dishes were always done by hand, home cooks in my family found every possible way to create the nicest one pot recipes. Some of those techniques come so handy during weeknights! My brother wanted to have chicken curry tonight, and I wanted to have something simple. So I cooked up this no-spice (ok, almost!) recipe as a compromise. Although one can always embellish this recipe with more spices, I think it tasted just as good without any!
I think chicken drumsticks work the best for traditional curries, but for an even quicker alternative, one can certainly go for chicken thighs, or the breast of a chicken. Chicken curries are best served with steaming hot rice, and I love having a few bites of raw onion and some traditional Indian pickle from back home as sides. One can easily make variations by either pre-grilling the chicken, or by adding extra flavours, or cream to make it milder - whatever one prefers!
Serves: 6 (I made a big batch for a book reading evening)
Time for preparation: 60 minutes
Ingredients
- 1000 gms chicken drumsticks (we had 8 drumsticks)
- 4 big red onions
- 1 inch piece of ginger
- 4-5 cloves of garlic
- 4 tbsp turmeric
- 4 tbsp sweet paprika powder
- Salt to taste
- Half cup yoghurt
- 3 cups of water
- 8-10 tbsp cooking oil
Method
- In a big bowl, mix the yoghurt, turmeric, salt, paprika powder and combine to form a marinate.
- Clean the chicken and marinate it with the yoghurt mix for at least 15 minutes and up to overnight
- Blend/finely chop 2 big onions, garlic and ginger. Slice the remaining 2 red onions
- Heat oil in a pan, add the sliced onions and stir until the onions are brown. This should take about 15 minutes.
- Add the onion-ginger-garlic paste to the pan and cook until the raw fragrance of the onion is gone and oil starts to form a layer on top. This typically takes 15 minutes.
- Add the chicken to the pan, mix well.
- Add the water, cover the pan with a lid and let the chicken cook for 30 minutes.
- Read a book, catch up with news, or sip a hot tea and enjoy!
We have enough curry left for tomorrow and Saturday. Sorted!
