Jamie Oliver's Chicken Tikka Masala

Here's  another recipe from the lovely Jamie Oliver for you all, this time one that actually worked better than my attempt at fishcakes, mainly because I had all the ingredients this time...  This was my first time making a homemade curry and I was pleasantly surprised at how it turned out - I've had curry sauces from jars before but I feel that it's always nicer to know exactly what goes into your food. 

For the Tikka Masala, you will need:

• 1 red chilli
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 15g ginger (Jamie Oliver specified fresh ginger but I had to resort to dried thanks to my somewhat pathetic local supermarkets)
• Paprika
• Garam Masala
• Cinnamon
• Turmeric
• Coriander (fresh if possible, Tesco surprisingly had packets of this)
• 1 onion
• 2 peppers
• Tinned tomatoes
• Tomato puree
• 2 chicken breasts
• 100ml plain yoghurt
• 100ml double cream

For a student-orientated cooking blog, this is quite a ridiculous list of ingredients, but don't be put off!  I already had all of the vegetables, spices and tomato-based things in the house, apart from the ginger and coriander, so it really wasn't all that expensive a meal. If you don't have anything on the list but are serious about getting into cooking, you could always use this recipe as an excuse to go out and buy a ton of herbs and spices - most of these are useful, everyday things that I use in a lot of my cooking, so think of it as an investment!  Remember supermarket brand spices are a lot cheaper, plus the ones in Tesco have letters on the bottles so you can also use them to spell out cute/obscene words to decorate your kitchen.

1. Firstly, chop the chicken into small pieces and place in a dish or bowl.  I think this is the first time that my blog has featured photos taken in daylight rather than my horrible kitchen lighting, thus marginally improving the quality of my terrible photography.  Hooray!

2. Chop the chilli, garlic and ginger (if you've managed to acquire fresh ginger).  Discard the chilli seeds if you don't like your curry to be too hot.

3. Mix the chopped chilli, garlic and ginger together with the chicken.  Add a generous sprinkle of paprika and garam masala, plus a couple of tablespoons of tomato puree, a drizzle of olive oil or sunflower oil, and some chopped coriander.  Jamie Oliver suggests leaving this to marinate for 24 hours, but as I am far too disorganised for such a proposition, I left mine for about 4 hours and it was still very flavoursome.

4. After leaving the chicken to marinate for as long as your hunger can withstand, begin to prepare the rest of the meal by chopping the onions and peppers.  Sadly I only had green peppers so my curry isn't as dramatically colourful as I would have liked.

5. Fry the onions and peppers in a large pot or wok and add a pinch of cinnamon and turmeric and some more chopped coriander.  At this stage it should hopefully begin to smell really nice.

6. After about 10 minutes when the onions and peppers are soft, add the tin of tomatoes and the yoghurt.  Then add the chicken pieces and simmer gently for 15-20 minutes.  Now would be the time to think about boiling your rice and so on.

7. Just before serving, add the double cream and some more chopped coriander and stir through until the curry is bubbling again.

Here is the finished product!  I served the curry with rice and garlic and coriander naan breads.  If you want to go all out and have an Indian feast, get some poppadoms and chutneys as well, or whatever else you fancy.

I tasted the curry before adding the cream and it was perfectly spicy, but after the cream was put in it was quite mild, so if you like hot curries I would suggest using less cream.  Other than that it was lovely, and the quantites were enough to give Tetley and I a substantial dinner plus lunch the next day - definitely worth the extra effort!