A 30 Minutes Dish – Chicken Curry with Potatoes

Wow, have I gotten lazy or what? I don’t know if it is the cold, or it is just the holiday spirit around, I have been a bad bad blogger lately. I rarely visit other foodies, I don’t reply to the comments on my blog, and even though I have a few recipes and restaurants in my drafts to write about, I just don’t feel like getting around to it. And as far as blog events are concerned, I have been ignoring those for a while now.  But I think it is not just me, things have been a little quite around a blogosphere lately. Hopefully things will get back to normal next month.

These days, we are eating out most days, catching up with friends. When we do cook, it is normally something very simple. Last week I got home pretty tired, in no mood to go out or cook. Siv called from work to check what he can pick up for dinner. We just couldn’t think of anything that we both like, I had Chinese for lunch, and he had Malaysian. We did an Indian take out the previous night, and Thai the night before. We were both not in the mood for burgers or sandwiches. We brainstormed for a while, and finally it was getting more tiring to think of a place to pick up food from than actually cooking. So I asked him to just come home, I will just “whip something up”. It took him about thirty minutes to get home, by the time he was home I was done with this chicken curry! Not bad, huh?

Ingredients

• 1.5 lbs Chicken Breast /thighs – bone-in, skinless cuts will be the best 
• 1.5 cups Diced Onions (1 large onion)
• A few curry leaves
• 1 tbsp Readymade ginger paste
• 1 tbsp Readymade garlic paste
• 1 cup diced tomatoes ( 2 medium Roma tomatoes)
• 6-8 baby potatoes quartered
• 1 tbsp Red chili powder
• 2 tbsp Coriander powder
• ¼ tsp Turmeric powder
• 5 Cardamom pods
• 3 Cloves
• 1” piece of Cinnamon
• 1 tbsp oil
• 1 cup hot water

Method

Here is the order in which I did things to save time. You can always cut the chicken and veggies in advance, and do this in a more relaxed pace. But follow this order, and you will be done in about 20-25 minutes.

- Keep a large pressure cooker or a deep frying pan with a tight lid on the stove, add the oil, and keep the heat on medium .

- Dice the onion into thin pieces, by the time you finish cutting at least half the onion, the oil will be hot.

- Add the cardamom, cloves and cinnamon to the oil, in between cutting the onions.

- When the spices just start to brown, add the diced onions (what you cut so far) into the oil, and stir well.

- Finish cutting the remaining onion as fast as you can, and add those onion pieces into the cooker as well.

- Add the curry leaves and stir well to combine.

- Cut the chicken into medium sized pieces when the onions are getting fried.

- Add the chili powder, coriander powder and turmeric powder to the onions and stir well to combine.

- Let the spice powders brown, while stirring frequently.

- Add the chicken pieces and stir well.

- Add the ginger and garlic pastes to the pan and mix well.

- Increase the heat, and let the chicken pieces cook, in the mean time dice the tomatoes.

- Add the tomatoes and mix well, and cook till all the ingredients are well blended.

- In the mean time, skin and quarter the potatoes, stir the chicken once in a while.

- Add the quartered potatoes and hot water to the pressure cooker/pan and close it.

- If you are pressure cooking, reduce the heat to medium high after the first whistle and cook for about 4 minutes. If cooking in a pan, cook for about 12 minutes, or till when the chicken pieces are tender.

A tasty chicken curry is ready in a matter of minutes. We had this with chapattis, since I had some in the freezer. But this gravy goes better with rice.

Note:  I used the readymade pastes for ginger and garlic, but if you don’t have these, you can just chop the ginger and garlic into tiny pieces, don’t bother making a paste…

Look at that… there is no grinding involved! So, I am sending this to Sra of When my soup came alive for her Grindless Gravies event.

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Category: Chicken, India - Kerala, Mains, Potato