Curry me to the end

              This week I decided to make another recipe by Gordon Ramsay. For my last meal I decided to make Chicken curry. I feel like this will really put a good conclusion to my blog project, because chicken curry is a rather hard dish to make when you have to make your own curry base. Curry was one of the most memorable meals I had with my brother during summer in Singapore, so making this dish and succeed on it holds a really importance purpose for me.

            The most important thing about curry is the curry base, because without a good curry base the curry will taste really blend. The curry base contains a lot of spices, including coriander, cumin, turmeric, onion, ginger, garlic, tomatoes, green chili, and garam masala. Garam masala is a warming spice mix, and it’s the main spice mix used in northern India. It contains black pepper, cardamom, bay leaf, chili, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, fennel, mace and nut meg. This ingredient wasn’t sold in safe way so I used curry powder instead, because it contained most of the main ingredient and I bought bay leaf to use with it. A lot of the recipes use tomato paste to bring out the sweetness in the chicken curry and I know Japanese curry uses apple to bring the sweet curry flavor. However, in Gordon’s recipe he uses full tomatoes instead of the paste, I guess this gives the curry a more authentic feeling.

            Gordon really likes presenting his food authentic, simple, and fresh. He thinks that it doesn’t really need any unnecessary decoration when it’s presented like this. I think this is the one big difference I see in all his recipes. The first step of making this curry is to boil the tomatoes for 20 sec and peel the skins off. Later on roughly cut them and remove most of the seed out of the tomatoes. Heat up the frying pan, and fry the onions with some vegetable oil until it turns brown golden color. When the colors of the onion are turned, add all the spices, garlic, and ginger in and mix it for a couple minutes. This will be the curry base, and when the flavor of the spices starts to come out, add the tomatoes and water to boil it for 10 to 15 minutes. The last step is to throw the chicken in and boil it for 40 minutes and the curry is done. This has been my longest cooking session compared to all my other cooking session, but the time and effort put in this was worth it. I won’t say it was the best curry ever made, but a lot of people tried it and said it tasted really good and special. I guess for a first time it wasn’t that bad, and I know next time I will do better.

In conclusion, my last cooking session was a success, but I would like to also try other curry recipes in the future. Julia Childs once said, “I was 32 when I started cooking; up until now, I just ate.” I was just like her and I only started cooking just now. This really tells people that it’s never too late to learn something new. Life is all about challenges and that’s probably what makes life interesting, because we face different challenges each day. I learned a lot through this project and I hope I can continue to cook in the future and try out different things each time.

Reference:

1.     "Cooking quotes" Brainy quotes, 2012. Web. 31 May. 2013. Retrieved from: <http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/cooking.html>.

"Chicken Curry Recipe by Gordon Ramsay" BBC Good Food, 2011. Web. 31 May. 2013. Retrieved from: <http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/10988/ >.