As those who have read my reviews and posts will know, garlic and onions are staples in the GB household. There is another item that will cause much consternation, distress and raising of blood pressure if store-cupboard supplies shrink below an acceptable level - and that is Italian tinned tomatoes. Long banished from the weekly shop by wife and daughter for persistent bad behaviour (Reading labels, comparing prices, spending half an hour in the speciality foreign foods section, perusing kitchen gadgets etc.), I compile a weekly list of ingredients for the week ahead and Mrs GB purchases them piecemeal from whatever supermarket she may be passing. And such is the ubiquitousness of the humble tinned tomato, there is no need to add them to the list. I know this will come as a major shock to some here, but we do eat other dishes apart from curry, so we easily go through a few tins a week.
Our current supplier of choice at the moment is Aldi, and a tin of Sweet Harvest tomatoes is good value at 34p for 400g. I generally avoid the pulped varieties, and the tins with added herbs are obviously verboten. A tube of Cucina double concentrated tomato puree costs about the same for 200g, so we generally have a good stock of the rich red fruit in our store cupboard. So it was with much excitement that when Chicken Tawa appeared as dish of the month in Curry Club, I thought it would be a cinch – tomatoes, chicken, base, mix powder, coriander – all the usual ingredients and nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Apart from the Tawa of course. I have so far resisted the temptation to buy one on the basis that a) we are running out of space for curry kit and b) I doubt if I could build a sufficiently strong financial argument as my pending Spices of India restock will probably hit £60. It has taken me six months or so to go through the last lot, which works out at about £2.50 a week – not bad at all for the extra ingredients that turn a plain old curry into something really rather special. The closest I have are some polished steel balti dishes, but these would not take kindly to being super-heated on a gas ring. My cast iron frying pan was another option, but it is so unwieldy it requires an industrial hoist to lift it into the sink to be washed up. So the serving dish was a cold balti dish I'm afraid.
Next, the ingredients. It goes without saying that there will always be something missing, and today's cook off was no exception. The first culprit was fresh ginger for the paste, but I managed to find a chunk hiding in the corner of the vegetable rack being sheltered by a rather bulky, if slightly mouldy, onion. Thankfully, the onion had the decency not to pass on the black plague to the ginger, which was surprisingly juicy once peeled. Horror of horrors, I could not find any small chillies. Despite the picture in my mind's eye of a small Tesco bag with 2 remaining red chillies residing in the salad section of our fridge, they were nowhere to be found. The household ghost had struck again. My only defence here for not rushing out to the shops to buy some is that my base has got fresh chilli in it, so hopefully this will get me off the hook here.
The cook off went off really well, apart from a cracked Satco container of base that dribbled inside the microwave and over the worktop. This is the third time I have had problems with the containers splitting after freezing, the plastic seems very brittle and easily shattered. This one had a small hole / crack in the corner, possibly sustained by other family members ratching around in the curry section of the freezer for ice cream and pizza. The alternative hypothesis is that the excessive quantity of garlic in my base eroded the plastic. I will leave the reader to judge.
That said, I don't know what consistency of the Lidl tomatoes TT regularly uses is like, but the liquid from the Aldi ones is really thick, even thicker than my standard tomato puree water mix. When added to the hot pan it thickened up really fast so I had to add some water to prevent the spices burning. This quickly resolved the situation, and the classic oil / crater / separation occurred soon after. I tend to use a bit more oil than was in the recipe, but everything worked out fine in the end.
Probably the trickiest part of this recipe is getting the tomatoes out of the tin in one piece. I drained the juice from the tomatoes into a mug and left the tomatoes in the tin to be extracted with a tablespoon. Trying to delicately extract 3 slippery tomatoes out of a tin without damaging them or having a ninja incident made me realise the error of my ways, and I tipped the whole tin into the curry. The fourth tomato was of such indistinct and insignificant proportions I decided that its fate was to be eaten in a curry, rather than with bacon and egg. And I was not sure if either of our dogs would eat cold, pre-cooked tomato off the floor. Yes I admit it, I really should have got a bowl and a sieve and left the toms to drain properly, but that would have meant more washing up.
One of the oldest culinary tricks around is to add some sugar to tomatoes to take away the slight acidity and tartness. On tasting the dish pre-serving, I found the flavours were well balanced and no extra sugar or salt was required. So it was into the balti dish, add a few splashes of yoghurt, wait for the steam to die down a bit, photograph, then serve with a generous helping of
TikaTom's Sag aloo.
The GB household is no stranger to rich tomato dishes, and this curry did not disappoint. Mrs GB gave it a 9, as would I. The only modification I personally would make next time I cook this is to use more oil at the frying stage as there is quite a lot of spice to cook off, and the Aldi tomato juice is quite thick.
This curry is an excellent tomatoey way of getting one of your 5 a day, according to the tin at least. Combined with a cracking Sag Aloo, we could almost say curries are potential health food.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.