Friday night curry

A couple of years ago I bought myself Anjum Anand's Indian Food Made Easy. I hadn't watched the TV series - strangely, I don't much like watching cooking on television, I'd much rather read about it (although I'll confess to being addicted to Masterchef - largely because it's not really about cooking!)

It took me a while to get into it - for a long time I was slightly too scared of all the ingredients in each recipe. One or two I couldn't even find at the shops. But then Caroline over at Second Hand Shopper came to stay and told me how much she liked the book. She even posted me some dried mango powder to get me going.

And I'm very glad she did! There are a number of recipes in the book I love, but the one I come back to again and again is this one. 

Just to warn you - it's another marinade recipe so requires a little thinking ahead. What we always do is pop the chicken and marinade in a freezer bag in the fridge the night before we want to eat it.

It's enough food to feed an army, and so I tend to quarter the amount of chicken, but halve the amount of sauce and marinade - partly because to quarter it would result in just too little sauce to marinate anything in, and partly because the sauce is amazing.

The reduced quantities mean that the yogurt would reduce too quickly if I left it as it is, so I tend to pop a quarter pint of water in at the beginning and keep an eye on it. I've never made full quantities but suspect it wouldn't be a problem if you were.

And it works perfectly with low fat yogurt, which means that you can actually make it astoundingly healthy.

But the magical thing for me about this recipe is the taste of the sauce - it's spicy but not hot, fresh and just beautiful. Although the recipe says chicken, as the star is the sauce I think it would work equally well with vegetables, chick peas or meat substitute, adjusting the cooking times accordingly.

The result is pretty damn tasty. So tasty, in fact, that when I photographed it I did so in a screaming hurry to go away and eat, and didn't check the results before digging in. Hence dodgy blurred photo below. Apologies - just take it as proof of how good it tastes!