Butter Chicken ...

I recently saw this recipe for Butter Chicken on Better Homes and Gardens TV show so I thought I'd give it a whirl. (photo: BH&G) - the link to watch Karen Martini knock up this dish is here

First, chop up your chicken thigh fillets and marinate with lime juice and salt.

Gently warm almonds, cloves, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves and peppercorns to toast.  I used my small electric grinder to give all of this a good whiz to form a coarse powder.

Add curry, cardamon and coriander powder ...

The spice and almond mix

Mix half the spice mix with 1.5 cups of natural yoghurt

Add the yoghurt mix to the chicken

Finely chop 10 (!) cloves of garlic and 6cm piece of ginger

Fry off the garlic and ginger and the rest of the spice paste and add in chopped onion, cook until tender.

Add in the chicken yoghurt mixture, stirring to combine.

Add in 1 can of tomato puree and 2 tablespoons of tomato paste.  At this point it says to add 2 litres of chicken stock - I think 1 litre or 1.5 would have been enough as it took ages (too long) for the sauce to reduce down.

Finally, about half an hour longer than the recipe said, the sauce had reduced and it was ready to serve.

I also made homemade Naan bread while the chicken was cooking away.   This stuff is so good.

The finished dish served with Basmati rice - quite labour intensive and in the end, a little disappointing.  Hey, I tell it how it is!  It was quite salty and I think I made the mistake of using chicken stock powder to make the stock instead of buying a 2L box of stock (which I have always found to lack salt).  It certainly looked like butter chicken but yeah, a bit salty even for my salt loving taste buds.  Give me Thai Green Chicken Curry anyday.
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Cheers - Joolz