Almost-chicken curry masala

Last weekend we made some curry. That's a really simple thing to do, and you can put in many different things. To give you an idea, here are some of the things you'll need:

• Curry powder. There are many different variations. Get one that looks interesting and just try it.
• Onions.
• Something else to add: vegetables, meat, chicken, ...
• If you want to "enhance" the meal, calory-wise, or e.g. plan to cook for many people, you might also wanna cook some rice. Goes well with the spiciness of the curry.

Many packs of curry powder have a suggested recipe on their back. You can take this as a guideline/inspiration for the ingredients needed. But don't be afraid of being a little creative on your own. We also added some salt, as suggested on the curry masala pack.

Our curry masala powder this time. As you can see, it's supposed to be cooked with pieces of chicken.

Whatever curry you aim for, start by cutting up some onions.

 

Fry them with some oil in a pan big enough for all curry ingredients. When they turn glassy or whatever that look is called in English, you can start adding more stuff. Vegetables or meat, whatever needs more frying goes first. 

In our case, we've added some cut-up carrots.

We simultaneously started to cook some rice. Rule of thumb: half a cup of rice per person should feed any mouth. We could write several blog entries about how to cook rice... we'll assume you know how to do it :-) We wash it several times and then add lots of water and cook it on slow heat for quite a while.

Use big pots and lots of water for cooking your rice.

Back to our curry. The spice pack itself suggested to use chicken. We opted for turkey. Just bought a nice piece of meat and sliced it up.

After all the fresh vegetables and the meat was properly fried we added mashed tomatoes out of a tetra pack and a can. If you have fresh ones, even better (unless it's winter and they taste mostly like water...). All in all it started to look and smell nice, mmmh. Time to add our curry powder. Be careful if you're not too keen on spicy food. The amount needed depends heavily on the curry powder you chose.

 Don't forget to stir it a bit all the time, especially after adding any new ingredients in the whole process.

Our recipe suggested to add some lemons in the end. We didn't have fresh lemons, so we added some lemon juice out of the bottle. Same thing as you would add to tea. Up to your personal taste. One more time stirring through, and then leaving it be on low heat and wait till the rice is done.

Yummy, yummy, yummy! It was so good that we only remembered to take a picture when almost nothing was left:

Mahlzeit, everyone!

Zucchini Pickles

We've never tried to pickle our own vegetables. And since a friend gave us a humungous homegrown zucchini - thanks! - we've decided to try it out, following this simple recipe. Ingredients:

• 1.5 kg zucchini
• 5 big onions
• 2 tablespoonful of salt
• 3 cupful of vinegar
• 3 cupful of sugar
• 1 teaspoonful of curry
• 1 teaspoonful of sweet paprika powder
• 1 teaspoonful of mustard seeds
• dill (we omitted that one because we don't really like it)

 From now one we plan to share our experiences with more pics, so here we go:

Almost all ingredients. And two glasses for pickles :-)

The onions that we forgot in the first photo...

Start by peeling the zucchini.

Cut the zucchini. We want to have bite-sized pieces.

Cutting in process :-) we removed the seeds, but that's up to you.

Cut the onions into slices or rings.

Put zucchini+onions into a big pot with a lid.

Add the salt and mix it through.

 Now close the pot with a lid and wait 3 to 4 hours. No kidding! Let the salt do its magic...

4 hours later: add all other ingredients and mix again. Now heat it up until it boils for a moment.

Start putting the still-hot pickles into your pickles glasses. A ladle comes in handy ;-)

First glass filled, on to the second...

All filled and closed, still hot.

Our zucchini pickles the next day.

 So, that was fun. And easy to do. We'll let them stay in our shelf for a while - in a dark and cold place - and tell you later how yummy they were.

Update: we've opened the smaller glass about three weeks later. And it was yummy! We'll definitely prepare them all in smaller glasses the next time - because you can't really stop once you've opened one of them, and that big one is quite big. Mmmmh...

Mahlzeit, everyone!