Cashew Chicken Curry

Makings of a Cashew Chicken Curry

After weeks of fried chicken, I wanted to make something out of the ordinary for my cooking date with Brian and decided on khao soi, one of my favourite Thai dishes. The day before we were slated to cook, I looked over the recipe and noted that ingredients like makrut lime and fresh cardammom would be hard to find. And if they were hard to find for me, they would be quadruply hard to find for Brian.

I scoured the net for an alternative and ended up choosing a cashew chicken curry recipe from Genius Kitchen. A quick look at its ingredients told me that we would not have any trouble finding any of them. I sent the recipe to Brian and went grocery shopping for the paella I was making for Mel. Thankfully, he agreed to it, because I had already bought all the ingredients during my grocery run. 😀

We started cooking Sunday evening. We cut up all our ingredients, and as we were doing so, Brian discovered that his onions were rotten; the not-so-funny part was that this wasn't the first time. 😂 He stepped out to pick up some fresh ones while I continued with the prep work. Given how slow I work, he would catch up to me anyway.

When Brian got back, he picked up where he left off, and soon enough, he was ahead of me again. We followed the recipe as closely as we could and left everything to simmer. We felt like our pots didn't have enough liquid, so I added more diced tomatoes and sauce to the mix, and Brian, who used fresh tomatoes, added water.

The chicken

Cashews

We mixed the chicken once in a while to keep it from sticking to the bottom. And once it was time, we added the cashews and yogurt into the chicken and gave it a stir. We served the chicken on a bed of rice and had a bite:

The finished product

And it was okay. The chicken was moist and the sauce was delicious over a bed of rice. Unfortunately, we felt that the dish lacked the boldness of an authentic Indian curry. Additionally, we felt that the flavours of some key ingredients were lost in the dish; for example, the cashews that were supposed to enhance the dish only served to provide texture to the sauce.

In the future, I would consider playing up the spices in this cashew chicken curry to give it some much needed flavour. At its current state, this recipe can only yield a mild, watered down version of such a delicious-sounding dish.