Cooking with Jonny69: CURRY!!!

[Jonny69]

Something for the weekend sir? Why yes Jonny. How about a curry recipe? Of course sir, I'll take you through how to cook this beautiful tiger prawn curry:



I have made this over and over and over again to perfect the recipe trying to mirror curries you get in Indian restaurants. The secret is to make a paste which acts as the base of the curry and then you add various ingredients to it for taste. This is by far the most adventurous of my cooking escapades so far but it's a lot simpler than you'd first think and the results are a satisfying rich curry sauce ready for meat, seafood, fish or vegetables and spices to taste. I'll go through what else to add further down.

Ingredients, makes 4 portions:

8-10 cloves of garlic
2 onions
chunk of ginger about the size of your thumb
1 red chilli
Bunch of fresh coriander
Tin of tomatoes
Vegetable oil
Salt

First we make the paste. Into the blender goes all the garlic cloves, half an onion, a piece of peeled ginger about the size of your thumb and a whole red chilli:



This sounds like a lot of garlic. It is! But the base of the curry is pretty much garlic and onion, very strong flavours to stand up to the heat of the chilli and other hefty spices you may add. You also only want to put in the one chilli at this point as you can bump the heat up later with chilli powder or more fresh chilli. Add to that a handful of washed fresh coriander, a good pinch of salt and about 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil:



Again that sounds like a lot of oil but without it the paste doesn't cook well. Blitz that up until it's quite smooth:



Get a wok quite hot and dump it all in and get it frying down until it starts to darken in colour slightly and the oil will just start to come out the paste:



Add in a whole chopped onion and cook that in until it softens:





Once the onion is soft add about half to 2/3 of a tin of tomatoes and continue to fry down until the colour of the tomatoes has darkened down with the paste: