chicken madras

I made chicken madras yesterday using a recipe from Recipes for the Nation's Favourite Food, a British cookbook put out by the BBC (also a TV series). It came out really, really good, nearly restaurant quality (if I do say so myself). My dad didn't even use chilli sauce on it because it was spicy enough, which is kind of a compliment (usually when I cook non-Chinese food he puts that on). It was a relatively simple dish, too. The dish consisted of chicken, diced onions, can of diced tomatoes, shredded coconut, and spices. The garam masala took some doing since I had to find the spices that went into it and mix them together myself (some of them were whole spices which I had to grind up). Luckily I remembered we had a small coffee grinder in the house, so I used that to grind up the spices and the coconut as well. I took a couple of pictures, which will be forthcoming.

One thing slightly pissed me off yesterday. The recipe called for a small handful of fresh coriander to be mixed into the curry, which I thought to leave off since I have never been able to find fresh coriander in supermarkets here. So I went grocery shopping for spices in the Mexican spices section, which had all the spices I needed at a third or a fourth of the price. They do come in plastic bags instead of fancy jars, but they do the trick just fine. Anyway, the packet for coriander seeds had the Spanish name "cilantro" underneath the English, so I was like, huh. Then I went home, did a search, and found that coriander and cilantro are one and the same. Gaaahhh!! Well, it's good because I have access to fresh "coriander", and bad because I didn't know I did :(. Actually, I remember smelling the coriander in a British supermarket and thought it smelled awfully like cilantro, but it didn't occur to me they were the same thing. Reminds me of the time I found out garbanzo beans and chickpeas were the same thing.