Chicken Korma

Tried a Hairy Dieters recipe from The Hairy Bikers the other day. It's one of the more testing recipes, due to the extensive prep. I made it harder on myself due to a few errors.

I didn't buy cardamom pods as I already had some. I tried crushing these, but their sell-by date being 6 years ago added some difficulty.

After mixing most of the ingredients, I left off the cream, which was still sat in my fridge. The instructions to include this were in a reeled-off paragraph of ingredients, which I didn't read carefully enough.

There was some cooling time needed after creating the mixture. This was recommended at 2-6 hours. I gave it the minimum, which was perhaps short-sighted. That said, it was the mistake with the least influence on the outcome (the finished meal).

Once the sauce was included and brought back to the hob, I then forgot to stir. One of the strangest parts of the recipe is that it asks you to add uncooked chicken to a sauce, and cook for just 10 minutes. That would be long enough for chicken pieces to fry/cook on their own, but when raw and added to a sauce, it obviously takes longer than that. Is this a publishing error?

As a result of these errors, the resulting product was burned, bitterly spicy, and a lot of cardamom pods were still pretty much whole in the mixture. It still took over 4 hours to prepare. As I served it I realised I'd forgotten naans. Fail.

The next day I reheated the mixture and added the cream. I still didn't have any naans, but could I be arsed trekking back to Tesco in the current climate, standing in queues that looked like this?

No. I could not. However, with the cream added, it tasted much better and like a korma should- mild, and wholesome. I figured it was worth starting from scratch.

With added familiarity the repeat process wasn't too hard, and crucially I read the instructions word-for-word. I took the seeds out of the cardamom pods and crushed them, as advised, and as opposed to crushing the whole pods. The new garlic crusher is a fundamental time-saver. When it came to adding the chicken- and the cream, the element I didn't read last time- it definitely asked to add raw chicken to the sauce as part of the process, and the cooking time was a little longer than the book suggested, but the chicken does cook through with time, and without burning out the sauce. I'm convinced there's an error in the instructions, though.

This time I didn't add water to the naans and burned them. FFS.

Suffice to say, it's really tasty, just completely unworthy of the prep time- 20 minutes before putting it in the fridge, then 2 hours in the fridge, then 1 hour 24 of further prep and frying. Good job I didn't have guests.