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.
