Serious Eats: Recipes
Dinner Tonight: Tomato Curry with Chicken
Since I was covered in tomatoes from the farmers' market and needed an interesting way to use them, I immediately jumped on a tomato curry recipe from Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries. I decided to add chicken, and without consulting the recipe any further, got started with the few ingredients necessary. Not until I chopped up the tomatoes did I realize they were supposed to sit in the sauce like the main dish—I was supposed to leave them whole. Why else would the recipe call for fresh and canned tomatoes?
Rather than toss my wooden spoon on the floor, I kept on cooking. Since it was now my mishap of a recipe, I started playing around by adding more heat and a sprinkle of garam marsala at the end for extra depth. After all the mistakes, I sat down to a pretty stellar tomato curry.
Like many Indian-inspired dishes, this one has more ingredients than the average quick, simple Dinner Tonight recipe. But four of them are spices, and most—onions, garlic, dried red chillies, and canned tomatoes—are just pantry staples. The dish can be finished in about 45 minutes. All in all, a pretty successful failure.
About the author: Nick Kindelsperger is a freelance writer in Chicago. He is the co-founder of The Paupered Chef and spends most of his time playing with the new cooking gadgets he got from his wedding.