A Chicken or Vegetable Curry Inspired by the Malaysian ‘Curry Kapitan’

This is a fusion curry for when you are feeling like something tasty. It is creamy thanks to the coconut milk but hot, sour and sweet as well. It’s comfort food for the Indianish palate, serving much the same psychic function as shepherds pie or sausage and mash on a cold day. And pretty much all the ingredients can come from the freezer and cupboard so it’s quite a good standby if you don’t want to shop specially.

The name ‘Curry Kapitan’ comes from a dish I ate in several places in Malaysia which in a lovely example of imperial apocrypha, allegedly got its name from a cabin boy who, in response to his ship’s captain’s query about the name of the standard chicken curry he served to him replied ‘It’s curry, Captain’...

Ingredients:
6 Chicken Thigh Filets, skin removed and cut into bite sized pieces (about 6 bites per thigh) or if on the bone, left whole (for a vegetarian variation, see below).

2 small onions or 1 large onion
1 green or red chilli (or more if you like)
1 piece of ginger – about 3 cm long
2 -3 cloves of garlic

1 can of coconut milk (reduced fat if you like)
1 heaped teaspoon tumeric
1 dried red chilli, crumbled (optional)

1 heaped tablespoon of store bought curry paste (any flavour. I have used Patak’s Hot Madras curry paste with good results.)
Juice of 1 lemon or lime (or 1 ½ if it’s not very juicy.) (Roll it along the table before you cut it, pressing hard, to get the best out of it)
1 tbsp soft brown sugar (or palm sugar or white if you don’t have any brown)
1 tbsp fish sauce

Vegetable oil for cooking
Fresh or frozen coriander to garnish

Optional (if you want more vegetables in your diet): Several handfuls of frozen green peas.

Peel onions, ginger and garlic and put into blender with the chilli and a splash of water (perhaps two tablespoons) to make a paste. If you have no blender, chop these ingredients up as finely as you can be bothered, or pound the chilli, garlic and ginger in a mortar and pestle and chop the onion.

Heat oil in large saucepan over medium heat. Pour blended paste in and fry for about 5-8 minutes until softened. Add tumeric, dried red chilli if using, ready made curry paste and fry for another 5-8 minutes stirring so it doesn’t stick. Add chicken pieces, increasing heat and stirring to seal the chicken and cover in the paste mixture.

Add coconut milk, lemon juice, fish sauce, sugar and stir gently to combine. Once it starts simmering, partially cover and leave bubbling very gently over low heat for at least 15-20 minutes (30 minutes if you used whole thigh filets), but longer if you want the sauce thicker.

Add the frozen peas straight from the bag and simmer for another 7 minutes or until they are cooked.

Taste. If it lacks zing, you might want to add a bit more lemon or lime juice.

This dish will sit around with no ill effects and can be cooled, refrigerated and then reheated then next day, either in the microwave or gently on the stove.

Garnish with coriander and serve with plain white rice or the bread of your choice. You can get ready made roti canai (the Malaysian kind) which would go well. Roti Canai is rather fattening though, so a lighter option would be a reheated tortilla (I cut them up and heat them briefly in the toaster, or you can heat them in a dry frying pan, or, last resort, the microwave, though they do tend to dry out as they cool in the microwave.)

If you wanted to try this with vegetables instead of chicken, it would work well with small button mushrooms left whole and treated like the chicken. To your mushroom curry you could also add chunks of peeled butternut squash just after adding the coconut milk and simmer until it is cooked. You could also replace the squash with tofu (firm tofu, not ‘silken’) but add it after the coconut milk has been simmering for 10 minutes. Then add the tofu to heat through and don’t boil it in case it disintegrates.