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Cooking With Christie: Chicken Tikka Masala

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Inspiration: Once again, while baking bread, I listened with half an ear to Alton Brown and Simon Majumdar discussing Tikka Masala on Good Eats (the newer seasons). As my household enjoys tomatoes, chicken, spices, and rice, I decided to give this dish a go.

However, due to my stupid, stupid allergies, I couldn’t use Alton Brown’s recipe as it calls for coconut milk. (Though, I’ve gotta say Mr. Brown’s dish does look spectacular.)

Completely forgetting I own a massive British cookbook, I took to the interwebs to find a non-coconut milk based version of this recipe. (As I was unsure if I could swap moo juice for tree juice.) Whereupon I found one by Recipetineats, which looked promising.

Even better? It turned out great the very first time!

(Okay, this recipe is worth trying at least once, for the moment when you add the cream and butter to the tomatoey gravy. The swirls are absolutely magnificent!)

Helpful Hint From Me to You: As this dish calls for you to lightly char the meat before adding it to the sauce — I’d advise you NOT to use your brand new cream-colored castiron pan to complete the deed. Otherwise, you might end up making your pan appear well-loved/distressed long before you’d anticipated.

Christie: As this is now considered a quintessentially British dish….Depending on the circumstances, I think all of Christie’s detectives would have tried Tikka Masala at one point or another! (Well, in the books set after 1960, as that’s about the time when this dish was invented!)

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2023

Cooking With Christie!

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This Week’s Recipe: Tom Yum Soup

The Inspiration: I am a fan of Guy’s Grocery Games on Food Network. Recently I was rewatching the Ultimate Spicy Games and one of the chefs, who’s from Thailand, made tom yum soup*. While watching her prepare the dish, I realized (so long as I’ve got more than thirty minutes) I can totally make this dish!

Turns out the most challenging part was finding the lime leaves! 

After visiting a half dozen grocery stores (my husband is fantastic), I finally found them – and frozen shrimp, which weren’t treated with sulfates! Which was a huge score! (Fun Fact: The sulfates help the little guys turn a deeper shade of pink when you cook them up.) 

Once I finally had everything, I used these two recipes to base my version on – one’s by Spruce Eats and the other on recipetineats.

Now, I stuck pretty close to the recipe for the broth, which was interesting. Because when I tasted the broth, before adding the veggies and the shrimp, I thought I had done something wrong. As the lemongrass and lime leaves made it kind of sour. However, after I cooked the veggies and shrimp in the broth – it transformed into the tastiest dish! 

BTW – I added a bunch of extra veggies to the dish because I couldn’t help myself: bell pepper, Fresno pepper, zucchini, and enoki mushrooms.

(*Of course, while writing this post, I rewatched the episode again…and discovered I did NOT pay very close attention. Patty, my inspiration, did not make tom yum soup – she made tom sapp soup. *sigh*)

Christie: Now, I can’t see Miss Marple making this for herself…However, if her nephew Raymond West had sent her to Thailand rather than the Caribbean for a vacation – I think she’d have tried it and loved it. (Especially since you can easily adjust the spice level.)