My Very Own Chicken Curry in a Casserole

This chicken recipe I made up myself when I was a student in England in the 70's.

It helped save time when I was alone in the kitchen trying to prepare a decent meal.

Ingredients:

1/2 chicken, skinned and cleaned, cut into 6 to 8 pieces.
3 large onions, chopped fine
2 teaspoon chilli powder
1 tablespoon coriander powder
1 teaspoon turmeric powder(serbuk kunyit )
1 teaspoon cumin powder (serbuk jintan putih)
1 teaspoon fennel powder (serbuk jintan manis)
3 cloves (bunga cengkih)
4 cm cinnnamon stick
2 cardamom seeds
Salt to taste
Cooking oil
1 1/2 cups of water

Cooking Method:

You can use a frying pan or a deep pan to fry the onions and all the spices, till fragrant,  in a little cooking oil. Add the chicken pieces and fry for another 5 minutes. Add in 1 1/2 cups of water.

Remove from heat and place in a deep casserole. Place the casserole in an oven  and cook for about 30 minutes at 250 degrees Centigrade, or till the curry turns red in colour.

When the chicken is cooked, take the casserole out of the oven using oven gloves or a piece or kitchen towel. You can skim off the layer of oil formed on the surface of the casserole.

(You may add coconut milk if you prefer. I did not do so because the curry tasted good even without the coconut milk).

Delicious when hot and eaten with bread or rice on a cold winter night.

In those days, communication was not as it is today. We could not afford oversea phone calls. Even if we could, we had to go to the post office to make a call. There were no parcels of foodstuff from home either. So we did not have our supplies of curry powder from home. You may ask why I used powdered spices. I remember using chilli powder in those days as neither chilli paste nor fresh red chillies were readily available.


I had to mix my own curry powder by trial and error. Luckily, I had the experience of grinding the dried chillies, coriander and other spices to make curry paste as a child. In those days, making curry involves tedious manual tasks of processing the spices into paste using a 'batu giling' ( an oval bed made from river stone coupled with a cylindrical roller also from river stone- you can hardly see this manual grinder in our homes now). We not only have to prepare the curry paste but we also had to process the coconut from removing the husks, scraping the kernel, to extracting the coconut milk. Making curries can last a full morning!
 
 I must thank my late grandmother for teaching me how to prepare the right proportion of spices to use in a curry. From my own experience, freshly mixed spices are more delicious compared to the ones you buy at the supermarket.
 
Try it, if you don't believe me.