Homemade Chicken Tikka Masala and Naan

I love Indian Curry. When I was living in California, I used to live with this wonderful Indian lady and she was a great cook so I was able to eat delicious Indian food all the time. Even after I moved out from her place, there are so many great Indian restaurant around so I was always eating great Indian food.

Now, there are many good Indian restaurants in NY also but there is not one really close to our place. I think the closest Indian restaurant from us is about 30mins away. I always say that we need a good Indian restaurant in my city! but until then, I make my own Indian food at home.

Anyway, the popular dish in American Indian restaurant is Chicken Tikka Masala. I am not sure if this dish is actually eaten in India but it seems like this dish is also popular in UK.

I borrowed this curry book from the library. This book have many curry dish recipes from all over the world such as India, Thai, Africa, and so on. I wanted to make Chicken Tikka Masala and I found it under the category of Britain. It seems like the origin of this dish is under discussion among many people. No matter where it is from, I love this rich creamy dish.

If you are interested in this book, here is the amazon link.















First, I marinade the chicken with some yogurt, garlic, jalapeno, ginger and so on. I had to marinade this overnight. Since I realized this when I start cooking, that night dinner quickly became something else and Chicken Tikka Masala was postponed for the next day :-) (I should learn that I need to read the whole recipe before I start cooking!!)

Since it is marinated overnight, the chicken soaks up all the flavors.
Then I grilled this. I was supposed to use a broiler but it was not grilling as I planned so I used frying pan instead. I think I should have cut the chicken bigger. Since it is well marinated, the chicken started to fall off a bit.

I mixed canned tomato, cilantro, ginger and so on in the blender and heat it up in the pan with some cream. The color of this sauce in the book was more bright orange but mine came out a bit dark. I think it might be because I add lots of cilantro.

Add the chicken and heat up. Serve with basmati rice.

Since my husband loves bread, I also made Naan. This was also in the book. (The book had a regular Naan but I added garlic and cilantro and made garlic Naans)

The dough was too soft and it was difficult to shape so the shape was not great. I added chopped garlic and cilantro on top because I had this kind of nann in Indian restaurant before and I loved them.

This is before baking

After baking

Does it look like Naan? This recipe did not have yeast in it so it was very quick bread. I personally like the one I made with yeast. I liked the texture of that one better. (Here is the link for the post for the Naan I made before with yeast)

Despite the color of Chicken Tikka Masala and the shape of Naan, the taste was great. I loved it and my husband loved it even more! It was worth spending time making this. The one thing I would change a bit next time is that I would make it little bit spicier since it was not much spicy.

Indian curry is great. It might take some time but the flavor is there. I guess in order to create this kind of big flavor, I need to spend some time. And for these delicious dishes, I have no problem spending more time in the kitchen. Actually, I love spending time in the kitchen anyway!

This book is due return soon but there are many more things I would like to try from this book. I think I will renew it and extend my due date for this book :-)

By the way, it seems like Avatar DVD is released. I watched it twice at the movie theater. If you would like to go back to the world of Pandora, here is the link to Amazon :-)