This year is just ticking by so quickly. Our daughter went back to college for the spring semester and poof she’s back again. Which is fine by us! Before she dashed off to be an EMT at overnight camp for the summer, we tried to make the dinners she liked to get some good homemade food into her. Times like this gets rarer and rarer, as it should be, as she starts leading her life. With one more year of having our son home, we best get on board with the empty nest bit. Despite having an early nasty heat wave, we’ve been lucky with having a decent spring this year so I was happy to make, at our daughter’s request, a Chicken Curry with Mint and my husband made Naan on our grill.

During the heat wave here in town, there was a food festival downtown. Our town had lifted the mask mandate a few days prior as our vaccination rates are pretty high. It was so nice to do something normal but also felt so weird walking round without a mask. We did come away with a few new inspirations for dishes to make at home. Despite the heat, we had a lot of fun letting our hair down so to speak!

Technique for Chicken Curry with Mint

I took inspiration from the book called the Best Ever Curry Cookbook by Mridula Baljekar. The original recipe is call Karahi Chicken with Mint. A Karahi is like a wok. Given where we are currently staying, we can’t use the wok on the glass stove top so I used a skillet. I also adjusted the recipe based on what I had in the pantry. The recipe called for boiling the chicken. I’m not a fan of that technique, I prefer sautéing chicken.

Heat the vegetable oil in a skillet and begin to sauté the chicken. After a few minutes, when the chicken starts to brown add the scallions/spring onions and ginger to the skillet.

I’ve been using minced ginger as I find it’s less waste than buying the fresh and not being able to use it up in time. It still has quite the punch of flavour. Stir well and cook until the scallions/spring onions start to soften.

At this point, add the rest of the ingredients. Instead of fresh tomatoes that were called for in the original recipe I like to used diced fire roasted tomatoes. The flavour is more concentrated which is perfect for this dish. Bring to a simmer and cook for about ten minutes on low medium heat. This is when you should taste test the curry. Adjust any flavours as needed. I added more ginger to this. I should have added more mint as it wasn’t as strong a note as I would have liked. There isn’t any right or wrong way to do this. If you like it, it’s good.

Once the naan is grilled, serve up the Chicken Curry with Mint. It was a lovely spring evening in the back garden listening to the cat birds demanding more grape jelly. They are so vocal! We finished off the evening with having a fire and making s’mores. I love family evenings like this.