Guest Post: Easy Meals - The Fundamentals of a Delicious Curry

Hi readers! Please welcome Carolyn, who contributed this amazing post on curries for Cosmopolitan Currymania. Carolyn is a professional writer, working for the Texas-based orgainsation Blog Content Guild. In this post, she explained about Indian curries in a simplistic way and thus, made it possible even for a layman to understand what curries are all about!

Easy Meals: The Fundamentals of a Delicious Curry

Around the holidays, you and your friends may be eating American classics like ham, turkey, apple pie and mashed potatoes, but these easy meals get old, fast. Spice things up a bit by whipping up a great curry dish for you and your family to enjoy. Here are just some of the fundamentals to making a great curry.

There are plenty of different types of curry to choose from, but generally a good curry includes cumin seeds, coriander seeds, ginger, garlic, turmeric and cardamom. Always make sure to use fresh spices. Your curry dish will always taste delicious if you grind spices yourself just before their use. If you don’t have a lot of time to work with you can buy a curry powder at any Indian grocer, just make sure you store it in an airtight environment. Mostly, curry also includes onions, ginger and garlic.

Take your pick of a meat, cottage cheese or vegetable to be your main ingredient for the curry sauce. The sauce or gravy is created with typical Indian ingredients, such as yogurt, cream and coconut milk, and sometimes, flour can be added to thicken the gravy. Your ingredients will differ depending on the type of curry you are shooting for. For example, coconut milk is used in Ceylon curries, while cream is used for pasanda. 

Now for the fun stuff: cooking up your curry! Once you have all of your ingredients, heat up the pan and get to business. First, throw some oil into the frying pan on about a medium heat, adding onions as oil heats. Cook onions until slightly brown. Add curry paste with some garlic, grated ginger and chilies. If you are hankering a tomato-based curry, throw in the tomatoes at this point, until the tomatoes turn into a pulp. Then, toss your main ingredient into the mix. You can use stock, coconut milk, yogurt or water to simmer the ingredients, depending on your curry recipe. Cover the pan until your main ingredient is fully cooked. Once cooked, stir your curry up and have a little taste test. Add spices as needed and garnish with some sliced nuts or coriander leaves, if the recipe calls for them.

And voila! You have a delicious, customised curry to share (or simply enjoy on your own!). All you need is some naan and steamed rice to complete this wonderful, ethnic dish. Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?