quickie curry

I went to a church sale recently and recovered a stack of cookbooks so tall I could barely carry them to the car. One of them, and perhaps the one that amuses me the most, is The Busy People's Cookbook, published in 1971. The premise is simple - you're busy, so these recipes all take less than 30 minutes. Many of them call for things like frozen vegetables, and call for them in quantities like 'one bag'.

Tacky though this may seem, I am a very busy person, and so I thought it might be useful to see if some of these produce anything resembling edible food. Accordingly, I've marked several recipes for experimentation, and last night I tried one called "Hurry Curry". I made a few changes to it, and here's the recipe I wound up with.

2 cups rice of choice
1 large chicken breast
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 cup sour cream
1&1/2 teaspoons curry powder

Start the rice on one burner. Cube the chicken and fire it up in a small skillet with your choice of lubricant.

In a large skillet, melt the butter, then saute the onions and garlic. Add the soup and coconut milk (I added a bit more than 1/4 cup of the latter just because), stir thoroughly. Then add the sour cream and the curry. I used red curry for this, although to be fair I would have preferred yellow. (Sadly red was all I could find while shopping this weekend, and I was in a hurry.) Stir this mix until it's smooth.

Your chicken should by this time be fully cooked, and if it's floating in fluids or oil or whatever else is in the skillet, you should drain that off. Put the chicken in the main skillet and let it cook for a bit - don't let it boil, but heat it through, as they say. At this point you're probably done, but I wound up forgetting the rice until the last minute, so I kept it simmering for a good fifteen minutes longer than I felt was necessary, then continued to let it sit in the skillet for a while after. I think this was actually a good choice, because it tasted dramatically better after that than when I was first ready to declare it done - your mileage may vary.

I was a little dubious about this, to be honest - I'm not much for sour cream, and the coconut milk was complete improv on my part - but the results are pretty awesome. I will say that as looks go, it's not the most appetizing dish I've ever prepared, but some minor presentation with a vegetable counteracted that easily, and it was quite tasty both immediately and left over. The process took a while longer than the book promised, but I did my own chicken prep instead of buying pre-cooked giblets (being lazy but not that lazy). Still the whole thing took less than an hour, and I probably could have made it an even 30 if I'd rushed.

Welcome

Yeah, yeah, another damn cooking blog. To say nothing of another damn blog for me. There is method to my madness, however. I have a theory that no one really wants to read random cooking entries in a blog that's not devoted to same, and the people who do want to read them will be happy to read a blog devoted to just that. (I read a dozen or so myself, in fact.) So to avoid spamming people who read me other places with endless talk of kitchen mishaps, I figure I'll just put them here, and if nobody reads them, so be it.

And hey, maybe someone will read them. If you are that person, hi!