Quick Chicken Bhuna

Serves: 4 people
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: about 20 minutes
Skill level: Competent
Equipment: Pestle and Mortar or spice mill; Frying pan

I think we all have a dish up our sleeve that we can cook without too much effort or too many ingredients, which yields a fantastic result at variance to the effort put in to it.  This recipe is a perfect example: Not a jar of sauce or tub of curry powder in sight, but no lengthy prep or extensive list of spices to buy-in and leave to expire, should you not cook spicy food often.
The sauce for this bhuna is aromatic with a gentle warmth and quite thick. Perfect for eating with chapati but goes equally well with rice or naan bread.

Ingredients

1 tbsp cardamon pods

8 cloves
1 tsp dried chilli flakes
8 pepper corns
Salt
Oil or ghee
6 diced chicken thighs or a whole chicken, jointed
4 cloves of garlic
Root ginger (about the same amount as the garlic)
Tub of onion salad crispies
Greek yoghurt
Coriander leaves

Method

Place the cardamon, cloves, chilli, peppercorns and a pinch of salt in the mortar then bash and grind with the pestle to reduce the spices to the size of ground pepper (the green pods of the cardamon won't go very small but that's fine)
Place the ground spices in a dry pan and place on a moderate or high heat until the spices start to smoke.
Pour in the oil or ghee and add the diced chicken.

Fry until browned all over.
Place a teaspoon of salt flakes in the mortar (add less if fine table salt), add the garlic cloves, peeled, and the same amount, by eye, of peeled root ginger.
Bash with the pestle to a paste and add to the pan.
Fry, stirring, for a few minutes until the chicken is essentially cooked through.
Add the tub of crispy, fried onions then a generous amount of Greek yoghurt to get a nice, thick sauce.
Heat through then add a handful of chopped coriander leaf before serving.


Note: You can substitute the tub of crispy onions with a whole onion fried in advance until browned.