One of the first recipes I learned when I started cooking back in 2012 was a chicken, sweet potato and coconut curry from the BBC Good Food magazine. It’s remained a firm favourite, one I cook regularly and always really enjoy.
Before my mother died, I used to cook for her on a Sunday – she was a woman with a very bland palate, didn’t even like tomatoes or onion which made it very difficult to cook for her at times. But she absolutely loved this dish, I didn’t even tell her it was a curry and it’s so mild she couldn’t even tell.
It also has no capsaicin in it which makes it perfect for me!
serves 2
prep: 10 minutes
cook: 25 minutes
Ingredients
1 tbsp sunflower oil
2 tsp mild curry paste
2 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
2 medium-sized sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-size pieces
4 tbsp red split lentils
300ml chicken stock
400ml can coconut milk
175g frozen peas
Method
Heat the oil in a deep frying pan or wok, stir in the curry paste and fry for 1 minute.
Add the chicken, sweet potatoes and lentils and stir to coat in the paste, then pour in the stock and coconut milk.
Bring to the boil, then simmer for 15 minutes.
Tip in the peas, bring back to the boil and simmer for a further 4-5 minutes. Season to taste before serving.
Now, as is fairly typical for my kitchen adventures, this didn’t quite go to plan. We’d peeled and diced the sweet potatoes and, when getting the chicken breasts out of the freezer to defrost, discovered we only actually had one, rather than two. But we decided to carry on with the recipe is it was so it was a little potato heavy compared to when I normally make it, but still really really tasty.
I just use a chilli-free korma pasta from Tesco but obviously you can change up which heat of curry paste you like depending on your taste, and it would be pretty easy to spice this one up if you felt so inclined.
We served it with brown, long-grain rice (because apparently Li had no basmati rice in her cupboard? Not sure how that happened, but I’ll be getting some when we do the groceries!) and Li also popped over to the Indian takeaway 4 doors down the road to pick up some garlic naan bread.
Tags: bbc good food, chicken, chicken stock, coconut milk, curry paste, peas, red split lentils, sweet potato