Spicy Almond Butter Chicken Curry - Healthy Recipe Ecstasy (2024)

This post is brought to you by my husband, Alasdair, the curry aficionado who has spent the better part of our relationship perfecting his curry recipe. I’ve spent just as long trying to convince him to blog about it…

A thousand years from now anthropologists will look back at life in the British Isles around the turn ofthe second millennium AD and propose alternative hypotheses for why the native population lived onAsian food. Why the preponderance of Indian restaurants? Why the diet of exotic spices and cookingstyles displaced from thousands of miles away? Why the cultural insistence on drinking the infusedleaves of a plant grown in the same region? Seeing as this is a food blog not a history blog, I will spareyou the journey through the rise and fall of the British Empire and 20th Century migration patterns andinstead sum this phenomenon up in three words:

British. Food. Sucks.

Beaten down by centuries ofpotatoes, pies, and mushy peas, British natives didn’t need much convincing to adopt the cuisine of a farflung region as their own. Chicken Tikka Masala is now widely accepted as the national dish.Bottom line – British people love curry.

In celebration of this phenomenon, Mrs HRx has asked me to share my curry recipe with you. This recipehas developed over a few years from a base recipe Michelle found, with a few tweaks here and there tosatisfy my own British-style curry tastes. If you’ve ever tried to make a curry you will know that it’s noteasy to get it right. My own attempts usually ended up more like spicy chicken soup. This is where therecipe Michelle found really caught my attention – a secret ingredient that makes it easy to get the right curry consistency that I would have never thought of – almond butter!

This ingredient, along withsoy sauce and rice vinegar, form the base of the sauce which can then be supplemented with whatevertickles your fancy. The fresh ginger adds great flavor and texture to the sauce (and it’s a “super food”according to Mrs HRx) so I like to be generous with the amount I put in. I also like spicy which comesfrom both the chilli-garlic paste and the fresh chillies added at the end. For those who don’t like tears running down their face when they eat curry, you can go lighter on the heat. This curry works equally well with pork, beefor shrimp as protein options, just like when you go to your favorite Asian restaurant.

Of course this, and any curry for that matter, is best served with a cold Indian lager. Cheers!