Chicken Mulligatawny
Ingredients
- 3/4 lb chicken (cut into bite-sized pieces)
- 1/2 c chopped onion
- 1 T butter
- 3/4 c diced carrot
- 3/4 c diced leek
- 1/2 T curry powder (medium)
- 1/2 T ground cumin
- 1 t ground coriander
- 1 T minced ginger
- 3 cloves minced garlic
- 5 c chicken stock
- 1/4 t salt
- 1/4 t pepper
- 1 T lemon juice
- 8 oz canned coconut milk
- 1/2 c basmati rice
- 1 c diced apple
- 3/4 c diced celery
- 3 T almonds (toasted)
- 1 T chopped cilantro (fresh)
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 clove (freshly ground)
- 1/4 t ground red pepper flakes
- 1 cardamom (freshly ground)
Method
Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and place in the slow cooker insert.
Grind the cumin, coriander, clove, and cardamom pods, red pepper flakes together using a mortar and pestle. Add the curry, salt, and pepper.
In a skillet over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the onions and cook until softened. Add the carrots and leeks and cook for a couple more minutes. Stir in the garlic, ginger, and spices (curry, cumin, coriander, cloves, cardamom, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper) until they become fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the celery and apples. Stir to combine. Place in the slow cooker on top of the chicken and add the chicken broth.
Cook on low for 6-8 hours. Change to the high setting and stir in the coconut milk and lemon juice.
Heat for 30-45 minutes, while you cook the rice separately.
Stir the cooked rice into the Mulligatawny and scoop into bowls.
Garnish with toasted almonds and freshly chopped cilantro.
Notes
SJ Note 13 March 2010: Many slow cooker recipes use over-processed ingredients I'd rather avoid; some of these I can simply make myself or find alternatives I prefer. But the blog where this recipe originated, freshslowcooking.com, seeks to slow cook without any of the over-processed foods, it looks like, which attracted me to it. Mulligatawny is a fairly common soup here, I see it in cans in the soup aisle constantly. I can't remember if I've tried that stuff or not, but this recipe sounded interesting enough that we tried it.
We had to make a few modifications: Chris can't have coconut, nuts, and some other things, so we left out the coconut milk and almonds. I'm still not sure if I like curry powder or not (I do in some things, not in others), so we reduced it from the 1 T called for to 1/2 T. We don't like brown rice, so we used white basmati rice instead of brown basmati rice. And I plain forgot to put the cilantro on top at the end. And I threw two whole chicken legs in at first (still kinda frozen, since I forgot to thaw them beforehand), and at the end pulled the meat off, broke it into small pieces, and tossed it back in.
I know, at this point it's really a different recipe. But still, a lot went into our pot - a lot of spices, a lot of vegetables - and not a lot of flavor came out. It was quite bland in the end. We added salt at the table, and that perked it up, and I figure the recipe was developed with store-bought broth instead of homemade stock (my stock is salt-free, as taking away salt proves more trouble than it's worth ;-) ). It was edible, but only a mediocre dinner, so we threw out the leftovers (the amounts listed on this page make about 4 good bowls of soup) and the recipe; it'll require too much tweaking to be useful. It's also way too much work to have something so bland at the end - we could have opened a can of soup and had the same taste.