Recipe
Chicken, chickpea, and spinach curry with rice
Chiara moved to Berlin for a job in 2019 and has been cooking Italian at people ever since, partly out of homesickness and mostly out of spite. She keeps a bag of Sardinian fregola in the cupboard that she rations like medicine. She has views on German tomatoes that she will share with you whether or not the subject comes up.
So it was genuinely surprising, the first time I visited, to be handed a bowl of curry.
Her explanation was that a Berlin winter is not an Italian winter, that it begins in October and ends whenever it feels like it, and that at some point in her second year she understood that the food of a warm country will not save you in a cold one. She had adopted the curry the way she adopts everything, completely and with strong opinions attached: chicken thighs and never breast, chickpeas in alongside the chicken because a curry with only meat in it is a waste of a good pot, and spinach stirred through at the end so there is something green in the bowl.
She was right about all three. This is the most useful pot in this half of the book. It costs about three euros a portion, it doubles with no extra effort, and it freezes flat in bags that thaw in a sink of warm water in the time it takes to shower. It gets better over three days, which is the opposite of what chicken usually does. And it reheats in an office microwave without any of the compromises the rest of this chapter has to negotiate, because it is essentially a stew, and a stew is a dish that has already been reheated once by design.
Use a decent curry powder or a jar of paste. Grinding your own spice blend is a lovely way to spend a free Saturday and a ludicrous thing to attempt at 19:40 on a Tuesday, and this book is mostly about Tuesdays.
- Prep 15 min
- Cook 30 min
- Serves 2
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Brown the chicken in the oil in a heavy pot over high heat until coloured on the outside. It does not need to cook through. Lift out.
6 min
- 2
Lower the heat, add the onion with a pinch of salt, and cook until soft and golden at the edges.
7 min
- 3
Add the garlic, ginger and curry powder and stir for a full minute until the spices smell toasted rather than dusty. This minute is the difference between a good curry and a flat one.
1 min
- 4
Return the chicken with the tomatoes, chickpeas and coconut milk. Simmer uncovered until the sauce has thickened and the chicken is tender.
20 min
- 5
Stir in the spinach and let it collapse. Taste hard for salt. Finish with coriander and a squeeze of lemon.
3 min
- 6
Cook the rice in plenty of salted water while the curry simmers, drain, and serve alongside.
12 min
Variations
Red lentils in place of the chickpeas thicken the sauce and make it cheaper still. A diced sweet potato added at step 4 stretches it to a fourth portion. Swap the spinach for frozen peas or green beans. For a drier, more North Indian result, leave out the coconut milk and add 100 ml of water instead. Leftover roast chicken works: skip step 1 and add the meat at the end. Freezes flat in bags for 3 months.