Indian Butter Chicken

I finally found a decent recipe that at least comes close to the kind of Indian food you would taste in a restaurant. The recipe is here, if you want it. There is even a video that goes along with it!

First I made a raw masala spice mix called tandoori masala which includes about 10 different spices. I then marinated chicken thighs overnight (= tender chicken) with that spice mixture, yogurt, lemon juice, fresh ginger, fresh garlic, salt, and chili powder.

 

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These chicken pieces then went under the broiler for about 10 minutes:

Meanwhile, I pureed some tomatoes in my lovely food processor.

I also chopped up some green chili peppers and minced some fresh garlic and ginger.

Into the pan went butter, a cinnamon stick, a bay leaf, and some cardamom powder (since I can't find the whole cardamom seeds anywhere!). Then in went the garlic and ginger for a minute or so. And finally the chili peppers, tomatoes, salt, and garam masala (this is another spice mixture, I found this one at an Indian market but it's also sold in local grocery stores).

I let this simmer and reduce until it looked like this:

I then added the sugar, dried methi leaves (the leaves were hard to find, I found them in Cali at a specialty Indian store) and the chicken and coated it well in the tomato sauce.

Then came the heavy cream!! Yum

Here I decided that I probably added three medium tomatoes and not the three large required because it didn't turn out near as red as the picture. Of course that could also be due to the fact that I left out the red/orange food dye.
But it still looked and tasted delicious: