Pirate Curry

Skin the legs and thighs, mix up the first group of spices and rub it into the chicken meat an hour or so before starting to cook. Keep the cat away.

Sauté the onion, garlic, and ginger in the oils until the onion wilts. Don’t let the garlic burn. Then add the chicken and sauté gently, tumbling the meat regularly, until it browns slightly, about 15 minutes.

Make the coconut milk by putting the desiccated coconut and boiling water into the blender. Blend on a medium speed for a couple of minutes, let the mixture rest for five minutes, then strain it through cheesecloth (cheesecloth is good because you can wring it to get the last of the coconut essence out – put on rubber gloves if it is too hot to handle with bare hands). Then add the cinnamon stick, bay leaf, tamarind, and coconut milk to the chicken, and bring the mixture to a very low simmer, and simmer about an hour – until the chicken is tender. (Coconut milk made from desiccated coconut is far better than that which comes from a tin. Desiccated coconut keeps for a long time, so it is easy to keep it in inventory to accommodate sudden curry demands.)

When the chicken is tender, correct the sauce for texture and flavor. It will likely need a bit of cornstarch. Mix a tablespoon of cornstarch in cold water, and add this paste a teaspoon or two at a time, cooking after each addition so that you don’t get the sauce too thick. Then cook another five to ten minutes to get rid of the raw cornstarch taste. Then add the sprigs of basil, soy sauce, and fish sauce for salt and richness, a bit of lime if more sourness is desired, and a sliced fresh chili (with seeds if much more hotness is desired, without seeds for only a little more hotness) and cook another five minutes. The basil sprigs, the ginger, and the bay leaves are not intended to be eaten.

NOTES:

Serve this curry with either Chinese-style egg noodles (buy them fresh at the Chinese market) or plain basmati rice, and a sourish green vegetable like spinach, mustard greens, bok choy, tat soy, or snow peas. Garnish with chopped cilantro.

This curry is much better when made with all dark meat. The dark meat cooks up much more tender than white meat, which tends to get dry and stringy even when cooked in a sauce like this.

Tamarind comes in many forms. Sometimes it is sold in a dried block, in which case you need to tear off a piece, soak it in boiling water and push it through a sieve to get the seeds out of it. Sometimes it is sold in dried slices (the best) and the slices can be cooked in the sauce and then discarded like bay leaves (use four slices for this recipe). And sometimes it is sold as a paste in a little jar, which is sometimes less flavorful but is convenient.

Serve over brown basmati rice.