chicken tikka masala

In February, I fell into an I Miss GBBO rabbit hole (my interest waned when Mel, Sue and Mary Berry left, although perhaps it’s my loss) and found myself on Chetna Makan, the talented semifinalist from the 2014 season’s YouTube page, watching her make her mom’s chicken curry. It looked absolutely amazing. I watched the video, “BEST Chicken Curry recipe!” three times, and, having failed to find the recipe online or in her cookbooks, did that thing I imagine we had to in the pre-internet era of food television: wrote down the recipe from what she was saying. My kids were in the backseat and I kept saying “shh! I need to hear what spice this is!” (I’m fun.)

I have so many dishes of Indian subcontinent origin on this site, but there hasn’t been a go-to chicken curry, just this sheet pan tikka, mostly because I didn’t know I needed one in my life. Silly Deb. But then I followed the recipe from my scrawled notes, we ate it for dinner, and absolutely did not shut up about it for at least three weeks after, telling everyone I saw about this “unbelievably good chicken curry” that would now be a staple in my cooking repertoire forever. I told friends to watch the video and make it, and would then text them a list of the changes I’d made and shockingly, this [“Watch and transcribe a 5-minute cooking video and then make these edits”] didn’t tempt anyone. I mean, if only I had an internet website I could share the edited recipe on and send them a link to? Nah, who needs that noise.

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