Around the World for Turkey Madras ⋆ Our Growing Paynes

It’s official, we’ll have a white Christmas.  Unless warm weather comes our way but given that it will be a low of 0F/-18C tomorrow I think we’re safe.  We woke to everything white with about 8″ of snow.  It happened overnight so most people were off the roads which is the way it should be.  It’s amazing that no matter how cold it is cleaning up the snow will make you hot.  I know our kids will come home today all flushed from being outside.  I fear my son may be a bit disappointed as the snow is dry so not the best for snowball fights.

For my last meal of turkey leftovers I decided to go the Indian Cuisine route and to a bit of Madras.  It’s not exact to the recipe as I couldn’t find curry leaves and also used jalapenos instead of green chilies as that is what I had on hand.

I find it interesting as I connect to people globally what is available for ingredients and what I may take for granted.  I did try with the curry leaves but it was a fool’s errand.  There isn’t much demand for curry leaves in my little corner of the world though we are pretty lucky to get a lot of things.  But when I posted about our cheesecake there were some comments about wondering what graham crackers were.  Now I wonder if a cheesecake is made in Europe what the base is.  I know I need to special order a few things from England to get my fixes and when we move back there I’ll have to do the same for some American ingredients.  As much as I am a fan of buying local I am glad we are able to get a few things here and there.  Cheese and onion crisps for example. 🙂

The base recipe for my dish came from “Best Ever Curry Cookbook” and then I made it mine.

For this dish I used our cast iron wok.  It cooks quickly especially since the turkey was already cooked.

In the wok I heated up about 3T of vegetable oil and sauteed about half an onion and a couple of chopped cloves of garlic.

I sliced up a jalapeno, removing the seeds, and added it to the mixture.  Then I grated fresh ginger over the onion and pepper.  I put in a couple of teaspoons.

I added about 1 1/2 cups of shredded turkey and stirred well.  Add 3T of tomato paste, a pinch of fresh ground fenugreek, 1/4 tsp of fresh ground fennel seeds, 1-2tsp of ground coriander, 2 tsp of chili powder, 1/4 tsp of ground tumeric, salt to taste, 1 1/2 cups of turkey stock (the recipe calls for water) then stir well.  I upped some of the seasoning to bring the flavours we like out.  Then add about 2T of lemon juice.

I wasn’t make a lot of this as we were making naan to go with our mango chutney but I wanted to add a bit of colour to the dish and bump it up a little so I chopped up some yellow peppers and added it to the dish.

Saute for a couple minutes then serve.  This dish takes about 10 minutes to cook so it’s a great dish for a weeknight when things are a bit crazy.

The mango chutney went very well with this dish as it was a little sweet with a bit of heat.