Butter Chicken

This has been a crazy week. My oldest had his last day of school yesterday and I seem to have a to-do list a mile long. I would love to say that I am super organized and am great about getting everything done. Before kids I had lists and everything was always done on time or early. All that changed after my youngest was born. With two kids there are days that my house looks like the same disaster it did at the start (even though it has been cleaned 10 plus times) and instead of taking items off my to-do list I have added more. So I have learned to keep at least a few simple meals plans on stand-by every week. Without these quick dinners things would turn into chaos at dinner time. One of the best things I have learned is to utilize my crockpot. I can normally carve out about a half an hour in the morning to prep and put everything nicely in the crockpot for dinner. Then I don't have to stress when my two boys are in the kitchen screaming for food and my husband joins in after getting home from work. The May issue of All You magazine had a recipe for Butter Chicken, which with 20 minutes of prep and 30 grams of protein, looked perfect for my busy week.

This recipe has 12 ingredients. It takes 20 minutes of prep and 5 hours and 15 minutes of cooking and makes 8 servings. I had the worst time finding garam masala in my area. All the large grocery stores have decided that everyone in my area only wants to buy 10 types of onion and garlic powders and little else. Insert mini rant on the horrible food choices in my state, if we aren't given quality ingredients to cook with then how do you expect our kids to grow up healthy! I digress from my rant. I was finally able to find the garam masala at the small Lebanese market by my house. This market has saved me so many times when I needed specific spices. They have a great selection and the prices are reasonable. I miss when small grocery stores were in every neighborhood and you could actually find things that were needed. I had no problems finding any of the other ingredients and made no modifications. I chose to leave off the cilantro at the plate since I was serving it to my kids. Instead of a food processor, I used my blender. Honestly, I use my blender more frequently, I find that it does a superior job when combining liquids or liquifying. My onions took much longer than 7 minutes to cook. I prefer my onions to be completely caramelized before placing in the crockpot, it makes for a greater amount of flavor. I followed the remainder of the recipe as written.

The sauce in this recipe was delicious. There was more sauce than the magazine photo represents. I would say most of the dish is sauce and then a small amount of meat. The photo is a little misleading, it makes it seem that the dish is mostly chicken with very little sauce. Either they were using breasts with no fat or miraculously found thighs with no fat! I actually liked that the dish was full of sauce, it made a great topping to rice and still had lots of protein from the chicken. If I made it again I would pulse the sauce longer like I did so it had the larger amount of sauce, the sauce was delicious and the best part of the dish.

For the recipe go to Butter Chicken.