Gammon Tikka Masala with Polenta Chips.
A delicious bit of fusion cooking using easy stuff from the supermarket and no faff with extra seasoning. It's a great failing of human history that curries were invented in places that don't eat piggies. Although maybe it was the lack of the bacon buttie that spurred them on. Who knows? At least in Greece their ancient wisdom tells them that marinated pork on a kebab spit will bring joy to many...

For 2 helpings you'll need:
1 onion
1 chilli (from those bags of 3 mixed chillis. I like the red one.)
1 red and 1 green pepper (multibag)
2 unsmoked gammon rounds
350g-500g jar of low-fat/good-for-you/healthy-eating tikka massala sauce
500g pack of ready-made polenta (look around the dried peas section; looks like a slab of marzipan)
cooking oil, olive oil

Chop an onion and start to fry in a mix of olive oil and vegetable oil. Then slice open a small chilli. Remove up to half the seeds, depending on how hot you like it, then slice thinly and add to the pan. Slice a red and a green pepper into strips, cut the strips in half, and as the onions start to brown add the peppers. Now cut two supermarket unsmoked gammon rounds into thin strips, then cut across the strips to make cubes and stubby bits. Add those to the pan and keep it all moving and cooking for about 5 minutes or so - look to the gammon bits to see they're cooked.

Squeezing excess oil out, transfer it to a saucepan. Then add around 375g of supermarket low-fat tikka masala sauce. Heat it till it starts to bubble on the surface. Stir occasionally. Leave as long as you like, but at least 10 minutes. (I keep the rest of the sauce to pour over grilled bratwurst/frankfurters with chips).

Clean the frying pan and heat a little olive oil. Slice the polenta as thin as you like (2-3mm is thin and will take up a lot of oil but be more crispy, how I like it. 5-8mm is more normal (I think). Then cut the slices lengthwise into chips. Fry in the oil until they start to turn golden and crispy, then turn over. The thinner they are, the more tricky this is without breaking them. You may find wide tongs better than a spatula, but be careful not to scratch the pan. Drain on some kitchen towel.

Put the polenta chips on one side of a plate and a helping (half) of the curry on the other. Nyom nyom time.

If it's just for one, just do half the polenta, wrap the other half and it'll keep in the fridge a few days. Same with the curry - just take it out and re-heat it. You can always freeze some if you like, but I'm always ready for more the following day. I lightly toasted some granary bread, buttered and grilled it, then used that to dip into the second helping of curry. Very nice too.

You can try other curry sauces and other piggy products, but beware of salt from curing and salty sauces being too much. A bacon jalfrezi sounds nice, but sadly doesn't work like this. Maybe a home-made curry expert could do something with it?
( joefish It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks, Thu 5 Jul 2012, 11:42, Reply)