Mango chicken? Mmmm, yum!
I also like apricot chicken and lemon chicken.
The mango chicken is a very mild Indian curry. The kids really like it. I've been buying butter chicken ready meals from Aldi and I was thinking that I can make a big batch of butter chicken in about half an hour (from go to whoah) and then freeze it in a few separate containers, and they can have better food, more of it, and cheaper. So I bought a sachet of butter chicken sauce and a sachet of mango chicken sauce a few days ago.
I've made it from scratch before and it is way better, but even just making it from a packet gives you a similar outcome to most Indian restaurants.
Speaking of apricot chicken and lemon chicken, I remember going to an Italian place on the NSW Central Coast (less than a couple of hours north of Sydney) in a tourist area with lots of restaurants. We've eaten at a couple of places around there and they are invariably rubbish, relying on the heavy weekend tourist trade rather than locals (who would find out how bad these places are and boycott them). My wife ordered a dish that was a bit expensive and the description on the menu sounded really good. It was chicken and salmon in some kind of tomato sauce. I tried it and it was just bland and yuck, and I told her "I'll bet they just used a jar of Chicken Tonight to make that". I ordered a gluten free pizza, all they did was charge me an extra $5 and give me a normal pizza (this common belief that food allergies are imaginary is seriously dangerous). Let's just say we had to make a couple of unscheduled stops on the trip home the next day and we had to drive with the windows down. Bloody idiots. For me it's just an unpleasant inconvenience. For someone else it could be life-threatening.
So anyway, the night after we got back to Sydney I bought a jar of Chicken Tonight that I thought would best approximate the flavour and I cooked up some chicken in the sauce. My wife said "this is really good, we should make this more often". And I tried it and it actually was really good. Which makes me wonder how they managed to make a $20 dish in a restaurant so bloody awful that it wasn't a tenth as good as a family-sized meal made with a $3 jar of Chicken Tonight?
(Al and Lestat are AWOL, someone around here has to pick up the slack and make some long rambling posts).
