Food and Cooking

Honestly we put way more effort into marinating our chicken than the actual sauce (caveat: we’re very white, and this is all picked up from reading). Meat’s expensive and Aldi’s chicken quality is… not great, but marinating it helps out a lot.

For 6 pounds of chopped chicken breast, we do the following:

• first marinade: 5 tbsp lemon juice, 1 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp chili powder, 1 tbsp paprika
• smoosh all around, let sit in the fridge for ~30 min
• second marinade: 1.5 cups plain Greek yogurt (this could probably be reduced to ~1 cup too), 6 tbsp ginger garlic paste (we load up on big jugs from our local Indian market, so much easier than making from scratch), 5 tbsp oil, 3/4 tsp turmeric, 2 tbsp garam masala, and 1 tbsp fenugreek (also from our Indian market, bought whole then ground in batches)
• smoosh all around, keep chicken in the marinade the rest of the week while using it up.

It’s a decent amount of effort, but only doing it once a week helps. And whenever we get lazy and have to eat our chicken without marinating it because we forgot… it’s SO much drier and less flavorful.

(For the sauce we just use Aldi’s jarred butter chicken / korma / tikka masala. Korma is the best, the others are mediocre. They super rarely have jarred madras curry in the limited time section and that is amazing, imo actually spicy. Tragic they don’t sell it as regular stock.)