Devilish fragrant chicken curry

If you don't have the Thermomix Devil of a cookbook well you should. Just go buy it right now. Every dollar spent goes toward safe habitats for Tasmanian devils who are not infected with the horrendous cancer that is threatening to make them extinct. For more information check out the Devil Island Project.
Anyway we had the pleasure of attending a cooking class with Fiona Hoskin on Friday night and sampling this curry so I thought I would give it a try.
After a rough start when I discovered I needed fenugreek seeds not leaves, which necessitated a trip to the Oriental food store and caused me to buy delicious things to use later... I followed the recipe in the book but added a couple of extra tomatoes and doubled the chicken.

I am so glad I did because that is a LOT of sauce, and you can't just fill up on sauce and rice if you are counting points.
While it was cooking I went and cut some mint and pulled out my trusty stick blender. I know the TM does everything the stick blender can do (better, stronger, faster) but I can't afford a second machine and often mine is busy. Besides my stick blender is so pretty I couldn't let it go. If the Thermomix put out limited edition red machines it would sell like crazy.
So while the curry cooked I made a mint chutney.

Use a bunch of mint, a spring onion, a shake of tabasco, 3 tablespoons greek yoghurt and a generous squeeze of lime juice. This is just so beautiful - to taste as well as look at. And it cools your mouth for hot curries (this one isn't hot by the way)

So after only about half an hour at home I have a lovely curry made from scratch. I needed to cook rice for the crowd, but as the recipe includes coconut cream there were really no points left to spare for rice for Taff and I so it was back to the old cauliflower trick.

Which meant this delicious plate full came in at only 10 ProPoints so we had some roti bread too!

this plate does not contain rice

Dinner in a hurry

Taff has to be somewhere tonight. So food in a hurry. We bought 3 pork scotch fillet steaks on special - 8 WW ProPoints of deliciousness there so the sides needed to be pretty low in points values.

I really love Jane Kennedy's book Fabulous Food minus the boombah (apparently she does apps now too - how cool is that?) So we started off our plans with her Spanish mushrooms with thyme - we have fresh thyme from the garden and these are just heavenly. Here they are ready to go in the oven. There is wine, oil and yoghurt in these too but not a lot of anything so very low in ProPoints values.

We also cooked her asparagus and cherry tomatoes - baked with garlic and olive oil this is pure deliciousness and has converted most of the monkeyhouse into asparagus lovers. (from the other book OMG! I can eat that?) The recipe is on page 132 with the salmon but we only cooked the salmon once - we do the vegetables at least weekly.

She mentions mock rice (which is actually cauliflower) in those books and I found detailed instructions on how to make it in my Thermomix here It is so easy to make - you just put your cauliflower in the TM31 like this:

And after 5 seconds (yes only 5 seconds!) on reverse it looks like this, and you steam it for 10 minutes while the other food is cooking... really so easy

That left the pork steaks - how to quickly add flavour and deliciousness to them? I had bought some sichuan peppercorns for tomorrow nights meal so I went to the Thermomix Taste of Asia cookbook and made sichuan salt and pepper. Again so easy just bung it in, roast and grind and here it is.

Before:

After:

We put the vegetables in the oven, turned on the TM to cook the cauliflower and put the steaks on in my trusty cast iron pan - don't the grill marks look pretty?

After they were cooked we rubbed them with the pepper mix and sliced them to serve. Here is the finished meal - only 12 Weight Watchers ProPoints per serve.