Indian Butter Sauce

This past weekend was a Cooking Without Borders adventure; featuring Indian Butter Chicken.

Delish.

I made a jumbo batch of sauce...enough for at least four meals. Two batches were packaged up and placed in the freezer. One was for dinner with C&S. The rest was made for a work potluck. The batch for dinner tonight was altered slightly and it was super tasty!

Let's begin.

You start by sauting onions in olive oil.

Add jalapeno, ginger and Garam Masala spice blend.

When you add the spice, the pan will start to dry out.

Add tomato sauce, stir to incorporate. Then the mix is blended until smooth. Chicken broth is added.

Butter and heavy cream are added to the sauce.

Boneless, skinless chicken breast, diced up, are added to the sauce and simmered until cooked.

Here are my two packages of sauce, heading to the freezer for dinner at a later time.

As I mentioned, I wanted to try something special this go around. So I marinaded some chicken in lemon, olive oil, salt, pepper and some Balti spice blend. This was some tasty chicken on it's own!!! But, I chopped it up for the Indian Butter Sauce.

The grilled chicken simmered in the sauce, sharing some of it's grill essence with the sauce. A very pleasing dinner!!!

I know Lady B made this. She shared her comments elsewhere, but I want to share them here as well:

We made this Tuesday night last week and LOVED it so much we called ScottE that night to thank him. Here are my notes:

We had tomato paste on hand, but didn't realize until it came time to put it in that it was "Italian Herb" tomato paste. I don't think it made a bit of difference in the taste of the final dish, it was just something that was kind of funny.

We used salted butter because that's what we had on hand.

We served it with a side of fresh spinach sauteed in olive oil and garlic. This is what I always serve when I make chicken with one of the Trader Joes Indian simmer sauces. We like it.

I had beer with it (I always like beer with Indian food), Lord B had his usual rum and coke. I think beer and Indian food are a great combo.

After our first helping, we got seconds, and the seconds tasted even better. It had kind of cooled a little on the stove and I guess it had more time to sit and absorb the flavors because our seconds were YUM.

One thing I'm glad we did by the recipe, though I was tempted to do differently, was just cooking the outside of the chicken bits and then letting the rest cook in the sauce. It was tempting to fully cook the chicken first then put in the sauce, but I think because I followed the instructions, the chicken was a lot more tender than it would have been had I cooked it fully before.

We are totally ruined on the Trader Joes simmer sauces now... which is a staple in our household for a quick meal. Well, I guess we'll continue to buy them, but every time we eat them I'm sure we'll be like "wow, this does not come close to ScottE's butter chicken."

My mom came over the next day and split the leftovers with me and she LOVED it. And, I know it's authentic, because my brother lives in India, and my mom has visited him there several times, and she said she ate a lot of butter chicken while in India... and this was just as good as what she had over there. A great compliment!!!

Thank you ScottE, we are in love with this recipe and think it would be great for when company comes for dinner. A+++++

Thanks for sharing Lady B! And thanks for the great comments. I had my dinner with beer. Very good. Refreshing. I did make this batch extra mild, again, it's going to be part of a potluck at work, so I wanted to make it accessible for as many people as possible.