Cape Malay Chicken Curry and Mielie Pap

[Mike Buckley]

This is a terrific dish from South Africa that I fixed for the first time two days ago using Food & Wine recipes. The distinctive flavor of the curried chicken, which is a very mild curry not at all like so many Indian curries, comes from the mango chutney and lime juice. The curried chicken sits atop a yellow food that is called polenta or grits throughout much of the world, but South Africans call it Mielie Pap.

Subscribe to see EXIF info for this image (if available)

Photo of the Setup
The only reason the white reflector was needed was to display the fork mostly in bright tones. When brightening a curved surface, the reflector has to be much, much larger than the area being brightened. That explains why the reflector is so much larger than the fork. When lighting moist surfaces such as the sauce in this dish, we have to be careful to position the light sources so they create as little glare as possible. The glare is actually a reflection of the light source. To understand the related details of that, look up family of angles. Three focus-bracketed images at Nikon step size 3 were stacked in Helicon focus at default settings. I intentionally left parts of the image out of focus.

Subscribe to see EXIF info for this image (if available)

 

[Hylander]

Another masterpiece of the culinary and photographic lighting arts. I'm not much of a cook but I'm too much of an eater. Is the polenta flavored with saffron?

 

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks, Bill!

Is the polenta flavored with saffron?

Nope, no saffron. It's made from corn, which explains the yellow color that saffron would give it. The recipe called for stone-ground, white polenta but I couldn't find either characteristic, at least not in a reasonably small quantity.

 

[Butlerkid]

Looks delicious, Mike! Nicely photographed! Would you make it again? I couldn't find the recipe on the Food and Wine website, but several other sites came up when I Google "Cape Malay Chicken Curry".............

I have a similar appetizer recipe using shrimp instead of chicken. It includes shrimp and curry and is topped with mango chutney and toasted coconut and is served in phyllo cups. Folks RAVE about it and always ask me to fix it.....

 

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks for both the compliment and the recipe, Karen. I bookmarked the recipe because it looks great and because I've always wanted to try fixing something that goes well in frozen phyllo cups.

Would you make it again?

It's already on the list of dishes to be repeated regularly throughout the year. I generally try to repeat a main dish in no less than two months unless it's a leftover in the freezer and I'm running out of storage space.

I also wasn't able to find the Food & Wine recipe online, which really surprised me because I've found their recipes in the past. The really funny part of the curried chicken recipe is that it tells you to preheat the oven at 400 degrees. It never mentions the oven again, as the entire recipe is cooked on the stove top.

 

[Allan]

Oh, does that look good!

Hey, if you want a challenge by a Domino's pizza and try to make it look good. Whenever I see an ad for one on tv I think that I would not want to eat one of them.

 

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks, Allan!

if you want a challenge buy a Domino's pizza and try to make it look good.

Way too funny!

 

[drr1531]

Another nicely presented food image, Mike. My inclination would be to include the whole plate which you've demonstrated isn't at all necessary. It's about the food not the crockery. Nicely done.

It's interesting how many different names corn meal mush has around the world. And regional preferences for either white or yellow corn meal. In the Dutch Caribbean they use yellow meal and call it "funchi"(pronounced foonchy). They make it very thick and then slice it into portions. It's interesting that in the southern US white meal is typically used for grits but yellow meal for corn bread. And grits tend to be prepared thinner than what's typically called polenta.

 

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks, Dan!

crockery

Also thanks for teaching me that word. When setting out all the crockery, I suppose it's inappropriate to mention that it's all just a bunch of crock, huh.

 

[Binnur]

It looks nice, colorful and delicious Mike.