Chicken Tikka Masala with Pasta Sauce

What do you do when you really want to make chicken tikka masala (CTM) but don’t have the ingredients that differentiate CTM from a plain ol’ chicken curry? Nor do you have the time to even make proper chicken tikka?

You take shortcuts. Lots of them.

Step 1: Shuffle through the pantry, messing up your mom’s neat organization of various foods, ingredients, and snacks.

Step 2: Panic when you realize you don’t have tomato sauce, tomato paste, or even tomatoes. There’s no heavy cream in the fridge. What now?

Step 3: Adapt. React. Readapt. Apt.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Whoever got that reference gets a brownie point which may or may not be redeemable for an actual brownie.

The only ingredient we had that was remotely close to tomatoes or tomato sauce was….pasta sauce. Plain ol’ marinara sauce. It’s basically tomato sauce with Italian seasoning…right? Sure.

We didn’t have heavy cream either, and not much milk. We did, however, have the tub of sour cream which my dad had accidentally bought in a much-too-large size. So I ran with it. And here’s my rough estimated recipe (I’m writing this a couple of days after the fact because I hadn’t planned on sharing the inauthentic recipe but decided to nonetheless because if it happened to me, it could happen to others too. Right? Sure.)

Ingredients

• 2 lbs boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into little cubes

• 2 tbsp canola oil or butter or ghee

• 2 tsp minced garlic

• 2 tsp minced ginger

• 2 tsp cumin powder

• 1 tsp paprika

• 1/2 tsp turmeric

• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 1/2 cups pasta sauce

• 1 cup chicken broth

• 1 cup sour cream

Recipe

1. Heat up the oil in a heavy bottom pot or large wok. One that is big enough to hold all of the chicken plus the sauce. Eyeball it! I used a 4 qt pot.

2. Carefully add the cubed chicken breast (patted dry) to the oil and let it cook, flipping the pieces around occasionally until they’re mostly cooked through. Then remove the chicken from the pot and place in a heatproof bowl.

3. Add some more (up to a tbsp) of oil to the pot. Once heated, add the ginger and garlic and stir. Let ‘em sizzle in the oil and bloom a bit.

4. Then add all of the spices and stir, stir, stir. It’ll smell and smoke up a bit, so you might want to turn on the exhaust on your range hood.

5. Once the spices have bloomed a bit as well, now is the time to add the rando—the pasta sauce. Add the chicken broth as well, stirring and letting it simmer for 5-10 minutes until it’s as thick as you prefer it.

6. Optional/Recommended: If the mixture is chunky from the type of pasta sauce you used, you can use an immersion blender to blend the mixture until it is smooth.

7. Next, carefully pour the mostly-cooked chicken back into the pot. Bump the heat to medium, cover, and let simmer for 5 minutes to ensure the chicken is cooked through.

8. Remove the pot from heat and uncover it; slowly stir in the sour cream until it’s fully incorporated.

9. Garnish with some cilantro (which I didn’t have on hand) and serve with naan or fluffy basmati rice!