Food of the World - Cardamom Chicken

This dish has a highly aromatic sauce flavoured with cardamom. The yoghurt makes the sauce deliciously creamy. If you drain youghurt overnight, this makes the sauce richer by getting rid of any excess liquid.

1.5kg chicken or chicken pieces
25 cardamom pods
4 crushed garlic cloves
3cm grated piece of ginger
300ml natural yoghurt
1 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
grated rind of 1 lemon
2 tbsp oil
400ml coconut milk
6 chillies, pricked all over
2 tbsp chopped coriander
3 tbsp lemon juice

Remove seeds from the cardamom pods and crush them in a pestle and mortar. Ina blender mix the garlic and ginger with 50ml yoghurt to make a paste. Add the cardamom, pepper and grated lemon rind. Spread this over over the chicken pieces, cover and leave in the fridge overnight.

Heat the oil in a heavy-based frying pan and brown the chicken pieces. Add the remaining yoghurt and coconut milk, bring to the boil, then add whole chillies and coriander leaves. Simmer for 20-30 minutes. Season with salt and stir in the lemon juice.

Food of the World - Chicken, Coconut and Galangal Soup

This is one of the classic soups of Thailand. There are a few variants of it and you can skip on ingredients if you don't have something at the moment. You can also use prawns, fish or vegetables instead of chicken.

400 ml coconut milk
1 lemon grass stalk
5 cm piece of galangal or you can use ginger instead
3 shallots, smashed
400 g skinless chicken fillets
2 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp palm sugar ( I used brown cane sugar)
200 g baby tomatoes (as you can see in the picture, I used normal-sized tomatoes, worked pretty well)
150 g button mushrooms
3 tbsp lemon juice
5 kaffir lime leaves

Put the coconut milk, lemon grass, galangal pieces and shallots in a sucepan or wok and bring to a boil. Add the chicken, fish sauce and palm sugar and simmer, stirring constantly for 5 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through. Add the tomatoes and mushrooms and simmer for 2-3 min. Add lemon juice, lime leaves in the last few seconds, taking care not to let the tomatoes lose their shape. It's a bit tricky if you are using whole tomatoes cut into pieces, but unless you stir vigorously, it should work out just fine. Garnish with coriander.