Chicken (or whatever) Curry

You can find all the Indian cookbooks you want, but you'll never make curry at home as good as your favorite restaurant. It's like that with all restaurants. Either it's the ingredients they have access to, their cooking equipment that gets super hot or can grind anything into a super smooth sauce, or they just don't give a f@#$ and throw in four sticks of butter which we would never think of doing at home.

Disabuse yourself that you'll ever make any of your favorite restaurant dishes at home. The fun of cooking is in chasing those tastes down. You won't find them all, but you'll know more than when you started and probably find something that'll be in your recipe card file for life.

Indian food commonly uses what we in America might think of as pie spices. Cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom. The awakening American palate wouldn't have thought to put cinnamon on anything but buttered toast or in an apple pie fifteen years ago. Along with these you'll find those common equator spices: cumin, coriander (seed and leaf - cilantro), ginger, hot peppers, turmeric. And those versatile, ubiquitous alliums: onion and garlic.

Cinnamon
coriander
cumin
cilantro
nutmeg
cardamom
ginger
garlic
peppers
onions
turmeric

That's pretty much all you need for most any curry (not all at once, but you could run across a recipe that does use all of them). A few specialty spices will have you ready for any curry you might encounter.:

Fenugreek (seeds)
Fenugreek (leaves), they will probably be called kasuri methi or just methi leaves
Spice blends like garam masala, chaat masala, tandoori masala, etc.
asafoetida (hing)

If you have these things around you're halfway to becoming a curry head.

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