Arati's Chicken Curry

Tracking down family recipes isn't easy. The mothers who made the meals famous learned from their mother or mother-in-law over the course of many years of coaching and supervision, so that the technique becomes part of her DNA long before it's ever written down. Perhaps this is part of what makes "home food" so awesome, as it's about about the people and the place as much as the recipe. Try as we may to recreate it on the other side of the world, it's not always easy to replicate.

One morning, before the rest of the family was up and moving, I camped out in my mother-in-law's kitchen while she cooked the day's basic chicken curry - the same chicken curry she's prepared for lunch each day for the past 31 years - and wrote down her every step.