Chicken Katsu Curry with Vegetable-Fried Rice

This is another one of those recipes where I tell myself it’s not too bad because there’s a lot of vegetables on my plate. I also feel a bit guilty for calling this a recipe as I used a lot of ready-made ingredients!

Do lots of vegetables make up for the fried chicken?!

Sometimes you just need a quick and easy dish you can put together with some store cupboard items!

Start by making the vegetable fried rice;

• 1 tbsp toasted sesame oil
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1 red onion, chopped
• 200g chestnut mushrooms, sliced
• 1 red pepper, cut into thin strips
• Microwave rice – we like Tilda’s brown basmati rice
• 200g spinach

Heat the oil, add the garlic, onions, mushrooms and red pepper and stir-fry until cooked. Add the rice and cook for another 2 minutes. Add the spinach and cook with the vegetables and rice until wilted. Cover and set aside.

The chicken and katsu sauce:

• 1 chicken breast per person (depending on the size of the pan used and number of people eating, you may want to cook the chicken in batches in order to not overfill the pan)
• cornflour, enough to coat the chicken breasts
• panko breadcrumbs, around 25g per chicken breast
• 1 egg, beaten
• 6 tbsp sunflower oil
• 1 jar of katsu curry paste – we used Tesco’s ‘Ingredients Katsu Curry Paste’

Heat the sunflower oil in a large frying pan. Coat the chicken breasts in the cornflour, dredge in the egg and coat in panko breadcrumbs. Repeat for all the chicken breasts.

Cook the chicken in the oil until the breadcrumbs are golden and the chicken is cooked through. Set aside on kitchen roll for 2 minutes.

Make the katsu curry sauce as per the jar’s instruction. The rice should still be hot so everything can be served now without the need to re-heat anything.

Like I said, I think it might be cheating to call this a recipe since the sauce is from a jar, however it’s nice to be able to try something new and it’s inspired me to find a cook-from-scratch katsu sauce recipe to try next time!