I first learned to love curry because of something my mother more or less threw together on her own.  She doesn't really know anything about proper curries or Indian cuisine, but rather I think decided to try and do something with "Curry Powder."  It was sweet, with coconut and raisins, used soy sauce for saltiness and volume, and the gravy was made with milk/flour and then thickened with peanut butter.  She then served it over egg noodles, and it was quite good.

This has inspired a lifelong love of curries and Indian food in general, which led me to learn more about cooking "real" Indian food.  Using that knowledge, I've re-worked my mother's concotion as follows.  Bizarre as it is, it is still one of the biggest hits with my friends.  

I apologize for poor quantities, but I've never really measured this one out very carefully - it's always been done by touch.

Chop up three boneless chicken breasts.  Chop up a small onion, a thumbs-length or so of ginger root, and six or seven garlic cloves, and paste them together in a blender.

Pour a fair amount of oil into a pan, and heat the oil.  Throw in a cinnamon stick or two, three or four cloves, four or five cardamon pods, a nice fistful of dried shredded coconut, and a goodly quantity of raisins.  Cook that for a bit - it should get aromatic rather quickly.  Then throw in the ginger/garlic/onion paste, and stir everything up.

Add a teaspoon or so of cumin, maybe two teaspoons of corriander, two teaspoons of tumeric, and anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon of chili powder, depending on how hot you like it.  The proportions are more important than the quantity -- you might want to add more if you are making a lot.

Stir everything up for a minute or two, until the spices turn everything into a brownish yellow.  Then throw in the chicken, and cook it until it's turned color on the outside.

Now add yogurt.  I use a lot, probably 4 or 5 cups, but the yogurt I get here in Japan is really watery, so I also like to add a bit of cream to thicken it up.  The yogurt will be the main quantity of your sauce, though, so if you want a lot, add a lot of yogurt.  Be careful, though, because if you add too much it will dilute the flavor of everything.  Bring the mix to a boil, stirring a lot.

Add salt.  I have an instinct for salt, and just add the "right" amount, so I can't really say exactly how much - probably no less than a tablespoon.  The thing about salt is that the mixture will completely change its flavor once you get the right amount of salt in it, and then not really change much at all if you keep adding salt, and then will all of a sudden seem REALLY salty.  So if you taste it and it's kinda bland, chances are you need to add a bit more salt, but if it's bland and you can already sort of taste salt, than you're just screwed.  Add curry powder and hope for the best.

Once you have the mixture up and bubbling, you throw in the peanut butter.  I use cheap factory peanut butter, Skippy or Jif brand, because it melts easily and its sweet.  The sweetness is important for this recipe.  So, if you use non-sugared natural peanut butter, you will need to add sugar separately.  I have heard that peanut butter is not very well known in Europe.  In Japan, they have a thin, frosting-like substance that they sell as peanut butter, but that has no relation to the real item as best as I can tell.  Add in several big dollops of peanut butter, and stir it in until its melted.  Add peanut butter until the sauce/gravy/whatever is nice and thick.  If it gets too thick, though, pour in a little milk.

Then taste it.  It should be slightly sweet, with a complex blend of the various Indian spices laid over a peanuty base.  If it's bland, either you used far too little spice in the beginning, or it needs salt.  I like it over white rice now, but it does go quite well with egg noodles as well.  Oddly, it goes well with hot soba noodles as well - add it into the soup before the noodles.

That's my blasphemous peanut-butter raisin-coconut curry.