The recipe:
The reason I held back from giving it was that he told me ingredients and procedure, not quantities, so I wanted to give it a trial run to let me guage what to give as the quantities.

BASE SAUCE
10 large onions, roughly chopped.
3 large tablespoons of cumin seeds very lightly toasted
about 1 litre of water.

Bring it all to the boil and then simmer for about 45 mins. Then, puree to a very fine soupy texture. Add 0.5 liters of sunflower oil and return to a low heat for about an hour until the onion particles have lost most of their water content and have browned slightly in the frying process. TURN OFF THE HEAT and immediately add 2 teaspoons of turmeric and 1.5 teaspoons of salt and 0.5 teaspoons of chilli powder. Then leave to cool.

THE CURRY (for 2 - 3 people)

Get some sunflower oil hot in a pan and add 2 tablespoons of homemade (grind in a pestle and mortar) ginger and garlic paste made in a 1:1 ratio by volume. Stir this constantly until it lightly browns - nothing extreme. Now add 2 - 3 tablespoons of tomato puree (the typical double concentrate one) and 2 teaspoons more of ground cumin this time. Stir for about 1 minute. Put in 1/2 a green pepper chopped quite small and half and onion chopped quite small.  Then laddle in about 0.3 litres of the base sauce after stirring it to incorporate the oil. Once this reaches a good rolling boil/fry chuck in 3 chichen breasts previously grilled tikka stylie (as per some other reliable recipe from here). Turn the heat to medium and give it a further 5 minutes and you're done. With the heat off chuck in a good helping of chopped fresh coriander and there you go.

em, me again. Correction: today is Saturday!! (what can I say? I'm a scientist, give me a break)
 

Hail fellow curry lovers,
After spending a while as a passive observer of this forum, and sharing in the joy of curry and the missery of the "close but no cigar" home curry cooking experience, I had a stroke of luck last night that I felt you should all know about. Cutting a long story short, my girlfriend and I were scavenging around a wee scottish town at close to midnight trying to find somewhere to get a good curry when we stumbled across a tandoori takeaway. At 11:50 we didn't dare pass by, but neither of us had been there before (and you know how that can go!) so we we're a little hessitant. Anyway, the place smelled wonderful and there was a queue at the door (and no pubs around that I could see), so in we went, the last customers. Now, my girldfriend is Pakistani and she frequently manages to get us some kind of better-than-normal treatment in these places and last night was no exception. When all the others had left and we were the only ones remaining she asked if we could come in and see the kitchen. After 2 minutes of quick and noisy tidying ("In case you think I'm a dirty person", he said!) we got to go into his kitchen and have a look. And it was pretty much what you would expect from a 2-man outlet. Then the amazing bit: my gf asked him outright for the recipe of the base sauce that was sitting in a massive tub in his cooler. And he gave it to us along with cooking instructions. Then, further to that, he cooked our order right in front of us and told us exactly what he was doing. Now 2 things: 1) he was making 2 batches of base sauce over low burner units at the back of the kitchen and one was further along than the other and they both seemed to confirm what he told us about the base sauce, and 2) when we got home and tried it, it was astonishingly delicsious and full of that what-the-hell-IS-that-? taste we're all trying to recreate. Now don't go thinking that because it was a wee scottish town and I'm scottish that I don't know the taste of a good curry: I've eaten curry all round brittain and in dozens of other countries for decades. So this was the real thing. But there's a catch. NOTHING he told me was revolutionary, nothing hard to do, nothing that isn't right under our noses. So, unless there was some kind of exceptional slight of hand, "the taste" is available from practically any supermarket shelf.
I'll be trying the recipe out today and will give you all the feedback. Strange, I already feel like I'm going to fail!
Andrew