My wife bought me the Curry Bible for Xmas, from Marks and Spencer – not to be confused with various other similarly named books. It's a great recipe book as it keeps things relatively simple, and contains most of my curry house favourites. It explains things in a decent manner that certainly worked for me, judging by the results!
I made Butter Chicken for my first attempt. This uses tandoori chicken (the nicest single foodstuff in the world) but I wasn't up for doing that entirely from scratch this time around. The supermarket didn't have any tandoori chicken ready to go though, so I bought chicken thighs (free range) and a jar of tandoori paste. Add lemon juice, salt, oil and yoghurt, mix it all up (or get wife to, as in the picture) marinate overnight in the fridge then blast in the oven to get that slightly charred surface. Then I took the chicken off the bone and used it in big chunks in the Butter Chicken recipe. I'll be doing tandoori chicken again, since it was so easy and so delicious even on its own.
I shan't bore you with the details of the recipe (or invite a copyright problem) but it wasn't crazy difficult and the results were to die for. The quality of the chicken in particular really made it stand out from usual curry house fare. I know the final picture of it on the plate just looks like an orange splat, but trust me it was great, and I couldn't be doing with garnishing with nuts and coriander sprigs.