Use a saucepan that’s easily big enough to hold all the sauce’s ingredients.

Add the butter and set your pan on a medium-high heat. As soon as it starts to foam, stir in the onions. You want the onions to fry for long enough so that they soften and just begin to take on a bit of browning color. That’ll take about 6 minutes with a few watchful stirs on that medium-high heat.

Stir in the carrots, garlic, chilies, ginger, salt, and pepper, together with all the spices — the cumin, cilantro, turmeric, cinnamon, star anise, cloves, and cardamom pods.

Stir-and-fry for 3 minutes, then add the flour. Stir thoroughly — and I mean thoroughly — so that the flour becomes completely absorbed into your buttery mix.

Now add the water, and, keeping the heat on medium-high, stir until it’s completely combined with your curry mix. When the sauce starts to bubble, drop the heat to low, cover the pan and let the sauce simmer gently for 10 minutes with a few stirs.

Add the apple and potato, and let the sauce simmer for about 15 minutes, until the potatoes are just cooked through.

Taste for saltiness — the potatoes will have absorbed a fair amount of salt, so adjust to your taste. Good, that’s the sauce done. Turn off the heat and let the sauce sit while you prepare the cutlets.

For the sake of appearances, I formed the de-boned and rindless chops into neat looking, slightly oval-shaped discs. It’s worth the little effort it takes to fold the fattier tag end or tail of the chop around the meaty eye and pin it into place with a couple of toothpicks. It’s easily done.

Now, because they’re fairly thick, the chops do need a little pre-cooking before they get panko-coated and hot-fried fairly deep and fast. This pre-cooking is important because the crumb-crust turns beautifully golden after just a few minutes frying — and that would be way too little cooking for the chops.

For this pre-cooking, I heated the sunflower oil in a deep-sided, 9-inch skillet over a medium-high heat. Two cups of oil in that size skillet meant the oil was about 1 ½ inches deep — that’s ideal.

As soon as the oil starts to shimmer — but before it gets anywhere near smoking — add two of the chops. Let them fry on that medium-high heat for two minutes on each side. Then remove them with a slotted spoon and set them on a kitchen towel to absorb any excess oil and to cool a little. Repeat the process with the next pair of chops. Good. Time now for coating them.

Combine the flour, salt, and pepper into a seasoned flour mix for coating.

For coating, I use three dinner plates lined up next to each other — one for the seasoned flour, one for the beaten egg, and one for the panko crumbs.

Begin by giving each chop a good coating of flour so that it sticks to them all over.

Now dip each one into the beaten egg, making sure that their entire surface is drenched with egg — that’s important because it’s this liquid coating that the panko crumbs are going to stick to.

Finally, lay the chops on the plate spread with the panko crumbs. Take some care here, and use your fingers to firmly press the crumbs into that eggy surface. Keep pressing the crumbs onto the surface until no more of them will stick to it. Good coating done — they’re ready to be fast-fried.

Heat the oil in your skillet on a medium-high heat until it reaches that hotly shimmering point. Gently add the cutlets two at a time, and let fry them on each side for about 2½ minutes.

Now, don’t fiddle with them as they fry. That’s important because you want the coating to stay intact and allow it to really firm-up as it fries around its inner chop. So, just let them sizzle away until each side turns a lovely golden color. Done.

Remove the cutlets to a cutting board and let them rest there for just a few minutes while you heat the sauce ready for serving. You’ll find that the panko coating hardly absorbs any oil, so there’s no need to bother draining them.

That few minutes of resting the cutlets actually adds to their crispiness. And it also makes them easier to slice nice and cleanly ready for serving on warmed plates.

After the cutlets have rested for a few minutes as the sauce is heating, use a very sharp carving knife to cut each of the cutlets into slices about 1/3-inch thick. Good. Time for plating.

Add a serving of rice to each diners’ plate. Keep the rice on one half of the plate so the other half is clear for a handsome helping of the sauce.

Now carefully arrange a sliced cutlet over the top of the rice. Then add the sauce so that it fills the vacant half of the plate. Finished. Serve at once.