indian food feast (a good attempt)

Last week, a good friend of mine was freaking out getting worried because she and the BF didn't have a dinner reservation for Valentine's Day and it was getting down to the wire. I hadn't figured out what I was going to do for this week's blog assignment, so I half-jokingly offered to make them dinner if they couldn't find anywhere to go. The house she lives in is almost my second home so there's a good chance I would have been over anyway.

Of course, she decided to take me up on it. "We have all this chicken in the freezer!" she said. "And I have a bunch of Indian spices I've never used so if you want to do something with those that would be cool."

Ok, I thought. I can work with that. Luckily I had most of Thursday off so I could spend the day playing personal chef. I consulted Bittman and found a couple of recipes (I got a little ambitious...), and between our two supplies of food I only had to pick up a few groceries.

The menu was:

Tandoori chicken (Bittman softcover, page 367)

Cauliflower curry (Bittman softcover, page 555) with brown rice

Vegetable samosas (Bittman softcover, page 35) with cilantro mint sauce

They turned out with varying degrees of success, but overall everything was solid, according to all those who ate it. If I do it again any time soon I think I'll stick to recipes I've actually done before... but it was good learning experience. For one, I cooked chicken for the first time (can you believe it?? I never cook meat at home) and I made clarified butter (or ghee) for the hell of it and because it's often used as a fat in Indian cooking. Now I have almost a pound of it sitting in my fridge. I predict a lot more curry in my future...

On to the recipes!

Cilantro, mint, garlic, olive oil, jalapeno, ginger, lime juice, sugar

1: The cilantro-mint sauce. This was the first thing I did because it was by far the easiest, and I just looked up a recipe online for this one. I threw the ingredients into my (magical wonderful) food processor, added some water and blended.

BOOM green sauce

Lovely leafy greenness!

2. Samosas. The "dumpling of India" (according to Bittman!). These involve filling yogurt dough wrappers with a spiced mixture of peas, potatoes, and onions.

Yogurt, butter, flour, salt, peas, onion, ginger, garlic, potatoes, curry powder, cayenne, black pepper

Pause here: The filling for the samosas was by far the most delicious thing I made that day. And it's from Bittman. Check it out. I definitely ate some of that straight out of the pan.

Yum.

I put the dough together in the food processor, and then the fun (or tedious) part--samosa assembly!

As I was folding them I noticed that the dough was pretty dry. It worked but had a tendency to crack, and after they were baked I decided it wasn't as tender as I would have liked. I followed Bittman's directions, but I think if I do these again the dough is going to need more butter and yogurt.

More fat-laden, basically.

Pause again for the rice! I used my rice cooker for the first time too--now I understand why people have these. It's amazing. It cooks perfect rice and you don't have to do anything. I am sold. Good thing my brother didn't want this and passed it on to me...

Also, here is a picture of what's definitely not honey (it's a trap). That is the clarified butter. 

To make it, you melt as much butter as you want (I imagine more is easier to deal with, you'll understand why) in a small saucepan, I did a pound. When it's completely melted there will be a layer of foam on top. Skim it off with a spoon, then carefully pour the clear liquid into a container. Floating at the bottom there will be some white solids, which you want to throw away.

That's it! Now you have pure butterfat. What more could you want?

Moving on, the food was transported to house #2 where I finished up the chicken and curry.

3. Tandoori chicken. What makes this is the yogurt marinade, and technically it's supposed to be cooked in a high heat clay oven (a tandoor). Since we don't have one of those, we settled for the broiler.

Yogurt, cumin, coriander, cayenne, garlic, ginger, salt

I actually started this the night before--I put the marinade together, cut up the chicken and put it into containers in the fridge to sit overnight. It turned out really nice (despite being pretty well charred) and I'd definitely use this marinade for chicken again. Personally I think I'd kick up the spices a bit, but my friends are not as keen on heat as I so I kept it toned down in this case.

4. Vegetable curry. I forgot to photograph the ingredients, but into it went garlic and minced ginger (cooked in the ghee), cauliflower, bell pepper, a can of diced tomatoes, and spices (cumin, coriander, cayenne, and cinnamon). The only real changes I made were leaving out the turmeric and nutmeg, which I don't think it suffered greatly for, and adding some bell pepper.

Browning ze cauliflower

Finished products...

Curry

Samosas & sauce

Tandoori chicken