Roast chicken with Indian spices and a pan gravy

If you ask me what is my least favorite meat, I wont have to think hard…it is chicken. When I was in India chicken wasnt an everyday affair. It was made only on special occasions and it tasted so good. American chicken is too bland for me..there is no 'taste' and it just tastes flat. The meat is almost like fibre…And among all this discontentment is when I found the cornish hen. These mini size chickens look so cute and taste wonderful..

I usually dont come up with recipes on my own..I usually follow recipes. Once I bought the cornish hen I wanted to do a Kerala/Indian style roast chicken and couldnt find any recipes and so I was on my own. I came up with a marinade and put everything in it that we use when we make a regular chicken curry and a few more. It was kind of an anxious moment when the chicken finally came out of the oven and we tasted it. It tasted really great…really! So here I am posting my first original recipe.

Ingredients

Cornish hen -one approx. 1 pound

Marinade

Yogurt 1.5 tablespoon plus 1/2 tbsp.
Ginger minced 1tsp packed
Garlic minced 2tsp packed
Green chillies 1or 2
Lemon juice 1 tsp
salt 1/2 tsp
Pepper 5 turns of the pepper mill
Red chilly powder 1 tsp
Coriander powder 1/2 tsp packed
Turmeric a pinch

Clove 1
Cardamom 1
Fennel seeds 1/4 tsp
Cinnamon 1 small piece 1/4 inch
Water 2 tbsp.

Oil for frying 1.5tbsp
Curry leaves 2 sprigs
Method

Grind the clove, cardamom, cinnamon and fennel to a powder.
Grind ginger,garlic and green chillies and add to the yogurt. Add the ground powder and rest of the ingredients to the yogurt and mix well to combine.

Usind a fork poke the chicken all over. This helps the chicken to absorb the marinade better.Apply the marinade to the chicken. Make sure the inner cavity gets coated with the marinade. I seperated the skin a little and applied some marinade between the skin and the meat.

Put the chicken in a ziplock bag. Meanwhile add some water to the container that had the marinade and give a good swirl to recover all the marinade from the sides and add another 1/2 tbsp yogurt to this. Pour this over the chicken in the plastic bag. Marinate for 2-3 hrs.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.Add oil to a hot oven safe pan and lay the 2 sprigs of curry leaves. Over this place the chicken. Fry on each side till it is brown (5min on each side) and then transfer the chicken to the oven.

Cover the chicken with aluminium foil before placing it in the oven. Bake for about 45 to 60min. Check the chicken package for baking time. Or use a fork to test if the chicken is done. When the chicken is baking, there will be lot of juices that come out of the chicken. Spoon this over the chicken as it bakes (do this every 15min. or so). Once the chicken is cooked, take it out of the oven and let it rest for about 15min.

To make pan gravy

Onions thinly sliced 1/4 cup

Ginger julienned 5-6 juliennes
Tomato 1/2 of a small tomato
Curry leaves 2 leaves
Green chilly -1/4 chilly and slice thinly

Salt

After 15min resting time, transfer the chicken to a serving platter. Take the same pan that was used to cook the chicken with the remaining juices and place it over medium heat on the stove. Add all the above and let the gravy reduce for about 5min and then pour it over the chicken.

Notes

I had added couple of carrots to the pan when the chicken was in the oven. You can do potatoes or any other veggies you like.

Serve with bread or chappatis.

Carrot pickle- carrot achar

If you are from South India, most probably there is a bottle of pickle in the centre of your dining table. As a kid I wasnt very fond of achar, but there was a carrot achar that my mother made which I liked. It tasted different from any other achar, and besides I loved carrots. When I went to college I used to take multiple bottles of this pickle with me as I left after my vacation. Plantain chips and carrot pickle made a good combination, as my hungry friends discovered.

I havent really thought about this pickle at all but during my recent visit to the grocery store I felt the sudden urge to get those gorgeous carrots and make some pickle. I guess just watching the mouthwatering pictures of the lemon pickle made by Indira and Kay rubbed off on me…..So I got the carrots and placed a call to my mother and the next day made the achar. It was more simple than I imagined and so tasty. Satish had never had achar this way and he was floored. It was nice to share something so special from my childhood and make it for my family. It is going to be a regular now at our table. I managed to save some of the pickle for my friends who were visiting us over the weekend and they gave their thumbs up too. And I am trying to figure out why I never attempted to try this before.

There is always this feeling that pickles are better not attempted by the novice. But this attempt has made me really bold. I used the rough recipe that I jotted down from my mother..the real recipe will have to wait till I make another batch.

Olive Oil and Rosemary cake

This cake was made in an attempt to make a healthy cake. I was just browsing when I came across the recipe here. Just one look and I was ready to try this….but my mind kept nagging me. Rosemary and oliveoil in a cake bothered me…but after my butterladen pistachio cake I needed something that was a little lighter and this seemed a good choice. So against my better judgement I decided to try this cake. I have a small rosemary plant in my kitchen and so there was rosemary readily available.

Recipe

Here

The cake was a breeze to put together and smells wonderful. It tasted more or less I expected it to…it was soft and declared rosemary in every bite. It is better as a breakfast dish than a dessert. My neighbors daughter said she liked it a lot and so did Satish….but for me the rosemary was a little too strong to handle. I ate it nevertheless. I might make it again…..

Imam Bayildi

I first heard about this dish in the comments section of Brett’s blog. I was intrigued by the name of the dish. So I googled and found the dish and the recipes. This Turkish dish translates as ‘The Imam fainted’. That is a pretty strong name for a dish. Either it had to be really good or really bad and I decided to try it for myself. This recipe seemed kind of authentic, and is the one I followed. I stuck close to the recipe and made only very minor changes.
To get the baby eggplants I went to our local Indian grocery store. The only other thing that needed to be bought was dill. So we made this one evening for dinner.

Recipe

Ingredients

Baby Eggplants 4
Salt

Extra virgin olive oil 6tbsp

Onions 2 medium or one large cut into thin slices
Garlic cloves 6

Tomatoes 2 large peeled, seeded and diced

Parsley 1/4 cup chopped
Dill 2 tablespoon chopped

Sugar 1tsp

Lemon juice freshly squeezed 2tbsp

Water 1/4-1/2 cup

Method

Peel the skin off the eggplant at one inch intervals.
( You can omit this step to save time. Once cooked this striped pattern is not visible,thus not adding to the visual appeal. It might help absorb the flavors better into the eggplant).

Cut the stem off and halve the eggplant.Make a deep slit lengthwise in the middle of each slice but be careful not to puncture the skin. Salt the eggplant and lay them onto paper towels for about 30min to drain the bitter juices from the eggplant.After 30min dry with paper towels.

In a large pan add 3 tablesppon of the olive oil
and fry the eggplants skinside down till it is golden brown. This takes about 4min. Remove and drain on paper towels. Sprinkle some salt on top.
Before frying I had scooped out some of the seeds from some slices, thinking it will give more space for the filling but found that this was unnecessary.

In the same pan, add 2tbsp oil and on medium heat fry the onions and garlic, stirring frequently till it is soft. To this add the tomatoes, parsley and sugar.Give a quick stir. After about 30sec remove from fire. Transfer to a bowl and add dill and the remaining one tablespoon of olive oil. Mix well.

Take a deep casserole to cook the dish.Arrange the eggplants with slit side up and gently open the slit and fill the slit with the filling. Spread the filling to cover flesh of the eggplant too.

Sprinkle the lemon juice on top of the stuffed eggplants. If there are any remaining stuffing just spread them over the eggplant randomly. Pour the water into the dish around the eggplants. Cover and cook for about 40-50min. Check in between to see if the water had dried up and if so add more water. Serve room temperature.

We had this with chappathis and by this time we were so hungry that we skipped picturing the final dish. This dish was voted as one of the best eggplant dishes we ever made.

Shrikhand for SHF #16

I went over to IMBB to see whats happening in the blogworld and then I saw it…SHF is tomorrow. And I hardly had any time to come up with anything, that is, until I ran to my pantry. Aphrodisiacs..hmmm. When I first read about the theme I had the glorious idea of making a dessert pizza with bananas, strawberries, chocolate…..but alas I had forgotten all about it till now. So I went to the pantry and got out cardamoms and honey. The list of aphrodisiac ingredients in my pantry stops there. I needed to think of something fast using these two ingredients and google led me to shrikhand. The original recipe can be found here
I grew up in India and had never had this dessert. Heard of it, but never had it. But now SHF made me discover this amazing stuff. See food blogging is good!

Few ingredients..superb results!

Ingredients

Plain yogurt 2 cups ( Drain the yogurt in a cheesecloth. Dont squeeze or anything..just let it hang in the cheese cloth and have a bowl below to catch the fluid that comes out of it. I put the cheese cloth in a sieve, poured the yogurt and let it sit on a bowl). This might take couple of hours. Keep it in the refrigerator.

Saffron a few threads (5-6)
Milk 1 tbsp
Heat the milk and add the saffron to it. Let sit for a few minutes.

Honey 3tbsp( Add more if you like more sweetness)

Cardamom 2 crushed

Pistachios and almonds for garnish

Method

This couldnt get any easier.

Take the yogurt, saffron, milk, honey, crushed cardamom and mix well.

Pour into serving cups…Garnish with chopped almonds and pistachios.

This post originally written on Feb 9th and pics uploaded Feb 10th…..

Tag SHF16

Pistachio cake

I just love cakes. Not the too sweet ones nor the chocolate ones. It can be dense,moist,fluffy or whatever . As long as it is not so sweet it is good for me. Back home in India I would make the simple tea cake..just a simple mix of good old milk, eggs, flour, baking powder, sugar and vanilla essence and it always tasted good. When I moved on to more complicated cakes, the results werent that encouraging. I had once made a cake, had it all decorated and took it to a friends house only to learn that it wasnt even cooked well. That was a very embarassing moment for me. So you will understand when I saw I am wary of cakes.

I first saw the recipe here. While sufing the web I found that many others had made the same recipe and everybody was raving about it. I decided to go ahead…spend quite some time shelling the pistachios and my fingers were all red and a couple were bruised after the shelling. 'The cake better be good' I thought…and when it finally emerged out of the oven I was kinda disappointed. I had imagined it to be a little 'less' dense but once I took a bite I knew it was a winner. Satish agreed and so did our friends who ate had it as a late night snack. I did not do the glaze but the next time I make this cake it will be done. I am sure it will increase the visual appeal for this wonderful cake.
I did not change the recipe a bit. But there was a little of the batter that was remaining as I did not have the baking dish that the recipe demanded. So I got creative with that..added some baking powder, a whiff of chocolate powder and a splash of milk and poured into the muffin pan. Here are the results of that…a fluffier piece of 'tastiness'.

Baked fennel for ARF Tuesdays

I had this bulb of fennel in my refrigerator for almost a week. It was time to do something with it and what better day to make it than ARF Tuesday. This week it is being hosted by Stephanie of Dispensing Happiness.This recipe is adapted from my latest cookbook. Fennel bulbs taste the same as the dried fennel seeds. And yes they do have antioxidants.

This is the recipe

Ingredients

One large head of fennel
Garlic 1 clove finely sliced
Butter half tablespoon
Oliveoil i tablespoon( This was my addition to reduce the amount of butter)
Dy vermouth or white wine 1/3 cup
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Preheat the oven to 425F.
Cut the tops off the fennel and slice finely.

Mix all the other ingredients into the fennel .Cover the fennel with aluminium foil. (Jamie suggest ripping off a piece of wax paper,running it under cold water and scrunching it up to make it soft. Then place it snugly over and around the fennel and not the baking dish. This will bake and steam the dish at the same time)

Cook for about 20min or until tender. Scatter the fennel leaves before serving.

It tastes wonderful. I am thinking of using it in a sandwich.

Dining out @ Spanish cuisine

Last night we had a special day to celebrate. For about a week we have been thinking of where to go and quite accidentally I happened to come across this site. We had never to an authentic Spanish restaurant before and the glowing reviews made us decide on this restaurant.

Zagat Survey 2003/2004
“Meigas the best Spanish cuisine this side of Madrid”

And let me tell you that it was every bit worthy of the glowing reviews it had received.

This is what we had

Hojaldre de Guindillas
Shrimps and Fresh Anchovy Salad over a Baked Guindilla Puff Pastry Garratxa Cheese with Melon, Tomatoes, Mustard and Saffron Emulsion.

Fletan
Grilled Halibut served over a sauté of Swiss Chard, Butternut Squash, Confit Potatoes, Saffron, and Ginger Reduction with Cockels and Mediterranean Mussels.

Pato
Grilled Peking Long Island Duck Breast sauté with Green Smith Apples, Panceta, Idizabal Cheese Black Sesame Seed Polenta, Dried Dates and a PX Reduction.

Arroz con Leche
Rice Pudding, Passion Fruit Ice Cream, Lemon Foam Flan de Manzana

The food was excellent and the service impeccable. It is definitely my new favorite restaurant. I had hoped to have some Paella but that is available only on Sundays. I have to go back for that. I am so glad we picked this restaurant. Unfortunately we forgot to take the camera along and so no pictures…

Meigas Restaurant
10 Wall Street
Norwalk, CT 06851
Telephone: 203-866-8800
Fax: 203-899-0576

http://www.meigasrestaurant.com