Chicken korma

I loooove Indian food, but in general, it is cheaper, tastier, and a lot quicker to just pay Bombay Palace to deliver some tasty tubs of sauces and braised meats. But, I wanted to try my hand at actually making chicken korma the other day, and figured I'd follow a recipe. Roughly, anyway. The gist of it is that you marinate the chicken a bit, you toast your spices, you create a sauce base, and then you add more stuff and simmer for a while.  Total success, except that when I doubled the amount of red pepper flakes (because that makes sense when you haven't tried a recipe, right?), Ed found it barely edible. This is interesting, because usually he's the one who doesn't notice spice; I found the dish to be hot, but delicious, while he mostly just found it hot, and was sweating.  I may have just won in a spice battle. Anyway, unless you like your food really hot, I recommend that you stick to 1 tsp of red pepper flakes, not the 2 that I used.  

This is a dish with a lot of ingredients, but mostly it's just spices.  And if you already have most of those spices (doesn't everyone keep a large tub of cumin seeds at ready use?), that part is easy.  The other special tool for this dish is a spice grinder - we have a coffee grinder that we use specifically for spices, and that works really well.  You can toast ground spices, but you have to be super duper careful not to burn them. Whatever you do, don't skip the spice-toasting step.  Totally adds the depth of flavor that I expect in good Indian cuisine. The other thing I tend to keep on hand is a jar of almond flour, mostly because I use it in pesto, but also sometimes for baking things. If you don't have this, you can buy some, or just use a half cup of ground cashews instead, since you're already buying cashews to put in the dish.  

Marinate:

2" piece of ginger

8 cloves garlic

2 Tbs olive oil

2 Tbs lemon juice

1/2C yogurt

4 chicken thighs, skinned and deboned (or, any other form of chicken that you happen to have on hand)

Spices:

2 tsp cumin seeds

2 tsp coriander seeds

2 tsp black peppercorns

1 tsp fennel seeds

6 cardamom pods

~1/2 stick of cinnamon, ground

~1/2 tsp nutmeg, ground

2 tsp kosher salt

1 tsp ground turmeric

2 tsp red pepper flakes (this is too much for a normal person)

1 bay leaf

(You could just use ~4tsp of a good garam masala instead of the first 7 spices, if you have that on hand. I'd still toast it)

Sauce base:

1/2C almond flour

3 Tbs olive oil

1 Tbs honey

1C chicken stock

The actual stuff in the dish:

1 onion

3 Tbs tomato paste

1/2C half & half

1-1/2C yogurt

1C golden raisins

1/2C cilantro, chopped

1/2C cashews

More salt, to taste

First things first: if using chicken thighs, take off the skin and the icky fatty bits. Debone, and throw those bones in a pot with some water to get some stock boiling.  Then chop the chicken into bite-size pieces, and put in a bowl to marinate. To make the marine, use a food processor to combine the ginger, garlic, lemon, and olive oil, and dump that over the chicken with a hefty spoonful or two of yogurt. Mix it around with your hands, and then set it aside while you prep other stuff.  

Put all the whole spices (cumin, cardamom, coriander, pepper, fennel seeds) into a pan, dry, and toast on medium-ish heat until you can smell them. Keep them moving around, and definitely keep an eye on these - you don't want to burn your spices! Once the spices are toasted, grind them in a spice grinder, and puree the almond flour, oil, honey, and stock with the spices to make your sauce base. This will taste pretty strong, remember that it's getting diluted with cream and yogurt.

Next up, start the actual dish - dice your onion, and sauté the heck out of it, til you've got some caramelization. At that point, add the tomato paste, and let that start to brown a little on the edges. Mush it up with the onions, and let things continue to meld. After about 10 minutes, add the chicken, and cook that on high heat for a while, before adding the sauce, the bay leaf, half and half, yogurt, raisins, cashews, and cilantro.  Let that simmer for a minimum of a half hour; if you're using chicken breast instead of thighs you probably want an hour.  I think it could probably go for up to 2 hours, if you had the time... I was hungry, so waited it out to 30 minutes and then dove in.  The sauce will reduce a little; if it's too thick, you can use more of that chicken stock you've been boiling to thin it out.  

Here's the final consistency, before we ate it.  We cooked it in a big pan, starting with an aluminum pan and transferring to a bigger nonstick once we realized how over-full the aluminum pan was.  I think a dutch oven may actually be the preferred vessel here.  Next time!

Serve with rice, and/or naan if you've thought that far ahead.  This is totally worth the ginungus ingredient list.  And, it got me over my fear of making Indian food, though I still think it's a better deal to just call up Bombay Palace for delivery...

Cauliflower with tahini sauce

For Christmas, I wanted a hearty veggie dish that still looked festive. One of the gifts I'd given my parents was a cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, Jerusalem, and I'd challenged them to cook their way through the book.  I figured maybe I could help them out, and start them out with a recipe from the book.  I'd recently had a very similar dish at Sofra, and small middle eastern cafe in Cambridge, and it was delicious, so I had a good idea that tahini sauce and cauliflower were a good match. And, with the pomegranate seeds and fried green onion pieces, it was a seasonally-appropriate color, too!

The base of the dish is roasted cauliflower, and I discovered that not all ovens happily burn the bottom of the pan the way mine does at home. Bummer.  I like the browned bits! Luckily, put it hot enough and you'll get results. I don't think I followed the proper recipe for the sauce, likely because I didn't have all the ingredients I needed, but what I came up with was tasty nonetheless. It's also quite simple, and quick to prepare. Bonus! Here's my version...

Roasted cauliflower in tahini sauce
1 head cauliflower
3-4 dried red peppers
Olive oil
3 sprigs green onions
Seeds from 1/2 pomegranate
Tahini
Lemon juice
salt
pepper
water
Pomegranate molasses

Cut or break the cauliflower into bite-size pieces. Split the red peppers lengthwise, and toss both cauliflower and peppers with olive oil and a decent sprinkling of kosher salt.  Spread into a single layer on a baking sheet, and roast for ~20 minutes at 450F.  You should get some browning, but you don't want blackening.

As that cooks, extract the seeds from the pomegranate. You can either use the thwack-with-a-wooden-spoon-into-a-bowl method, or painstakingly remove the seeds one at a time. The thwacking method might make more of a mess, but it's a heckuva lot more fun.

Chop the green onions into ~1" pieces, and cut lengthwise. Fry those over high heat in some oil, just to take off some of the bite.

For the sauce, put ~1/4C tahini into a mixing bowl.  Add ~2 tablespoons of lemon juice, and a few pinches of salt and some grinds of pepper.  Stir in a tablespoon or two of water, and taste. Add more tahini if it's too lemon-y, more lemon if it's too tahini-y.  Thin with water as needed; you want a runny consistency.

Once the cauliflower is done, lump into a serving platter, and drizzle the sauce all over the top.  Use 2-3 tablespoons of pomegranate molasses and drizzle that over the top.  Sprinkle the green onions and pomegranate seeds over the top, and serve.  Mmm.