We have lots of chicken in the house. It’s a good meat choice, for the most part. But it gets a little on the boring side when all you really have is chicken. This state of affairs doesn’t really bother me all that much. I can eat ramen every meal for a week straight and be fine with it. I’ll feel sick from malnutrition, but I won’t care about my pallate (or however that’s spelled).
But it’s fun to look for new things every now and again.
If you type in “novel chicken recipes” into google it thinks you’re looking for a book on chicken. While that is not entirely inaccurate, that isn’t quite the idea I was hoping for. But it did remind me of the Dark Horse collection, Autobiographix, where Matt Wagner talks about making chicken parmesian. But I wanted something a little more exciting than fried chicken and cheese.
I found this Chicken Biryani recipe over on blogger. Here we have something a little more interesting. Any meat dish from India is bound to be a little on the peculiar side. A largely vegetarian population and no refrigeration makes for a little inventiveness when it comes to preparing meat.
I especially like the ingredients list, where else would you find yogurt and chilli powder in a the same marinade?
And the stuff in the actual dish is a bit of a hoot as well. When you get right down to it, if you ditch the garlic and bay leaves you pretty much have chai.
Mint/Pudina leaves - a bunch - use only the leaves
Giner-Garlic Paste - 2-3 Tbsp
Cardamom - 4 (Crush using a pestle and mortar into a coarse powder)
Cinnamon - 4
Clove - 4
Bay leaves - 4
Peppercorns - 1/4 tsp
Fennel seeds - 1/4 tsp
This is garlic chai rice to go with your chilli yogurt chicken. I think that really is the secret to non-western cooking, choose two things that probably shouldn’t be used together, and use them together. Problem solved. I wonder if chicken flavored ice cream would sell in India?
Granted, I’m sure they think the same thing about us. Well, almost the same thing. “Look, they’ve got hot peppers, but no coconut milk, are they mad?” Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll be making this particular recipe anytime soon. Not because it doesn’t look tasty, it actually does, but because I don’t have most of those spices. And I’m not real sure where to get them.
Tune in tomorrow as Halloween approaches and we have absolutely nothing prepared. Sheesh, you’d think a site with “Pumpkin” in it’s name would know better. I’m sure something will turn up.
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