Simple Roast Veggies.

Simplest and quickest burst of color that you can eat!
As long as you have a half decent oven or grill.

Disclaimer on that photo above! 
Its the starting grid, not the finished product!
I clean forgot to grab that on the camera

Writing this can scarcely take longer than the dish prep!

Grab some assorted veggies you like and slice & dice them up. Any shapes you like, but dont leave anything thicker than a centimetre each.

I started with
mushrooms – halved
yellow & red bell peppers – 1 inch squares
carrots – cut into small batons
onions – peeled and quartered; and then separated a bit with my hands
garlic pods – half a doz; just hammer them under the top of your wrist – no need to peel these.
some basil leaves – shred into two pieces.

Get all these into a deep bowl. Sprinkle some salt or sea salt, crushed pepper, dry basil powder, and a generous couple of tbsp of extra virgin olive oil. Mix well in the bowl, and then lay out flat on a baking tray or earthenware plate.

This shd take no more than 12-15 mins in a pre-heated oven at moderate heat – which means no more than 175° celsius. I prefer to do them at 150° though. Take a pick, but watch the veggies every now and then!

Incidentally, the basil leaves will burn. So don’t shred them too small. Just discard them before serving.

Clearly these go well with quite a wide range of mains. And they work well as part of a warm salad with some fresh crunchy lettuce!

Enjoy them!

Butter Chicken. The most fun I have in the kitchen.

If it wasn’t for the move from Delhi to Bombay in 2006, this recipe would never have become part of my repertoire. In fact, and some may argue this, just the sheer lack of width of dining choices in Bombay (at least the parts we lived and roamed in), meant that one had to improvise in one’s own kitchen.


For the record, in Bombay, the only butter chicken that’s passed our taste-test was at the Copper Chimney. And amongst the best butter chicken you will ever have is at the Taj Holiday Village coffee shop (in goa). Discovered that a few weeks ago, and rue the fact that I did not go talk to the chef to find out more.


There are as many BC recipes as there are Indian cookbooks. The book I used many years ago is no longer in print (The Complete Indian Cookbook – Vimla Patil). Broadly though, some books prep this as a single dish and others as a two-stage dish… needing one to roast the chicken (good old tandoori chicken), and then amalgamate this with the curry. 


This is a slightly complicated dish – at least compared to other food that I work on in my kitchen. It has a couple of stages, need marination time, and needs a blender and oven. 


If you get tandoori chicken around you that you really like, that’s one way to sidestep one part. Just ignore the ‘roasting’ bit and go straight to the curry and onwards.


Get together the ingredients and let’s get started.


One chicken, cut into curry size pieces. Make some deep cuts in the chicken with a sharp knife
1 tbsp oil for the marinade
Curd – half a cup for marinade, half a cup for the curry
Garlic – 6 pods for the marinade (minced), 4 pods chopped fine for the curry
Ginger – 1″ piece for the marinade(minced), 1″ chopped for the curry
Salt – 1/2 a tsp for each but pls adjust as per your taste
Zeera (Cumin) powder – 1tsp for the marinade
Chilly powder – 1 tsp each for the marinade and curry
Turmeric – less than 1/s a tsp, only in the marinade 
Dhania (Coriander)powder – 1 tsp each for the marinade and 1.5 for the curry
Garam masala – 1tsp
3 tbsp oil (I use olive)
3 onions – diced small
3 tomatoes – blanched, peeled and roughly diced
Tomato puree – 2 tbsp
Sugar – 1tsp
Vinegar – 1tsp
Kasuri Methi (Febugreek) – a fistful
2 Green Chillies, whole; slit through the middle.
Oh, oops. Here’s the wonderful thing, I actually don’t use butter. But if you want this richer, then about 50gms of butter can be added to the oil in the curry and about 3tbsp of cream (easy now, Amul has 200gm tetra packs)


STEP 1 :: Marinade and Roast the chicken!


So, get your oil and cup of curd, beat it lightly and blend in all the spices as well as the minced garlic and ginger. Rub this marinade all over your chicken, cover the dish and leave inside your refrigerator for 2 to 3 hours. (Get your chicken out from the fridge at least 30 minutes before you’re going to roast it).


Heat your oven to the max (mine goes to 240ºC), pile your marinaded chicken onto the slotted tray and get this into your oven. Remember, the marinade will drip down to the oven floor…. so if you want to avoid a mess later, do put a large piece of foil on the oven floor.


This needs 12-15 minutes. Do keep an eye on the chicken, since each oven has variable cook times to my mind. But your olfactories and a visual check will surely tell you when it’s done. I tend to do this about 15 mins, which cooks the chicken fully, but I still turn the chicken around and put back in the oven for 3 minutes to brown the undersides.


That’s it. The Tandoori Chicken is ready!
(yes, that’s a copy of Bombay Times to make mopping up easier!)

STEP 2 :: Getting the curry right!


Get hold of the thickest karai (or wok), and heat the 3tbsp oil. If you’re using butter, add at this stage. Once the oil is hot, add the onions, chopped garlic and ginger. After about a couple of minutes add all your dry masalas (chilly powder, dhania powder, garam masala, salt). Once the onions have softened, add the blanched/diced tomatoes as well as the tomato puree. 


Let this onion/tomato mix cook on a medium flame and stir once in a while to keep things centered in your kadai.


You will find the oil will separate in about 10 minutes. At this stage move your onion tomato mix to a food blender (get this into a big jar). Add the rest of the curd and for good measure if you’ve saved up the leftover marinade add that to the jar as well. Pulse your blender a few times and you will get an orange color, thick and consistent paste in your blender jar.


Move all this back to your kadai now and let the blended curry cook on a medium heat for another 10 minutes. This takes care of the rawness of the curd and marinade. Add the slit green chillies, sugar, vinegar and cream (if you’re using) as well. Depending on how I want to adjust the taste, sometime I add a couple of spoons of ketchup too.


Here’s what your dish should be looking like at this time.

To this, depending on the consistency you want, please add water (in small quantities each time so you don’t cause the dish to flood).


Once you’re happy with the taste of this curry, simply take all your tandoori chicken and put into the kadai and gently envelope the chicken with the curry. Remember – the chicken is already cooked – so you’re only finishing off now. You can let this blended chicken cook for another 4-5 minutes.


Here’s your butter chicken at this stage – 

Now, the final flourish – and again actually this is optional. We love kasuri methi in our chicken – so here it is after you throw in the handful! Gorgeous, no?

Blend the fenugreek in gently and let this cook for another 5 minutes after.


That’s it, you’re done!


Add some sliced chilly and/or ginger strips to garnish if you like. A dollop of butter, or some cream atop this dish always adds a bit of glam!


Big Tip! Eat the next day!! My experience, and that of many around me, is that many many meat dishes improve dramatically if eaten the next day! 

A good reason to eat breakfast.

This is my breakfast comfort food.

I really can’t recall where or when exactly I picked a recipe for these Moroccan Eggs, but I’ve been making these for something like 8 or 10 years now. The blandest description I saw was eggs poached in tomato ragout. Accurate, but entirely unappealing!

If you do google up moroccan eggs, you get a dozen results that are all quite close to this recipe. And apparently variations of this dish are popular in Israel Tunisia and Turkey as well. And each of these have interesting variations – with bell peppers, harissa and cheese included in the recipes.

The thing that will strike you, as it does anyone who tastes this, is how the flavor is so Indian. Spicy, based on tomato and onions that are the staple of so many of our curries, and cumin at the heart of the flavors.

This takes about 20 mins from start to finish. And serves feeds a couple that has had a busy saturday morning (yes, like we had today!)

2 onions sliced – i prefer thick slices as you can see in the finished dish above.

3 tomatoes – sliced, again thickly – pick the ripest tomatoes in your kitchen

3-4 pods garlic – roughly chopped

A couple of green chillies – each cut into 4 or 5 pieces

Red Chilly powder (1 tsp)

Zeera or Cumin powder (1 tsp, and another 1/2 tsp)

Salt to taste

4 eggs – best if they have been out of the fridge for a while.

And some olive oil of course.

Heat a couple of tbsp of olive oil in a 6″ or 8″ skillet (the one in the photo above is an 8″). Saute the onions and garlic together for about 4 minutes till they are translucent and soft. Keep the heat medium so you don’t end up browning or burning these up. Next, in go the tomato slices. Move them around to blend them with the (now cooked) onions and make sure that the onions aren’t buried under the tomato slices. 

This is the time to add the salt, red chilly powder (or use paprika if you want things lighter), the cumin powder (1tsp) and the salt and the green chilly.

Now just stir once in a while and let the whole tomato-onion mix combine and cook out. If things are starting to dry out, you know that the heat is too high! Remember, keep the heat medium to low, and move your tomato-onion mix around – without breaking up the pieces. In about 7-8 minutes (may be a couple of mins longer with more raw or green tomatoes), you should see the tomatoes fully cooked out, and moist and a saucy, oily separation to the sides of the pan.

Make four ‘indents’ within the mix in the pan now and break one egg into each indent. Use a fork if you need to spread the whites of the egg around the pan, and let the eggs cook inside this mix for a minute. Sprinkle some more salt, little red chilly powder and the rest of the cumin powder onto the eggs, and cover for the last couple of minutes. The covered pan allows the soft egg whites right on top to cook and settle down.

Open pan, throw in some coriander leaves and serve with toasted bread, pao, or (as I did) last night’s garlic toast from Hard Rock Cafe’!

This rustic mix of the eggs and the tomato-onion mix makes for a hearty breakfast, and its one of those simple dishes that makes you scrape the pan with your last bits of bread!

Try this out and write to me. Its quick and simple to rustle up, and a delight to eat!

The variations I mentioned before? I will try out and revise this post soon; but they involve including some red or yellow peppers into the tomato mix, and one  variations ends with some cheese chunks to be placed in the pan before the end.Worth a shot!

Steamed fish with ginger, spring onions and soy!

It’s fitting that this blog starts here, and today. 
This is one of Payal and my favorite dishes, across choices of cuisine. It’s one of the few dishes with which I don’t completely insist on a carb-accompaniment.


It was made this afternoon at lunch, which is why I felt it necessary to start writing some of these twists down. And yes, it was afternoon & lunch. I was cooking. I happen to be away from work on leave. To relax. And for me much of that happens to be in the kitchen!


Here are some of the links that I have used before as well. You can skip them and move right along if you want.


Luscious Temptations is one kickass blog of someone who is obviously a kickass cook and foodie. I recall when I made this fish the first time, it was by following the recipe here. The addition of sautéed onions was a result of this piece. I had been wondering how steamed onions would be, and this was a great way to add them in. Epicurious generally has the goods, but in this case I decided not to incorporate any of the stuff they said – the pepper and cayenne seemed a bit much for this gentle dish. They speak about adding mushrooms – which I recall I had done in my original attempt.


The fish I like to work with is Basa. 
3 fillets of Basa – about 600gms. (Got a frozen kilo of that at Nature’s Basket for under Rs.500)
The Fish & Atop
Juliennes of ginger (about half a handful)
1 Red Onion – diced and sautéed till brown (or you can grate it & sauté, but the dicing gives it better texture)
Assorted Mushrooms – sliced – couple of handfuls. I used a rehydrated pack of sundry mushrooms; but I can tell you from experience that fresh shiitake are the dreamiest! 
The Sauce (just mix these up in a bowl)
Sesame or peanut oil – 4tbs
Light Soya Sauce – 4tbs (or use less than 3tbs of the normal one)
Rice Wine Vinegar – 2tbs – don’t worry if this is not in the larder… just leave it out.
Water – 2tbs
Fish Sauce – 1tbs – again optional. If you want to give this dish a distinctly thai touch, please use fish sauce, and add in sliced lemongrass and replace the ginger with galangal in the ‘Atop’. Worth a try next time for me too!
The Garnish
2 Spring Onions (sliced diagonal)
2 Fresh Red Chillies (sliced diagonal)


Oh. And you need a steamer! I use my newly acquired bamboo one (crawford mkt). But you can put an elevated plate inside a cooker full of boiling water. Needless to say, the water should not be touching your dish or plate. In my steamer (about 6″) incidentally, I can make no more than 2 long fillet’s; or about 6 pieces 4″x4″ at a time.


That’s it! All set!
Put the fish on a long piece of foil and fold the foil edges inwards a bit (just preventing the juices from flowing away). Make a few slits in the fillet and spoon over some of the sauce into the slits and over the fillet. On top of the fillet, rub some of the sautéed onion, put a liberal amount of julienned ginger and heap the fillet with the mushrooms. Lower the whole foil package into the steamer; and then add a second lot if you have the space. 


If you water is nicely on the boil in the steamer or cooker, then this should take no more than 8-10 minutes of steaming. Lift and check! If the fish is all flaky and white, then you’re done! Garnish with a liberal amount of spring onions and chilles and place into a serving dish. Finally – put some more of the ‘sauce’ on top of the whole dish. I keep making more sauce on the fly since its so simple… so if I find that I need more of this light sauce with my rice, I just make a little more quickly. A couple of times, I have also poured a tsp of sizzling chili oil on top of the whole dish – wonderful – adds a zing. But I avoid this if my girls are eating with us.


Served best with saada steamed rice! And a dash of the sauce if you’ve kept it handy.


My estimate is that this dish (fed 4) cost me no more than Rs.400. And since I eat this so often at Ling’s and Royal China this brings a grin to my face. What your guess? Check Royal China’s prices at Zomato here :). They do a terrific job though; I’d still beat the doors down to eat the same dish there!


Accompaniments!
This ginger & spring onion sauce is a must!
And if parts of your family won’t touch fish, then this quick chicken in hoisin works well.
With pretty much any oriental meal, I will always add a side of greens. This pok choi is typical.
And depending on how much firing up the meal needs, this really really quick chilly sauce!