Indian Butter Chicken

Well, so much for getting caught up! I plan to try another new recipe today, which will put me two behind. Oh well.

Recipe 9: Indian Butter Chicken

The recipe this week is courtesy of my cousin, who posted some delicious looking pictures of this meal when he made it last month.

I jumped on the chance to get a new butter chicken recipe. I had made it in the past, but it was really labor intensive, and involved simmering a sauce made of butter and heavy cream, so I generally managed to "break" it. (For anyone who hasn't broken a sauce here is a good example and instructions on how to fix it.)

This recipe still required multiple steps, but was much easier to complete. I mostly followed the instructions, but I got paranoid about the chicken not cooking completely in six minutes, so I covered it while it cooked. I don't think this was actually necessary, and did make the yogurt mixture the chicken cooked in look a little strange. I also cooked the chicken in the same pan I had cooked the sauce in (does it freak anyone else out when people call sauce that isn't made from fat drippings "gravy"?), I just wiped it out in between steps. I should also mention that I couldn't find Tandoori BBQ mix, so I used Tandoori Marsala mix instead.

The resulting dish was very satisfying, and quite a bit spicier than butter chicken I've made in the past. I had so much sauce (probaby in part because i heated it *very* gently) that a few days later I mixed it into stir fried rice, and got another large and satisfyingly spicy meal out of it. I also wasn't sure how much ginger to buy, and ended up getting twice what I needed, so I have three ounces frozen in cubes in the freezer for the next time I make stir fry.

Plus, now I have a new website to mine for recipes!

Recipe #2, Italian Marinaded Chicken

So, Thursday I made my second NYR recipe:

Recipe 2: Italian Marinaded Chicken

The recipe is here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/melissa-darabian/italian-marinated-chicken-with-red-potatoes-recipe.html

(Note to self, make these links look nicer in future posts. What kind of amateur hour nonsense is this?)

Of course, I once again didn't have all of the ingredients the recipe called for. I ended up doubling the recipe, so what I actually used was something like this:

6 T olive oil
6 T Apple cider vinegar
3 T Rice wine vinegar
The juice of 2 limes (Okay, 1.5 limes. I was trying not to get lime juice on my dry winter hands and ended up dropping half of a lime.)
4 small cloves of garlic, sliced
~1 T Oregano
~2 t Rosemary
Some salt and pepper

I was pretty confident this would work alright, because I looked online and found that vinegar is less acidic than lemons, but lemons are less acidic than limes. So where I was using some vinegar and some lime (instead of some vinegar and some lemon), I figured it would work out okay. Also, I just didn't have lemon, so what's a girl to do? (Clearly not pick a recipe where she has all of the required ingredients, that would be silly.)

I also didn't use the chili flakes, which is a pretty major change. I do own chili flakes, but I wanted to be sure that the chicken was palatable to my son, and I wasn't entirely confident that the acid mix I was using would mesh well with heat.

The final substitution I made is to use bone-in chicken breasts instead of legs, but I consider that a fairly minor change.

I cut everything up and put it in two freezer bags at about 7am, and got them in the oven at about 5pm. I put the veggies and two of the chicken breasts in a 9x13 pan, and the other two breasts in 9 inch square pans. The breasts were large enough that if I had tried to bake them all together, they would have completely filled the 9x13 pan. The marinade did a goo d job coating everything, but what was left in the bags was extremely thin, so I'm not sure if pouring it over everything right before baking did any good.

The chicken cooked in about the 40 minutes the recipe predicted, but I was very disappointed to find that the veggies were still firm. I left everything in the oven for an additional ten minutes, but the carrots especially were still hard, and most of the potatoes were also underdone. I'm not sure why this happened. Maybe I should have crowded the pan with chicken? Would that have steamed the veggies more? Maybe it was the glass pan? (If anyone knows what I did wrong, please tell me!)

In any case, it is extremely disappointing to cook a side, then end up having to serve instant mashed potatoes and canned green beans instead.

The chicken itself turned out very nice. Normally when I cook chicken, I use frozen chicken breasts and just slather them with olive oil and coat them with spices. They end up pretty flavorful, but often dry.  Even after being cooked for ten minutes past done, this chicken was very moist (I am tempted to characterize it as damp, but that is a very unappetizing word to use). It had a nice roasted flavor, but otherwise I found it somewhat bland. I was a little stuffed up, though, and my husband thought it was flavorful enough. (The kiddo just chewed it up and spat it out, but he is going through a phase where he does that with food I know he likes.)

We ended up eating the veggies last night, and it made me wish they had made it on the plate with the chicken. They really soaked up the vinegar, and were very tangy. I had left them in the turned-off oven while we ate on Thursday, and my husband warmed them in foil on the grill last night, so they had some nicely browned bits as well.

Over all, while I might not use this exact recipe again, I plan to use marinades more in the future. It was easy enough,and resulted in noticeably better quality food (eventually). I'm also guessing that if I did the math, I'm probably paying a heavy premium for the convenience of the frozen chicken breasts.

I still have to pick this week's recipe. I got a couple of suggestions of places to look last week, so I'll be scouring those while we eat up the grillables from yesterday. I'm going to try to actually follow a recipe to the letter this week. We'll see if I make it.