03.02.06
Goggling at Onions
Cutting onions is, for me, the toughest part of preparing a dish. As everyone knows, the preparation of all the Indian dishes invariably starts with the frying of onion as the base. To me, there were two problems with the picture of the aforementioned frying onions:
- I don’t know how to cut onions. That explains why I’ll never be a “phamous” cook. When the dishes call for thinly sliced onions, what they get from me is this mess of unevenly, and thickly, cut pieces. To produce even that, I take up half-an-hour. I have a friend named Sunil who can slice — and I mean paper thin, even slices — an onion in 15 seconds flat. I envy people like him.
- The second problem is of course the tears. Sometimes it became so bad that I used to give up. Total surrender. I tried washing onions, wearing glasses etc, but to no avail. Finally, I hit the perfect solution a couple weeks back — I bought a pair of tight-fitting goggles from the hardware store, the type one puts on while drilling wood or something. They have worked wonderfully. Except look-wise. Since the kids destroyed my chef’s hat sometime back, I usually put on a ski cap while cooking. With the addition of goggles, my chef avatar looks distinctly Alpine. Oh, well… A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, in any case.
02.27.06
Chicken Parampara
I love breasts, chicken, and stir-fries, most of the time in that order. So it is no wonder that I find myself thinking of different ways of stir-frying a chicken breast into submission whenever I get a free run of the chicken, er kitchen. Chicken breast has the advantage of quick to cook. Given smoking hot oil in a skillet or wok, and some breast to stir, a happy meal is less than 15 minutes away.
Last week, I bought a new masala called Parampara from the local Patel store. I got their Sookha Chicken (Sookha == dry) variety. The masala came with instructions on how to make the dish. The masala itself was not a powder, but an oily paste that smelled great. As instructed by the packet, I washed the breasts, cut them into bite-sized pieces, and coated them with the masala and i cup of yoghurt (curd). On an impulse, I poured some extra virgin olive oil on the pieces — that was the left-over oil from the last summer’s barbecue attempts, and the bottle was stealing space in an already crowded cupboard. After 30 minutes of marination, I gave the chicken the stir-fry treatment. Here, I deviated from the packet’s edict. The ginger-garlic lover that I am, I could not pass an opportunity to use those ingredients. So into the smoking coconut oil (ah, the fragrance of it), went matchstick slices of ginger and halved pieces of garlic. After a minute of stirring, I added the chicken and stirred like mad for sometime. Then I got tired, and let it cook at its own pace, with occasional stirrings. Somewhere in there, I added salt as well. After 10 minutes, I added some fresh curry leaves and did a thorugh stirring.
The chicken came out great. Succulent, with the right amount of spiciness. Accompanied by basmati rice, and washed down by an ice cold bottle of Rolling Rocks Extra Pale, it was pure heaven.
