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Get in touch with me, if you’re in Bangalore and interested! I’d love to see this working out.
Lemon and Herb Grilled Chicken with Roasted Red Pepper Aioli
Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? The great and very adorable(If I get killed, you know who did it!) @yashot was home for dinner last night. I have come to enjoy how we’ve re-kindled our friendship from undergraduate school, after my move to Bangalore. I loved Siddharth and Yash to bits through undergrad. And I hated them just as much. But, it makes me immensely happy to be able to hang out with them, at will (for most part) now. In Bangalore. *wipes tears*
May be I should’ve taken up Theatre. Why am I cooking and feeding the whole world and their uncle, again?
Oh, well.
Yash brought some wine, a Shiraz for himself and a Chenin Blanc for me. And happy times were had.
We started off with some hummus and whole-wheat pita. And when we fell short of pita, we ate the hummus with some khakhra. Being Gujju has always had it’s perks.
Earlier in the evening, I roasted some red peppers and mashed them up, mixed them with some mayo and garlic and made some pretty delicious aioli, quite on the lines of this recipe.
For the Chicken:
Ingredients:
Boneless chicken breasts, butterflied or cut in manageable pieces (I used 2 pieces and cut each into half, to yield 4, in all)
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon fresh ground black pepper
1 tablespoon freshly chopped rosemary (or 1/2 tablespoon dried rosemary)
Juice of 2 limes
Method:
1. Marinate the chicken in the spices for about an hour.
2. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees celsius.
3. Cook the chicken for about 20 minutes, in grill mode, flipping it over half way through.
Notes:
1. I overcooked the chicken by about 5 minutes or so, and it got a little dry. In my defense, we were having a good time gossiping and drinking wine and eating hummus. The chicken still tasted great, especially the peppery crust. But I wish I could’ve “salvaged” it from the oven while it was still really juicy.
2. If you have the conventional grill with charcoal, feel free to use it. I’m sure the charring would add a beautiful flavour to the chicken.
For the Aioli:
For the uninitiated, aioli is garlic mayonnaise. You can make the mayonnaise from scratch, by using whisked egg yolks, vinegar, lemon juice, vegetable oil and water. But I had a small jar of mayonnaise at home, from my fish-and-chips lunch, one afternoon. And it made best sense to use this.
Ingredients:
1 clove garlic
2 medium sized red peppers
1 cup mayonnaise
1 tsp chopped fresh parsley (or 1/2 tsp dried parsley)
A pinch of red chilli powder (cayenne pepper)
A pinch of crushed black pepper
Salt, to taste, if at all
Method:
1. Poke holes into the red peppers using a fork, in 3-4 places and roast the peppers on the gase stove (or an open flame) for a few minutes until they are mildly charred and have softened.
2. De-seed the peppers and give them a quick whir in the blender, to ensure that they are still chunky and not entirely a paste.
3. Mix half the mayonnaise with the peppers. Taste this. If you think it feels creamy and sweet enough, you can stop right here. Else, you can go ahead and add as much mayonnaise as you like.
4. Mix in the herbs and spices – the red chilli powder, the black pepper and the parsley, followed by the crushed garlic. Set aside to chill.
5. Plate it with the chicken, while serving.
Notes:
To be honest, I didn’t use measures for this recipe. I just tasted it along the way, keeping in mind that the chicken would be lemony-peppery and that I’d probably like a sweet and tangy touch to the sauce.
Marble Cake
In an endeavour to prove wrong the wise words of the author’s mother, “People in love bake the world’s best cupcakes and cookies… And people with pent up anger bake amazing bread”, the author set out on a mission to fix her day-long lousy headache AND bake a cake.
And it turned out fabulous. Her first entirely (well, almost) successful baking experiment after having moved to Bangalore.
I say “well, almost” because I own a cake-pan with a ring that can be removed from the base. And I had some of the cake batter seep through the points where the ring meets the base, and fall onto the heating coils inside my oven, and send mad fumes out of my oven. Hee. That was fun. Especially because I was making palak paneer AND vegetable pulao alongside. Yes, we’re goddesses. With three pairs of arms. Because in the end, all three edible items were not only plain edible, but also delicious. *smug*
I don’t know what point in the day I decided to bake a cake. My head was spinning. I was feeling terribly low for stupid reasons. And I was fasting. And I think all that put together called for some severe feel good. How the marble cake idea came to my head, I can’t say. I looked up a recipe. And decided to go with a Sanjeev Kapoor recipe that I found here.
Ingredients:
(Makes a 9″ round cake)
2 cups all purpose flour (good ol’ maida)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/4 cup powdered sugar
A pinch of salt
1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup milk
2-3 tablespoons cocoa powder
Note:
I used a 100g slab of Amul (salted) butter and didn’t add the pinch of salt that the original recipe calls for. The cake turned out excellent, even with the improvisation.
Method:
1. Preheat oven to 180C.
2. Grease a cake pan with some butter.
3. In a large mixing bowl, add the flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla essence and milk. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, first with a spatula or spoon to incorporate them into one another.
4. Then, beat the mixture with an electric mixer (or vigorously by hand) at medium speed for about two minutes until smooth.
5. Pour half to three-fourth of the batter into your cake pan.
6. Stir the cocoa powder into this remaining batter. You can add more cocoa to the batter, or alternately, do half cocoa, half vanilla, depending on how chocolate-y you want your cake.
7. Drop the cocoa batter over the white batter, one (large) spoonful at a time.
8. Then, using a knife, swirl the cocoa batter into the white batter to give it a marble effect.
9. Bake for thirty to forty minutes, or until a knife inserted into the cake center comes through clean. 10. Remove from the oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool.
So, I brought the cake in to work this morning, and coolly sent out an email with the subject “Cake at my desk [eom]“, in the hope that the whole world and their uncle would charge in to eat my oh-so-lovely-first-time-in-a-long-time-successful-marble-cake. Nope. Nothing. Mild heartbreak.
Forty five minutes later.
It’s gone.
And me, I’m bloody pleased!
Talk around lunch time involves a “Hey, you owe us another cake, just by the way. Because you let [software engineer guy] eat half of it.”
What can I say! I’m all smiles!
(No fancy cameras were used in the photographs for this recipe. NOW YOU KNOW WHY THEY SUCK!)
London-style Fish and Chips (albeit, with a twist)
Weekends are for cooking. Or getting drunk and wasting. Occasionally, they involve drinking and cooking.
I had a bottle of some nasty Kingfisher Strong a friend had left behind in my refrigerator and I wasn’t going to drink it. I wasn’t going to use it in my hair as conditioner either. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to pour all of it down the drain just yet. So I decided to cook with it.
London-style beer-battered fish and chips seemed like a fun idea.
I picked up a whole black pomfret, fresh from the supermarket and asked the man to make fillets for me. I was pleasantly surprised by how fine his work was. I’m tempted to get more fillets made, soon. It’s way better than buying frozen basa-fillets from Nature’s Basket, really.
I also had some avocados that I needed to use. And guacamole wasn’t something I wanted to make, this time around. Thankfully, there’s the interweb. And there’s never a dearth of good recipes. Crumb-fried avocados seemed the perfect substitute for fries, because if you’ve read my Belgium post, you’ll know I’m not big on potato fries, in general.
And thus, Sunday lunch was planned.
(The “eat-healthy” whore in me didn’t agree on frying the fish AND the “chips”, so I altered the crumb-fried avocado recipe to baked, crumb-coated avocados. You could alternately make them pan-fried.)
Baked, Crumb-coated Avocados:
Ingredients:
2 avocados, pitted and cut into wedges, to look like french-fries
1 cup semolina (rava)
Half a cup rice flour
Salt, to taste
1 egg, beaten
Olive oil, to drizzle
Method:
1. In a plate, mix the rice flour, the semolina and the salt.
2. Preheat the oven at 200 degrees celsius.
3. Dip the avocado wedges first in the egg mixture and then coat them evenly with the flour/semolina mixture and lay out on a baking dish.
4. Drizzle the coated avocado wedges with some olive oil and bake for 3-4 minutes on one side, and then flip over and bake for a couple of minutes on the other side. Drizzle a little more olive oil if required.
Notes:
Burnt avocado tastes really nasty. It’s bitter and can ruin the taste of the wedges of avocado altogether. Reduce the time the avocados are in the oven, in case you see them getting overly browned. Remember, avocados are eaten raw too, so you’re putting them in the oven, just to get them crumby and crunchy, not to cook really. They’d taste great even without the crumb-coating.
Beer-batter Fried Fish Fillets
Ingredients:
4-5 fillets of a fish of your choice
Oil, for frying
2 cups of lager beer
1 cup of gram flour
1 teaspoon garam masala (or bay seasoning or five-spice)
Salt, to taste
Method:
1. Make a batter using beer, gram flour, the spice mix and salt. The batter should be thick and stick to the fish when it is dipped in.
2. Heat enough oil in a vessel, so that the fish fillets will be submerged completely, when immersed.
3. Dip the fish in the batter and gently slide into the oil. Let it cook for about 3-4 minutes or until the batter turns a fine golden-brown and flip it over to fry for a few minutes on the other side as well.
4. Take the fillet out of the oil and dry on some paper towels.
Points to Note:
1. A runny batter will result in the batter not holding on to the fish entirely and it will give way, in the oil, resulting in some not-so-nice fillets of fried fish.
2. You can test if the oil is hot enough by gently letting a drop or two of batter into the oil. If the oil is hot enough, the batter will rise to the top.
3. Be very careful about frying the fish. Let it into the oil very gently, from the side. Fish generallt tends to have more water content than most other meats or veggies and will cause the oil to splatter, if not handled with care. This can be dangerous.
Tartar Sauce:
(Makes a little over 1 cup)
1 cup mayonnaise
Ingredients:
1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup dill pickle
1 tablespoon parsley
1/2 tablespoon capers
1 small scallion
1/4 teaspoon lemon zest
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
2 to 3 drops hot sauce
Method:
1. Combine all ingredients (except the mayonnaise) in a food processor.
2. Add this mixture to the mayonnaise in a bowl and mix well. Refrigerate until serving.
To Serve:
Typically, fish and chips are served with tartar sauce and a wedge of lime, in an old daily or in a brown paper bag or box.
I tried to recreate that in my own silly way. I won’t say I was entirely successful here, but that first picture with the beer bottle and the instagram filters came out pretty well, I think.
Prosciutto and Provolone Bites
Prosciutto wrapped around cubes of provolone, finished with a mint leaf and a cube of red pepper.
(inspired from this picture. BasilGenovese is the most awesome food-porn tumblr around, if you ask me.)
I had a couple of friends over for dinner last night. While they arranged for the alcohol and other happy things, I took full responsibility for the food.
There was guacamole and tortilla chips.
Then there were store-bought chicken and cheese sausages.
There were the prosciutto and cheese bites.
There were devils of horseback.
And there was railway mutton curry, with bread and rice.
I haven’t asked for my friends’ opinions on this one, but I think the party was a success. Bring ‘em on!
Butter Garlic Mushrooms
Butter. Garlic. Salt and pepper.
New tableware.
And more attempts at photography.
Oreo Thickshake
There was an issue with the internet at work earlier this week, and I needed the internet to get some stuff working. That is why I decided to go home, about three hours into my work day and work from home, instead.
Worst idea ever.
Alright, alright. I *did* get some work done. But staying at home on a summer weekday (and not quite having plans other than work) get those binges going. Also, this post was to blame, in some ways.
I crushed some cloves. I got out the bottle of rum. And dunked the cloves in a couple of tablespoons of rum for about half an hour, stirring occasionally, while I coded.
And then, I embarked on an expedition. To make the yummiest oreo shake that may ever have been made. Of course, to each his own.
(This makes a really tall glass of oreo shake, probably a half litre, or so. You have been warned.)
Ingredients:
2 cups of vanilla ice cream
1/2 cup of milk
60 ml dark rum
10-12 cloves
6-8 oreo cookies
2-3 teaspoons of instant coffee powder (more or less, depending on how bitter you like your drink, I’d recommend starting with a single teaspoon and moving upwards)
Method:
1. Crush the cloves to a coarse powder and mix them with the rum. Let this sit for about 20-30 minutes.
2. Crush the cookies (only the chocolate cookies, not the cream centre) by hand or in a blender.
3. Blend the ice cream, the milk and the coffee powder to a smooth, thick shake.
4. Strain the cloves from the rum and add the rum to the thick shake.
5. Add in the crushed oreo and mix well.
6. Garnish (if I may use the word) with more crushed oreos and serve chilled in a tall glass.
Notes:
The rum, the oreo and the ice cream are all sweet components and the shake can get a little overwhelming. That is why I added the coffee. It serves to add that bitter tinge to the shake, almost like you’re eating dark chocolate, y’know.
Drunky time!
