xpost from lounge: Butter Chicken (Punjabi) and Kheer (rice pudding)

[politicat]

For the sake of preserving the recipes, because the lounge moves so quickly, I'm xposting these here.

Kheer:

2.5 cups cooked, cooled rice
2 cups milk
3/4 cup sugar
handful of raisins
1/4 tsp cardamom
chopped pistachios or almonds to top

Break up the rice into the milk in a sauce pan. Add the other ingredients and heat over low heat until simmering. Use a hand blender or a handmixer to break up the rice kernels, stir and then top with nuts. Serve warm or cold with chai.

Butter Chicken
2 chicken breasts, skinless and boneless and cut into small pieces
1 onion, coarsely chopped
1 Tblsp butter

Saute the chicken and onion in the butter.

Add to the chicken:
2 TB garlic paste, 1 TB ginger paste, 1 T garam masala, 4 TB tomato paste, 1 TB honey, 1 tsp chili powder (or hot curry powder; the latter has a different taste, but still tastes very good) 3 TB butter and 3 chopped green chiles (finely chopped). Saute until the peppers are wilted, the butter melted and the spices well blended.

Add 1 C. half and half.

Simmer 7 -10 minutes until the sauce reduces. Stir constantly to prevent scorching. Salt, pepper and otherwise correct to taste. Serve with rice or naan.

If you need to cheat, you can also use Tiger Tiger Butter Chicken Simmer sauce because the above recipe is a reverse engineer of the Tiger Tiger recipe (I found it at Cost Plus World Market and liked it, so I made up my own using the ingredients on the label as a guide). If you use the sauce (it's a bit pricy at $4 a jar, but with the rice and chicken, it stretches pretty well) go ahead and use the onion and butter in the first part of the recipe. Then when you add the sauce, scrape out the jar with a spatula and then fill the jar with water to 1/3, shake well to get the remaining sauce out, and pour in the pan with the sauce and chicken. Blend well, reduce heat, and simmer for a few minutes (until the rice cooker is done).

[mike_c]

1. thanks for posting here....

The butter chicken looks really good! I'll bet it's a brilliant orange color-- HAH! I found a picture of butter chicken!



It's on a page DEVOTED to butter chicken!

http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~sameer/butter_chicken/

[politicat]

2. I think I used his page to help me reverse engineer the proportions.

It's been a couple years, and I have the recipe written down but it's mostly memorized now.

And yes, it is brilliant orange... and I have a lovely spot of it on my white cotton sweater to prove it!! (Thank the Powers That Be for Oxyclean...)

[eyesroll]

3. Can fresh garlic and ginger be subbed for the paste?

I don't usually have the pastes on hand, but I always have fresh garlic and almost always have ginger. I also have the powdered forms of each.

I do need to get some garam masala.

These look good, and will save me $10 a pop when I try to buy butter chicken at the local Indian restaurant. Sigh.

[politicat]

7. Yes....

When I buy a hand of ginger, I automatically peel it and paste it because I use it as paste and it lasts longer in a little jar with a bit of lemon juice for me than in a hand. Same with garlic (though I bought a big jar of Christopher Ranch garlic because for some reason my cats have decided to play with the bulbs in the middle of the night... and occasionally Fuzzy will eat one, then come sit on my pillow and breathe on me.... Damn cat!!) When I say paste, I just mean chopped and ready to use, not something fancy-schmancy.

Garam masala is something I make, because it's not hard. I think mine is currently about cinnamon, bay, cumin seeds, corienader, black cardomom, black pepper, cloves, mace and ?.... Pulsed in the spice mill until fine....

Don't tell me about the restaurant prices... I got an Indian friend to teach me the basics BECAUSE we were going broke at Taj Mahal. I still can't make a decent Lamb Saag to save my life, but if that's the only thing I'm deficient at, I'll gladly give them $12 a couple times a month....

[eyesroll]

9. There's a Penzeys right near the pet store (where I have to go at lunch),

so I think I'll pick up their garam masala (it's a good blend -- I "lost" mine in the divorce, I think).

We're gonna try this tonight...we'll let you know how it goes?

[politicat]

10. Please! I'd love to hear what you think!

And feel free to tinker with the recipe. Your tastes are likely to be different from ours; if nothing else, you may not have an asbestos mouth in the house like I have!! (This recipe isn't hot, but DH adds chiles to his....)

[eyesroll]

11. $20 worth of stuff at Penzey's later...

:eyes:

(I can't ever go in there and leave with just what I intended.)

I'm making some palak aloo too. And basmati rice, which I paid an obscene amount for because I'm not near the Indian grocery and I don't have time to go after work. Next time I'm out that way, I'm picking up a big sack of it.

[politicat]

12. I'm sorry... I didn't mean to make you break the budget!

At least you have one? (I have to mail order, and the olefactory experience is NOT the same.)

[eyesroll]

13. Don't worry -- it's stuff I "needed" anyway

I live in Milwaukee, and Penzey's is based in the suburbs, so we're well covered here.

[eyesroll]

14. UPDATE: Very good!

We'll definitely make this one again, adjusting the seasoning a bit and perhaps lightening it up a bit with evaporated milk instead of half and half (I know it won't be as rich, but we'll see what happens.)

Thanks!

[babylonsister]

4. I LOVE rice pudding! Or did, when I ate it at diners in NY. Ironically,

I don't care for rice so much. Go figure...

That chicken looks really yummy, too, but the ingredients don't compute. Where do you get ginger and garlic paste-do you make it?-and what is garam masala? I have a Hong Kong market close by, so might be able to pick this stuff up. Tiger Butter Chicken Simmer sauce? :shrug:

[mike_c]

5. put garlic and ginger in a mortar and pestle and pound it...

...to a paste, usually with a little salt. Only takes a minute or so. Hint: hold the mortar in your hand while you do this, otherwise it sounds like you're beating on the countertop with a hammer! Alternatively, mince the garlic and ginger as finely as possible, put a pinch of salt on it, and grind it to a paste against the cutting board with the flat side of a knife. The mortar works best.

Garam masala is a ground spice blend that Indian cooks usually make themselves (or at least used to)-- each tends to be rather individualistic in traditional Indian cuisine. But you can buy commercial versions-- some western companies (e.g. McCormick) sell it as gram masala.



http://www.zamourispices.com/garamamasala.html

[babylonsister]

6. Thanks for the info, mike!

This does sound intriguing and tasty!

[politicat]

8. Garlic Paste and Ginger paste are things I make that are also available

commercially. As mentioned above, I can't have bulbs of garlic in the house because my cat finds them to be Great! Fun! To! Bat! Around! The! Kitchen! and even more great fun to chomp on, then come wake Mommy up by breathing garlic cat breath in her face at 3 am. (The only time I have ever believed in demons or monsters is when I wake from dreams to that smell....) So I just use chopped garlic in oil (it comes in bottles at most supermarkets; major brand name is Christopher Ranch). You can use plain garlic - 4-5 cloves.

You can do the same with fresh ginger root - ginger paste for me is the logical thing that happens after I buy a hand of ginger - it comes home, it gets peeled, and it goes in the bowl of the handi-mixer until it's paste. A few drops of lemon juice as a preservative and it will last in a babyfood jar in the fridge for a couple of weeks. You can also just use plain, fresh chopped ginger. (In my climate, if I buy a hand of ginger and leave it on the counter, I have this mummy looking thing in about 48 hours; if I leave it in the fridge, it usually gets lost and becomes icky. So....) I think Christopher Ranch has a jarred ginger paste and I know that it comes in tubes like toothpaste, too.

Tiger Tiger is a name brand of sauces and condiments that is popular in England as a convenience food. It's the equivalent to Prego or Ragu, but with far superior taste and better ingredients. It's an all natural, pre-made and bottled sauce that we buy at Cost Plus World Market occasionally (when we know I'm going to have a lot of evening client meetings). I haven't seen it any place but CPWM except in England, and right now, the budget doesn't let me make regular shopping trips to Harvey Knickers ^H^H^H^H Nichols and Harrods. A-hem.

Finally, Garam Masala is a finely ground Indian spice mixture. There are literally hundreds of variations, but you can make your own and adjust it to your own tastes. Here's one that's close to mine and has the directions; you can also buy it at many Asian groceries. (I add mustard seeds, sesame seeds and nutmeg; we also make a Kashmiri version and my husband the human fire eater makes a Mumbai mixture that I can't even touch that he uses for vindaloo....)

http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/13/Basic_Garam_Masala633.shtml

Let me know if I can answer any other questions.