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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2j0NBzo:
So uh. I have a problem of more chickens than my freezer can hold. (There was also an incident involving Asia Food Mart’s frozen dumpling aisle and my self-control. I LOVE DUMPLINGS OK.)
I don’t have time on a workday to roast a chicken. I could cut the chicken into parts now that it’s defrosted, but I’m out of fridge space and patience. And that sounds like work. But! I have a slow cooker. Surely I can… something.
I know if you pop a chicken into a slow cooker and just go, it turns out rubbery as hell. Nobody likes that. I’m a white enough person that I’ve totally had boiled chicken before. This is not a good concept. That’s basically what a slow cooker does. Ugh.
Now, I also know that if you cook the chicken in something, preferably something acidic, you can tenderize it a bit so it’s not so dang rubbery. But I also have a long-held belief that chicken and tomatoes are terrible together. I picked this up in the UK, where, again, white people– the boarding school cafeteria used to stew chickens in tomatoes and call it, what the fuck did they call it, I don’t know. I think they were trying to pass it off as Indian food. I don’t know jack about dick, but I know that’s not Indian food. Indian food has… flavors.
So. At Asian Food Mart, knowing I was going to lose my mind in the dumpling aisle, I was kind of thinking this over, and so when I found the South Asian aisle– here’s a profound injustice, that whole old Wal-Mart is a giant Asian supermarket and there’s only one South Asia aisle in it!– I tried to Google what I was doing but the reception was bad, and so, having done 0 homework and knowing less than jack about dick, I threw myself upon the tender mercies of the copy written on the sides of the spice mix boxes.
Masala, I knew, is a spice blend. Garam masala is a promising one, it sounds like something I’ve heard of before, but the box isn’t very informative because presumably if you’re buying it you know why. This Tandoori one has a recipe! I read the recipe. It called for another spice blend. I looked. The other spice blend contains only red chili powder. Well… why the fuck not.
(These boxes, by the way… fascinating. Made in India, by a UAE company… the text is in English first, then in half a dozen other European languages, no Indian languages at all, and the French text, which is in the middle, inexplicably contains a bunch more information, which between us we know enough French only to be sure of, but not to know what the information actually really is. I should post a picture. Or, you know, Google.)
Anyway. We got home, and I shoved the chicken into the fridge to let it ponder its sins for a couple of days while I worked up my nerve. And I Googled around for slow cooker curry chicken recipes. I learned all about the etymology of the word curry, I learned that really I ought to have just bought the garam masala because that is the spice mix that just goes in everything in a particular subset of recipes, and I mostly learned that I cannot abide recipe blogs. SHUT UP AND TELL ME WHAT’S IN THIS.
But this recipe, which is the worst offender, do not whatever you do load this on your phone and attempt to cook while reading it, it’s full of ads that make you jump a whole screen, and the ingredient lists are separated into multiple sections, and the whole thing has an agonizing prologue about impressing her friends, but– at least it had the bare bones of what I wanted to do. I read a few other ones, but of course, if you generically google “curry” you’re going to get a whole buttload of cuisines because that word has been applied to so many things, thanks Britain– I mean, genuinely thank you for exporting the concept of the spice mix to places like Japan who have done fucking amazing things with it, but no thank you for the dumb names for everything and like, the genocide. Whatever.
So, let’s pretend I’m a recipe blogger and you’ve had to wait for at least five ads to black out the screen and try to give you notifications and set cookies and such, and pretend this whole story was a soft-focus atmospheric piece with blowing net curtains in the sunny breeze and some pale hardwood floors and like, an antique wooden kitchen table and some vintage Pyrex bowls and shit. Here’s what I did, and we’ll find out this afternoon if it’s any good.
I followed the directions on the Tandoori Spice Box, which told me to make a paste of garlic, ginger, onions, and deggi mirch. I did that in the food processor. Then I was to coat the chicken in this and pressure cook it. I’m not doing that.
Ms. Asmanov, linked above, had recommended to make a paste of onions, ginger, garlic, and a bunch of spices, and then to saute the spice mix. So I split the difference, and coated the chicken in this stuff and then slapped it into a frying pan. I then made another batch of spice mix in the food processor, and once the chicken had had a tender moment or, like, five minutes on front and back in the frying pan, I chucked the chicken into the slowcooker and then sauteed the second batch of spice mix. (I really really really really really hate bland chicken and tomatoes, did I Mention?) The second batch of spice mix was where I put in the stuff the Tandoori box wanted me to add for the second round of cooking of the chicken (predictably, this second round involves a Tandoori oven, which I don’t have), which was itself and a couple of other things. (Including more deggi mirch.) I added water, as Ms. Asmanov had suggested, and it deglazed the pan nicely.
Then I put a can of tomatoes and a cup of yogurt in with the chicken, and then I dumped the whole spice mix saute over the top of it.
I’m going to slow cooker it for however many hours I’m at work, and then I hope we’ll have something edible. Stay tuned to know if you should laugh at me or follow my lead. It could go either way.
If I waited until I’d had time to research it and do it right, I’d never do it. But apologies to any South Asians who are recognizing what I’m trying to do, and cringing. I don’t know, I know how to cook a chicken but I don’t know how to make it taste like I want it to.
Also don’t be like me, if something’s in metric and you can’t convert it in your head, look it up. I know a gram is a paper clip so it asked me for 60 grams of onion and I tried to estimate what a whole bag of paper clips would be like. (I used a half an onion, for that, and then threw the other half in too, because who the fuck weighs an onion.)
(Your picture was not posted)
So uh. I have a problem of more chickens than my freezer can hold. (There was also an incident involving Asia Food Mart’s frozen dumpling aisle and my self-control. I LOVE DUMPLINGS OK.)
I don’t have time on a workday to roast a chicken. I could cut the chicken into parts now that it’s defrosted, but I’m out of fridge space and patience. And that sounds like work. But! I have a slow cooker. Surely I can… something.
I know if you pop a chicken into a slow cooker and just go, it turns out rubbery as hell. Nobody likes that. I’m a white enough person that I’ve totally had boiled chicken before. This is not a good concept. That’s basically what a slow cooker does. Ugh.
Now, I also know that if you cook the chicken in something, preferably something acidic, you can tenderize it a bit so it’s not so dang rubbery. But I also have a long-held belief that chicken and tomatoes are terrible together. I picked this up in the UK, where, again, white people– the boarding school cafeteria used to stew chickens in tomatoes and call it, what the fuck did they call it, I don’t know. I think they were trying to pass it off as Indian food. I don’t know jack about dick, but I know that’s not Indian food. Indian food has… flavors.
So. At Asian Food Mart, knowing I was going to lose my mind in the dumpling aisle, I was kind of thinking this over, and so when I found the South Asian aisle– here’s a profound injustice, that whole old Wal-Mart is a giant Asian supermarket and there’s only one South Asia aisle in it!– I tried to Google what I was doing but the reception was bad, and so, having done 0 homework and knowing less than jack about dick, I threw myself upon the tender mercies of the copy written on the sides of the spice mix boxes.
Masala, I knew, is a spice blend. Garam masala is a promising one, it sounds like something I’ve heard of before, but the box isn’t very informative because presumably if you’re buying it you know why. This Tandoori one has a recipe! I read the recipe. It called for another spice blend. I looked. The other spice blend contains only red chili powder. Well… why the fuck not.
(These boxes, by the way… fascinating. Made in India, by a UAE company… the text is in English first, then in half a dozen other European languages, no Indian languages at all, and the French text, which is in the middle, inexplicably contains a bunch more information, which between us we know enough French only to be sure of, but not to know what the information actually really is. I should post a picture. Or, you know, Google.)
Anyway. We got home, and I shoved the chicken into the fridge to let it ponder its sins for a couple of days while I worked up my nerve. And I Googled around for slow cooker curry chicken recipes. I learned all about the etymology of the word curry, I learned that really I ought to have just bought the garam masala because that is the spice mix that just goes in everything in a particular subset of recipes, and I mostly learned that I cannot abide recipe blogs. SHUT UP AND TELL ME WHAT’S IN THIS.
But this recipe, which is the worst offender, do not whatever you do load this on your phone and attempt to cook while reading it, it’s full of ads that make you jump a whole screen, and the ingredient lists are separated into multiple sections, and the whole thing has an agonizing prologue about impressing her friends, but– at least it had the bare bones of what I wanted to do. I read a few other ones, but of course, if you generically google “curry” you’re going to get a whole buttload of cuisines because that word has been applied to so many things, thanks Britain– I mean, genuinely thank you for exporting the concept of the spice mix to places like Japan who have done fucking amazing things with it, but no thank you for the dumb names for everything and like, the genocide. Whatever.
So, let’s pretend I’m a recipe blogger and you’ve had to wait for at least five ads to black out the screen and try to give you notifications and set cookies and such, and pretend this whole story was a soft-focus atmospheric piece with blowing net curtains in the sunny breeze and some pale hardwood floors and like, an antique wooden kitchen table and some vintage Pyrex bowls and shit. Here’s what I did, and we’ll find out this afternoon if it’s any good.
I followed the directions on the Tandoori Spice Box, which told me to make a paste of garlic, ginger, onions, and deggi mirch. I did that in the food processor. Then I was to coat the chicken in this and pressure cook it. I’m not doing that.
Ms. Asmanov, linked above, had recommended to make a paste of onions, ginger, garlic, and a bunch of spices, and then to saute the spice mix. So I split the difference, and coated the chicken in this stuff and then slapped it into a frying pan. I then made another batch of spice mix in the food processor, and once the chicken had had a tender moment or, like, five minutes on front and back in the frying pan, I chucked the chicken into the slowcooker and then sauteed the second batch of spice mix. (I really really really really really hate bland chicken and tomatoes, did I Mention?) The second batch of spice mix was where I put in the stuff the Tandoori box wanted me to add for the second round of cooking of the chicken (predictably, this second round involves a Tandoori oven, which I don’t have), which was itself and a couple of other things. (Including more deggi mirch.) I added water, as Ms. Asmanov had suggested, and it deglazed the pan nicely.
Then I put a can of tomatoes and a cup of yogurt in with the chicken, and then I dumped the whole spice mix saute over the top of it.
I’m going to slow cooker it for however many hours I’m at work, and then I hope we’ll have something edible. Stay tuned to know if you should laugh at me or follow my lead. It could go either way.
If I waited until I’d had time to research it and do it right, I’d never do it. But apologies to any South Asians who are recognizing what I’m trying to do, and cringing. I don’t know, I know how to cook a chicken but I don’t know how to make it taste like I want it to.
Also don’t be like me, if something’s in metric and you can’t convert it in your head, look it up. I know a gram is a paper clip so it asked me for 60 grams of onion and I tried to estimate what a whole bag of paper clips would be like. (I used a half an onion, for that, and then threw the other half in too, because who the fuck weighs an onion.)
(Your picture was not posted)
