Traditional Chicken Curry

The last semester was really hectic for me with teaching for the first time and applying for dissertation fellowships and this blog has clearly reflected that, in that I didn't have any time to update. But this upcoming semester should be a lot calmer, so I'm going to try to be a little more consistent with updating and plan to do so about twice a month, around the 1st and the 15th of every month. This gives me a little more leeway than trying to update every other weekend.

So I made this Traditional Chicken Curry from the Indian Slow Cooker cookbook over a year ago (on 28 September 2011), but I can't update with anything I've made more recently because I can't seem to find the charger for my digital camera and all the photos that I have on there are stuck there for now. I'll keep looking... I'm sure I put it somewhere after my France trip and I'm pretty sure that I didn't leave it in Paris... (For my vegetarian friends, I just noticed that the same author now has a Vegan Indian Cooking cookbook, that apparently has both slow cooker and stove-top recipes.)

This is a pretty simple recipe, but you need a food processor for it. I was able to use the "food processor"-type attachment for my immersion blender which was effective, but it's not great for these things, especially because of the size. My parents got me an 11-cup food processor for Christmas, so from now on I'll be able to use that for these types of things. So first, you mix onion, tomato, ginger root, and garlic in the food processor until it comes out smooth. Now, I didn't have the exact amount of ginger for this that the recipe called for, so I added some dried ginger as well, approximately according to this substitution policy. Would it have tasted different if I had used all fresh ginger? Perhaps, but this recipe worked with a mix of fresh and dried.

After you have a paste, you add salt (though, knowing me, I probably left out the salt), turmeric, garam masla, vegetable or canola oil, plain yogurt, red chile powder, and dried methi leaves. I got the methi leaves from Amazon.com (this is the kind I purchased, but I would have gotten ones that were Prime eligible, so I didn't get these exact ones).

This paste gets poured over chicken in the slow cooker. Now, the recipe calls for "3 pounds (1.36 kg) skinless whole chicken, cut in about 8 pieces including the breast, legs, and wings (boneless can also be used)." As people who have followed this blog can guess, I used boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

To this, you add a cinnamon stick, green cardamom pods, whole cloves, and halved green chiles. I also got the cardamom pods from Amazon.com. Then you cook it on low for 8 hours.

This is what it looked like before I turned it on.

And this is what it looked like after cooking for 8 hours.

An optional step is to add 1/2 cup boiling water toward the end of the cooking time if you like your dish with more broth.  I did not do this. The recipe suggests serving this "over a bed of basmati or brown rice or with roti or naan." As you can see from the pictures, I served it over basmati rice with a salad.

Now, since this was so long ago, I don't remember how many servings I got out of this, but the cookbook says you get 6-8 servings. I imagine that a lot of this depends on how many pieces of chicken you end up with. In terms of calories, this is a pretty substantial meal, especially if you only end up with 6 servings. Not counting the rice, I calculated that this is about 380 calories for 8 servings and 510 for 6. With the rice, that ends up around 530 to 660 for the meal, not counting the salad which, with dressing, can bring your total up to over 700 or 800 calories -- a full mean for someone my size and even substantial enough for my husband (though I'm sure he went back for seconds).

Cost-wise, this is still under $10/serving if you have to buy everything. I calculated based on my purchases around $5.81/serving for 8 servings and $7.74/serving for 6. I had to get most of the ingredients for this recipe, though I already had turmeric and garam masala from the Spiced Cauliflower and Potatoes I had made over the summer (and the vegetable oil, of course). So I spent around $4.64/serving for 8 servings and $6.19/serving for 6. You could eat this meal for 3-4 days of a week and have spent under $50 total for your dinners for that week. Pretty good for those of us still on a graduate student's budget.

Spiced Cauliflower and Potatoes

One of the many awesome cookbooks that my mother-in-law has given me is The Indian Slow Cooker: 50 Healthy, Easy, Authentic Recipes and the first recipe I tried out of this was the Spiced Cauliflower and Potatoes. Now one note about this cookbook: a lot of the recipes require some unique spices, but I've found that if your local grocery store doesn't have what is needed, try Amazon.com. You're definitely going to need to stock up on some standard Indian spices like garam masala, which is in almost every recipe. Also, a lot of the recipes call for saffron, which can be really expensive.  In the introduction, it says, "For decades, saffron was the world's most expensive spice by weight."  I found it prohibitively expensive in my local grocery store, but Trader Joe's has it at a much more reasonable price, so check there.  I actually have avoided the saffron recipes so far because I didn't get it until recently, so you'll have to wait for any of the recipes that use saffron.

The recipe is pretty easy to make once you've chopped all the ingredients.  You'll need to cut up the cauliflower, potato, onion, tomato, fresh ginger, garlic, and peppers (Thai, serrano, or cayenne). The spices in this recipe include cumin, red chile powder, garam masala, salt, and turmeric, with a little bit of vegetable or canola oil. As most people who read this blog regularly know, I didn't add the salt.

You mix the ingredients all together and then cook the cauliflower on low for three hours. The recipe recommends mixing it once during cooking: "Mix once or twice during cooking, especially in the beginning. Eventually the cauliflower will release enough liquid to prevent anything from sticking to the sides of the slow cooker."

This is what the dish looked like before I turned it on.

And this is what it looked like after cooking.

As you can see in the picture above, you mix in some chopped cilantro. The recipe suggests serving this dish "with roti or naan and a side of onion and cucumber salad."  As you can see from the picture to the left and below, I served it over basmati rice, the naan you can get from Trader Joe's, and a salad. This was a really good recipe, but I made it too spicy.  I didn't get all the seeds out of the peppers so it ended up super spicy. Obviously it wouldn't have been as spicy if I had taken all the seeds out.  But, I thought it was still good.

The good thing about this dish is that it makes a lot of servings.  This cookbook doesn't give you any approximation about the servings, but rather how many cups of food you make. This recipe makes 7 cups.  I ate it for a while, however, so I'm going to estimate that I got 8 servings out of it for the purposes of my calculation. In terms of calories, the cauliflower dish by itself is only about 122 calories per serving.  I'd estimate rice at between 100 and 150 calories (depending on how much you serve -- 1/2 cup is about 100 calories, but people often serve themselves more) and the Trader Joe's naan is 190 calories per piece. So the total (not counting the salad) is about 412 to 462 calories per meal.  This one really keeps the calories down for those days when you spend the entire day in the library and no time in the gym!

For cost per serving, the real bulk of the cost is getting some of the spices that you may not normally have on hand. My grocery receipt included cumin ($2.99), red chile powder ($7.99), garam masala ($4.49) and turmeric ($3.29) -- basically all the spices needed for this recipe. The first time you cook from this book you'll be spending a bit more to get the spices, but subsequent recipes will cost less per serving because you'll already have the spices on hand.  For everything you need for the recipe, I estimated about $4.34 per serving (I only paid $3.54 per serving, but I didn't have enough naan to serve every time). If you already have the spices it would only be $2.00 per serving (and keep in mind, I included the rice and naan in this calculation) and only $1.44 with the things that I already had on hand!  So basically, you could feed yourself for over a week with this meal at only $2.00 per meal!  Really helpful for those of us on a grad school budget!

Rachel Ray's Indian-Style Crock Pot Curry

When my husband and I first moved into our new apartment, there was a period in which we had a million boxes and my cookbooks were all buried somewhere so I ended up searching the internet for some good crock pot recipes.  (In fact, if you skip down to the last photo, you can see some of the unpacked boxes on the floor behind my husband.)  On June 23 I tried making a recipe I found online: Rachel Ray's Indian-Style Curry.  I picked this recipe because my husband absolutely loves Indian food, having grown up with close family friends who are Indian. Interestingly, this recipe is different than many of the other ones I've made, and in a really brilliant way that just, silly enough, never occurred to me.  Most of the recipes I make have you put most of the ingredients in the crock pot, then mix the sauce in a separate bowl and pour it over everything else.  What is cool about this is it really was one-pot cooking.  It has you make the sauce first in the crock pot, then add the other ingredients and stir everything together.

As you can read from the link above, the sauce is made out of coconut milk, tomato paste, curry, coriander, cumin, and hot sauce.  Then you add all the other ingredients and mix it together: onion, garlic, ginger, bell pepper, eggplant, sweet potatoes, chick peas, chicken, salt, and black pepper.  Now I skipped the salt, as I often do.  Also, although this recipe called for bone-in, skinless chicken thighs, I substituted boneless, skinless chicken thighs -- of course I find that my favorite cut of chicken is the boneless, skinless chicken breast so these days whenever I have a chicken recipe I tend to use that regardless of what it actually calls for (especially when they are on sale at the grocery store!).  Then you cook on high for four hours.

This is what it looked like before turning it on.

And this is what it looked like when finished cooking.

Now, the recipe as listed on the Rachel Ray website suggests that you serve it over white rice and garnish it with lemon wedges, scallions, cilantro, peanuts, and mango chutney.  I decided to serve it over rice, but skipped the ridiculous amount of garnish completely.  Looking back over my receipt (that I dug up out of a pile of old receipts to figure out how much I spent on this meal), I did purchase everything for the garnish at Trader Joe's but I think I forgot about it when it actually came time to serve the recipe -- which would make sense because I wouldn't have looked up the recipe online again before serving four hours later.  Overall, both my husband and I thought this was a good recipe, but it is a very mild curry and doesn't feel very Indian -- more like an American take on Indian food.  Of course, if you wanted to make it more spicy, you could use more hot sauce or throw in some crushed red pepper.  But still, it was yummy.

Now, at this point, this was so long ago that I can't even pretend to remember how many servings we got out of it so I'll use Rachel Ray's estimate of four servings even though I'm pretty sure we got more than four servings out of this.  Of course, I also used the whole eggplant instead of just half as she recommends... cause what would I do with half an eggplant?  In terms of calories, this one is pretty heavy, especially if you include the rice.  The curry itself is about 587 calories per serving, if you're counting for four servings.  Then, add about 140 calories to each serving for the rice, making this meal almost 730 calories per serving without adding a salad or a beverage.  However, since I suspect that I actually got more than four servings out of this, I will note that this recipe is only 392 calories per serving for six servings (so even with the rice, only about 532 calories per serving -- much more reasonable for someone who tends to be sitting at a desk all day).

In terms of cost, this was actually a bit pricey for me to make, but part of that was because we had just moved into our new place and so didn't have any spices and such yet and I had to purchase all of them.  The one thing we already had on hand was the hot sauce because my husband is addicted to Tapatio.  Using 4 servings, this comes out to $8.39 per serving (not counting the garnish) if you have to purchase everything (though if you make it into 6 servings, it's around $5.59 per serving).  However, if you cook regularly and already have the spices on hand, it's a much more reasonable $5.17 per serving.  Still -- 4 meals for the week at under $10 per meal?  Not too bad for those of us on a limited budget.

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Finally, I apologize for having been a week late with this post.  Somehow, I planned to be updating my blog the same weekends that I've scheduled to submit drafts of my dissertation prospectus to my seminar.  So, it's quite possible that some weeks until I get this done will be a little late.  But such is the life of the grad student.

Asian Barbecue Skewers

I apologize for missing posting last weekend.  I meant to actually write this post while I was watching the Superbowl, but unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries so I couldn't upload my pictures and because my weeks are so busy, it just had to wait.

Anyway, last week my roommate and I had our own Superbowl party.  She told me that for the game, she was going to make stuffed mushrooms, Philly cheese steaks, and veggies with hummus.  As she was getting ready to go to the grocery store, I thought: my crock pot cookbooks have some appetizers in them so I should take this opportunity to make one of them!  We looked through the options and picked the Asian Barbecue Skewers from the Crock-Pot Incredibly Easy Recipes cookbook.

Luckily, we had most of the ingredients, so I asked my roommate to pick up boneless skinless chicken breasts, scallions, and wooden skewers.  Now, the recipe actually calls for boneless skinless chicken thighs, but, as I've mentioned in previous posts dealing with chicken, I've realize that the chicken breast is the cut of meat that I prefer so generally, I just get that regardless of what the recipe actually calls for.  My roommate suggested that I pound out the breasts a bit before cutting them into strips, because the breasts were thicker than chicken thighs would have been.

The two pounds of chicken breast that the recipe calls for actually makes quite a few strips, which I then had to put on the skewers.  I will note especially at this point that the cookbook says that when you layer the skewered chicken into the crock pot, you should do it as flat as possible.  Of course, I thought this was kind of silly.  It can only be so flat when the crock pot is of the size that it is.

Then you make the sauce, made out of soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil, and garlic.  We already had all of those ingredients (the soy sauce I bought when I made the Soy-Sake Asparagus back in December), though I had *just* purchased the sesame oil the day before when I had gone grocery shopping.  Now, the picture on the left is of the sauce after I put all the ingredients in.  I had wanted to take a picture that showed all of the individual ingredients, but while I was looking for my sesame oil, the soy sauce ate the brown sugar, so alas.

But here's where it gets important, leading to how I'd make this recipe differently were I to do it again.  The directions say, "Reserve 1/3 cup sauce; set aside.  Pour remaining sauce over skewers."  The picture on the right is what the dish looked like right after I followed this direction.  As you can see, the chicken is not covered by the sauce.  The dish cooks for three hours on low: that's two hours initially and then an additional hour after you turn the chicken over.  After it's done cooking, you put the chicken skewers on a plate and pour the remaining sauce over them.  The recipe says to garnish the chicken with sliced scallions and, optionally, toasted sesame seeds.  I started the recipe around 3:30 p.m., so it was already mid-way into the game when it was finished.  Unfortunately, I forgot about the scallions.

So this is what the skewers looked like when I served them.

And this is what it was supposed to look like according to the cookbook.

Now, the skewers weren't that bad, but the problem is that they cook unevenly in the sauce.  Even with turning them over before the last hour of cooking, as the directions say, the sauce is not evenly absorbed into all the chicken.  So, my recommendation?  Make more sauce.  If I were to make this again, I'd probably double or triple the amount of sauce that I make so that the chicken skewers would be completely covered in the sauce while cooking.

Now, we had a ton of leftovers (as you could probably have guessed, seeing as it was only two of us and my roommate had already made a massive amount of food), but I didn't really want to eat them as they were both because of the lack of flavor on some pieces and because they're a distinctly appetizer food.  To remedy this, I decided to make stir-fry.  I took all the chicken off the skewers and cut it into bite-sized pieces.

Then, I added it to some fresh stir-fry mixed vegetables from Trader Joe's (pricier than frozen mixed vegetables for stir-fry, but the price was well worth it for both the freshness and the variety in there).  This was all being cooked from the very beginning in the tiny bit of the sauce that I had saved from the original skewer recipe and sesame oil.

I also added some stir-fry sauce, just the standard type that you get in the grocery store and voila!  Just add rice and you have a quick meal... one that I really enjoyed!

Now, because I made stir fry out of this recipe, it's difficult to figure out exactly how many servings it came out to be, but the cookbook says four to six, so let's say that this came out to be six: two that we ate as skewers and four that I'm having as stir fry.  That comes out to be about 163 calories per serving of the chicken alone (or 165 had I remembered the scallions).  But honestly, as an appetizer, each person might have only one or two skewers, so the calorie count in actual practice might be half of what it is for a "serving."  Making it into a stir-fry upped the calorie count to about 260 calories per serving, not bad for a meal (of course, note that this doesn't count the basmati rice which can be up to 320 calories per serving depending on how much you serve yourself).

I am not going to try to figure out the cost per serving for this dish because I already had many of the ingredients, but the only items that tend to be a little more expensive (and not often on sale at the grocery store) are the sesame oil (used in the original recipe and the stir fry) and the stir-fry sauce.  So, this would be a good appetizer for the grad student to make to bring to the potluck department get-together at the beginning or end of the semester.

This was my dinner tonight (plus a salad that I had already finished when I took this picture).