Indian recipes

Awesome Indian recipes I helped make while in England, copied from Jason’s cookbook:

Parsi Chicken with Apricots

1.5 kg chicken or chicken pieces
3 tablespoons oil
2 large onions, finely sliced
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
4 cm piece of ginger, finely chopped
3 dried chillies
1.5 teaspoons garam masala*
2 tablespoons tomato puree
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons clear vinegar
1.5 tablespoons jaggery or brown sugar
12 dried apricots

If using a whole chicken, cut it into eight pieces by removing both legs and cutting between the joint of the drumstick and thigh.  Cut down either side of the backbone and remove the backbone.  Turn the chicken over and cut through the cartilage down the centre of the breastbone.  Cut each breast in half, leaving the wing attached to the top half.  Trim off the wing tips.

Heat the oil in a karhai or casserole.  Add the onion and stir over medium heat until softened and starting to brown.  Stir in the garlic, ginger, dried chillies, and garam masala, then add all the chicken pieces.  Stir and brown the chicken for 5 minutes, taking care not to burn the onion.  Add the tomato puree, salt, and 250 ml water.  Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat, cover, and simmer gently for 20 minutes.

Add the vinegar, jaggery, and dried apricots to the pan, cover, and simmer for another 15 minutes.


Gajar Matar

1 small onion, roughly chopped
1 garlic clove, roughly chopped
2.5 cm piece of ginger, chopped
125 ml oil
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1.5 teaspoons ground turmeric
320 g carrots, diced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
250 g fresh or frozen peas
3 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon sugar
¼ teaspoon chili powder
4 teaspoons pomegranate seeds (optional)
½ teaspoon garam masala*

Put the onion, garlic, and ginger in a food processor and blend until finely chopped, or chop them with a knife and mix together.

Heat the oil in a karhai or frying pan, then add the onion mixture and stir over high heat for 2 minutes, or until softened.  Reduce the heat to medium and add the cumin seeds and turmeric.  When the seeds are sizzling, add the carrot and stir for 2 minutes.  Add the ground cumin and coriander and fry for 2 minutes.  Stir in the peas and then salt, sugar, and chili powder.  Add 2 tablespoons of water if using frozen peas, or 4 tablespoons if using fresh peas.  Reduce the heat to a simmer, add the pomegranate seeds, if using, and stir before partially covering the pan.  Simmer for 15 minutes, or until the carrot and peas are tender.  Stir in the garam masala.


*Garam Masala

8 cardamom pods
2 Indian bay leaves (cassia leaves)
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
5 cm piece of cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon cloves

Remove the seeds from the cardamom pods.  Break the bay leaves into small pieces.  Put them in a spice grinder or pestle and mortar with the remaining spices and grind to a fine powder.  Store in a small airtight container until needed.

Features and unfeatures

So I’m home, as of late last night, and currently trying out this new “Blog from Word” featurette.  Seems to work.  This will spare me many near-posts that don’t work because the web interface has died.  Glen always tells me to compose in anything but online and then cut and paste in, but I never listen.  Now I have no excuse.  This is easy.

Meanwhile, I’m AGAIN waiting for Flickr.  I got the last set of pics posted, but need to add commentary and such, which it’s not letting me do consistently (keeps complaining it lost my metadata) and now it seems the whole thing is down for the count.  I’ll drop one more mass mail once I get it sorted.  

Got to talk to Chris over GoogleTalk today which was pretty spiffy and very cool.  There was some initial confusion with microphone set up and her speakers not being plugged in to the “proper hole”, but seems to be functional now.  That will be how we do our web meetings from now on, I think.    

Grr!!

So I decided I'd surprise you all by posting some more pics.  In fact, I'm missing a plenary lecture to do this.  And I get here, and I log in on one of the computer lab computers (since to get internet on your own here at Durham is one royal pain in the ass), and I get my key drive (thanks Brandy) all working properly when plugged in and I go to the Flickr home page and ...  it's offline.  So I figure okay, well, I can at least send some to Distances.  But then I remember I need to have Hello installed to do that.  So I try to install Hello, and even though it looks like it works, it doesn't because I don't have admin privileges on this machine.  So basically, the long and short of it is, I have pics waiting to go and no way to post them.  Worse, it is unlikely that I will be able to get to the lab tomorrow (since I'm chairing a session, presenting, and then doing a panel discussion, and then we're rushing out of here to try to beat traffic on the six hour drive back to Whitchurch), and Chris doesn't have internet access from home.  SO...  Check back later and even tomorrow, but don't hold your breath.  :(  I will post them when I get home next week if they don't get up from here, but it's so much more exciting when I'm not there already for you to see the photos!

EDIT:  Flickr is back up and I've posted.  All pics are in the England set.  I didn't have much time, though, so they're not necessarily in the right order, particularly the cathedral and night shots of Durham.    

Full bath

My room here at Durham is a collegiate dorm room. Literally. But it includes a private bathroom, which is quite small, and consists of a toilet, a sink, and a shower. The shower isn't separated from the rest of the room by anything. There is a curtain, but the floor is on the same level and there's no drain near it. When you need to shower, you pull the curtain around as best as you are able, and then go for it. The entire bathroom floods. Apparently the floor is declined towards the toilet, and there must be a drain under that somewhere, but it's still very strange. And then the floor of the entire bathroom is wet for hours. Someone please explain to me why the Europeans can't figure out how to make normal showers!!

My British vacation

Greetings from cold, overcast England. I'm sitting in the CAQDAS office at the University of Surrey in Guildford, and procrastinating working on the presentation I'll be giving in a few days. Instead, I've been posting pics to flickr. Here's a teaser:




You can find the rest here. Enjoy!

It's the little things

Suffice it to say, August was a huge disaster for me. So when little things make me inordinarily happy, I don't try to mitigate that too much. One of those little things happened today - I found out that Winamp had released a new version. Not usually a big deal, since tweaks to every software product come out periodically. So I went to check out and see what the new features were, and was very pleasantly surprised. First, I was excited to see that Predixis MusicMagic was now built-in. (This is kind of like MoodLogic, which I've discussed previously.) After upgrading my Winamp to 5.1, I played around with Predixis a bit, and found it satisfactory. Exploring other features, I discovered that Winamp now supports podcasts! I hadn't yet played with podcasts, preferring my own MP3s. But I found out that there is a podcast of KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, for example, and I immediately subscribed. Very cool.