Chicken and vegetable biryani: an inauthentic, fast supper for five

This is done at a sprint, which is the shape of my life on any number of days. Because I'm also naturally very clumsy, all manner of accidents abound - but I digress. This is a rice, vegetable and chicken dish which you can cook in a casserole dish and forget about for a while - remembering to stir once. Here's what I just did.


With a pair of sharp kitchen scissors, cut up six chicken breasts. If they are already skinned, you don't need to brown them; if not, brown the pieces for a couple of minutes, so that they are seared and golden. Then chuck them into your casserole dish. I've used an enamel roasting dish in which I usually roast chickens. Now add a teaspoon of crushed red chillies, a tablespoon of so of garam masala (I know you should only add this at the end, but it will work as a warm subtle flavouring if added at the beginning, too) and plenty of freshly ground paper. I didn't add salt only because customer number five tonight is eleven months old, so I'll be adding that at the end. Toss the chicken in the spices, add eight finely chopped cherry tomatoes, three finely chopped garlic cloves, four potatoes peeled and cubed and a small cauliflower (not the leaves in this case) pulled into florets - or hell, just torn apart. I am a bit slapstick in the kitchen. Now add a couple of handfuls of frozen peas and, finally, 250 g of basmati rice, which you have first rinsed carefully. Toss the lot carefully and then add boiling water to cover, stir again and put the dish in the oven, lid on at 200 (hot - you know your oven best) and leave it for about thirty minutes, then stir and cook for another thirty minutes until the rise is done and the water all absorbed. You may need to add water during the cooking time; you can do this when you stir. 


That's it. Salt to season at the end and garnish with crisply fried onions and fresh coriander if you like. x

Pancakes for yours truly.

Now, I had decided to do the full works for Sunday dinner tomorrow and knew I would have to prep ahead, so I made a vat of Yorkshire pudding batter and then, between chores, sat in the kitchen and cooked some pancakes from  a few spoons of the batter all for myself. The house was at peace and the light had dimmed; there was wild weather outside. One child was at a football match (Bath City won -- and in gale force conditions, I might add) and another was happily exhausted but calm and still damp from dog walking in said gale and getting blown over in the field. So, if you are ever wet, cold, a bit over-extended, trying to get ahead and then find, unexepectedly, a few silent minutes to yourself, you could do worse then make yourself a few pancakes. get them just right and then sit at the table and eat them or, hell, swallow them like a Boa Constrictor standing up at the stove. Not that boa constructors ever stand up or cook. But..you see my point.

Take two free range eggs
1 pint of milk
8 rounded tablespoons of plain flour

Then I mix them for a good three minutes in the blender, push the sides down with a spatula, blend again and, if it's for Yorkshire pudding, just leave the batter for a while. Or even overnight. For your Yorkshires, the key points, I think, are that the batter has time to settle and that the fat into which you put them must be blisteringly hot. I bake the pudding in either individual helpings in a muffin tin or in one vast dish and I don't mind if they sre soft or crisp. Same goes for Toad in the hole.

But the pancakes for now....just for me, I cooked two in a pan, keeping them very thin so that they were just a little crisp and lacy at the edges and then I ate them like a woman possessed, with copious lemon juice and soft brown sugar. And it wasn't even Shrove Tuesday.

Thank you to fionaandneil at flickr for tjhe picture. 

Why you should get yourself some thali dishes (part one)

Oooh: look at these. This is a stainless steel shop in Chennai (Madras) and, I must tell you, I have a splendid collection of stainless steel dishes, plates and tumblers. Favourite of all, though, would be my thali dishes.

Thali are large silver platters which are either flat -- for you to place little matching silver pots full of different dishes on the platters-- or the thali dishes have different sections into which you put your food. It is the latter I favour and, reader, I use them day in and day out and not just for curries.(Although you can see a selection of curries and fresh pickles in my last entry -- a regular dinner in our Anglo-American household, curiously enough...)

So here's an idea: why don't you pop over to Spices of India at http://www.spicesofindia.co.uk and find yourself some dishes like these; you'll find them listed as dinner plates and then use them for all sorts of things? For example, dinner last night for assorted under 8s. A thali dish into which went little handfuls of crisps, carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, peanut butter sandwiches cut into stars, cubes of cheese, some chipolatas and a big mango hedgehog. The mango hedgehog is, as you might know if you've been reading this for a while or have read my book, simply a fat slice of mango, skin still attached, scored and bent back on itself. Looks like a hedgehog, see? Well, sort of. My point is, the dish looks novel and hugely cheerful, like party food every day, but is practical and a good way to eke out odds and sods and make them look special. Ker-ching!

And for our dinner tonight, the thalis will be used by Mr Nedved and me and they will be heaped with a prawn curry (curry leaves, cumin seeds, fresh coriander, chopped red chilli, garlic), in the central section will be a mound of basmati rice, in another, some Greek yoghurt, just slightly flavoured with some 'chaat' powder and in another section, a little fresh pickle of finely chopped cucumber with sea salt, black pepper and fennel seed. Fire lit (have you looked outside? My five year old got blown over in a field just now while we were dog walking); dinner on lap. Try it. We might be watching --against Mr Nedved's will, the X factor: awful but I cannot seem to look away. I digress. The thali dish, by the way, tends to be native to Southern India (see the beautiful thali of Southern Indian vegetarian food above), but you do see it elsewhere. And I've given you (to left) another stainless steel picture (how I love these shops) and one of my own thalis. In the dish below, you can see a nan (or naan) bread, which is speckled with kalonji -- the spice you might know as onion seed or nigella; there is a rather thick massor (red lentil) dhal with curry leaves, some aloo paalak (potato and spinach curry), a hot lime pickle, some cucumber batons which I had barely sprinkled with anardhana (pomegranate powder), some fresh lime slices, a hot lime pickle and a little fresh pickle (or you might call it a salad) or tomato, green mango, onion, saunf (fennel seed), fresh mint and dred chilli. These are North Indian foods.Get cooking. x

Many thanks to McKaysavage and LadyJake at Flickr for, respectively, the stainless steel shots and that of the South Indian thali, about which I will tell you in a more scholarly future chapter.