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It's the quintessential summer-holidays-at-grandma's-cottage dish.
Or that's what my cookbook called it. I wonder if anyone in Kashmir heard of it, but I don't mind. It's a recipe for a vegetable stew in the Indian style (so a 5h14+704d of spices) in a nice yoghurt-based sauce. And it's hard to spoil, too.
You'll need:
The spices are optional to an extent. Last time I added green onion and it worked fine.
So. Peel and chop the potatoes into small cubes. Heat up the oil and add shredded ginger. (The recipe said to add a small chopped chilli pepper, which I haven't listed, and don't really care for anyway. You can spice it up with grounds.) After a few minutes add the other spices and give it a minute. Add potatoes, turn to a low heat, and cover. Mix once in a while.
Potatoes need a while, so you can now take your time rip the cauliflower into small, uh, flowers? (Or whatever it's called.) After some 15-20 minutes, add the cauliflower and the other vegetables, and give it a few more minutes.
Now, do you have stock prepared? It's a good moment to add stock and yoghurt. Take some hot stock, mix it well with yoghurt so it won't curdle from heat, add some more, repeat. At least, I did it that way the last time, and then poured the yoghurt-stock mix into the pot. Should be enough that the vegetables would stew in it. So, stew. Low heat, cover, some 30 minutes until the vegetables are soft. Give it a mix once in a while so it won't get burned.
The ingredients:
* I have no idea what a spoonful means in this context, so I was like, will this piece I just cut off roughly fit on a spoon?
** You can probably add only a half of that and be fine.
*** I didn't use it so the amount here is simply what feels like enough to me right now.
**** I used, like, three?
***** I mean, like, I took a bag and rolled it over with a rolling pin until the nuts were, like, not whole.
So the idea is like this. Melt the butter, then wait until it's cooled. Whisk an egg in a bowl, add sugar, butter, and juice, mix well. It's possible the acid in juice caused the egg to cauterize a bit, but it didn't seem to hurt the end result. Perhaps I whisked it enough. Take another bowl, dump all the flour in there, preferably through a sieve though I didn't do it and it didn't result in a culinary failure, add the spices, salt, and baking powders. (Oh, and probably the zest too, I dunno.)
There's a potential concern in that both kinds of baking powders have a taste of their own, but orange juice should be able to cancel them out. From indirect experience I can say it's relatively easy to add too much of them and ruin the taste. While tasting, I had the notion that I can kinda sense it's there, so beware.
The next step should be, make a little crater in the flour and pour the butter-egg-juice in, except I did the opposite. In any case, whisk fervently and add whatever-you-are-adding slowly, it should work then. (I don't know if it works all the same, or I was just lucky.) Whisk it into a uniform thick mixture, then add apples, cranberries, and hazelnuts, and mix well. Preferably with a spoon, the whisker is probably too soft for heavier particles you've just added. Dough's ready to go now.
Grease muffin forms (twelve of them is the intended amount), pour the mix in, then stuff into an oven set to 180 degrees Celsius. The recipe I had said to check once in a while if it's grown and returns to the previous shape after being pressed, so I pressed them with the tip of a spoon, but it wasn't all that clear to me how long should be enough. In any case, some 40-50 minutes should do the trick. Take them out, let them cool a bit, then you may powder them a bit with, well, powdered sugar, but it should be sweet enough.
Also, 99% of the muffins I've had were bought from a store rather than home-baked.
And I'm also woefully inexperienced with baking.
Also, I think baking powder is a combination of baking soda with other things in order to generate CO2 upon being dissolved in water. Not just simply nor necessarily ammonium bicarbonate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baking_powder
Pretty much all it said was to fry pieces of chicken in butter, coat them in optionally saffrony pancake dough, fry that again, then pour in stock with a mix of spices and bake(?) for some time. You know how these old-timey recipes rarely care to provide specific amounts of ingredients. Well, exactly speaking it was more detailed, but not by much, and certainly not to provide a counterexample to my previous sentence.
Turned out I could do it all in one frying pan, despite what the recipe implied, though I needed some additional kitchenware.
So, I began to fry all these pieces of chicken I had prepared for this very purpose, on butter which I also had prepared for this very purpose, and in the meantime I made some pancake dough. Flour, milk (diluted with water since I ran out of milk), an egg, and saffron which I didn't want to miss the opportunity to use. It was supposed not to be thick, but I made it thick.
I fried the chicken for a while until it was white, got rid of all that watery chicken scum, dried the pieces a bit, melted some more butter, and began to fry dough-covered chicken pieces. Turned out it didn't work well with the dough I had, which flowed down and off the chicken. I'm wondering if it means I should have, like, batted the chicken in flour, or if the dough was too thick. Anyways, after a while, and turning up heat, it began to look like it kind of worked.
(Is it how you call it? "Batted"?)
Like, it kind of worked. It went better than I expected.
Then I added some chicken stock and ground nutmeg, and chopped fresh ginger, and some ground cinnamon, and freshly ground pepper, and a chopped lime, and some sugar, and salt. The recipe also mentioned vinegar and raisins, but I didn't feel like going that far.
The spices did it fine. The broth did not.
I expected that the result would be pieces of batted chicken in a sauce, but I covered the frying pan, and it got moist, and it fugging all clogged together. Like, it went from batted chicken to a wet pancake-y mass with chicken pieces. I took off the lid, turned up the heat, and began to mix, in hope I can salvage it. I mostly could, what more is there to say.
Outcome:
1) Ground nutmeg and fresh chopped ginger are a fine addition if you want to spice up your chicken roast.
2) I managed to make a dish out of a 17th Century recipe, good for me.
3) Could've been better, the chicken itself did not soak up the aroma and the batting... battering... that pancake-y stuff feels a bit heavy on my stomach right now, but it's not a no-no for the concept itself.
4) I did not feel the taste of the lime, perhaps I should have added more than one and the vinegar too, but I was afraid I'd make it too sour.
5) That was an interesting experiment.
"Beer-battered fish" is a thing for example.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/08/25/arroz-chaufa-chinese-servitude-peru/
Here's a recipe, but note that with a dish conceived as a practicality, there's a lot of potential variation in the recipe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/arroz-chaufa/
h/t to https://med-mastodon.com/@bicmay/110962185424877554
As for this one, I'm generally wary of Peruvian cuisine because I'm much too fond of guinea pigs, but this one is safe, so I might try it out one day, thanks.
(Unfortunately I haven't really had time for cooking for a long while now.)
You need:
* 500g basmati rice
* 500g minced beef
* two or three onions
* a can of green peas
* a can of chickpeas
* some water or broth
* a few garlic... these small units garlic is made of
* some oil
* spices: garam masala, ground cumin, ground coriander seed, salt, pepper
Like I said, the recipe is simple enough. First you chop the onions, and garlic, and fry in oil. Then you add the meat and fry it together. Add the spices, mix, let it fry. Then you add the rice, which has been rinsed a few times so that it will not clog in the future, and add the water/broth so it will not burn. Set to low heat and cover, and stir once in a while. If you were afraid of raw meat, don't, it will cook along. Add the peas at the end, not too soon, so they will not get too soft, but let 'em stew a few minutes anyway.
There, that's all. Sort of. As far as I remember. I ate that shizzle with yoghurt and there was enough of that stuff that I ate it for like an entire week or so. More, if you count the days I was invited to a family dinner, so the issue of the dish of the day was already solved for me. What I can tell you is that it wasn't yet smelling bad after almost two weeks later, so there's that. Altogether, I could spice it up, but it wasn't bad either and I can recommend it for all of you who wanna do the cooking once a week and be done for the rest of it.
Also, I find it amusing it's called a "cafeteria" in English. Like, gee guys, it's not like there's a friggin' Starbucksie in there, innit?
Though ngl, the only meals from that video I wouldn't enjoy eating (as an adult) are the 40s one and 90s one.
As for university-level dining, nowadays it's pretty much the American cafeteria thing, except they still serve kompot. But I've been to a few places that looked like time stopped for them some fifty years ago.
Also:
Come to think of it I have once heard of beef wellington, which is like the fanciest the Britons could come up with and it's still a piece of meat in dough.
In The Clique book series, there actually is (it's later replaced by some organic smoothie chain that didn't last too long).
IIRC it was based on some ridiculous stories about a fancy private school PTA that took over half the school's board and blew half the budget on cool but unneccessary things (IIRC since they were rich later on they just increased the budget by that much anyways). I don't think it was a Starbucks at the real life Westchester NY schools though.
After seeing it on TV/the internet millions of times, for the first time in my life I ate pie. The crust was nice and chewy, it had sweet fruits inside, I couldn't tell which (probably peaches) and were super sweet to the point I couldn't eat much of it in a single sitting, though it was still good, nice to have along with some coffee.
It was from a neighbor, I don't know if it was store-bought or homemade.
Define pie, please, because I've all my life been thinking it's a generic English word for a sweet baked good and it makes me think you sound like a peasant in the middle ages who just discovered a pear while raiding the master's wastebin. (Unless that's the first time you ate a sweet baked good.) Surely you guys do have some sweet baked goods over there, so, is it some sort of specifically pie-but-like-in-American-media?
Y'know, the round things stuffed with sweet stuff inside* that clowns throw at each other. The one I ate looked like this.
Judging from Google Images it seems to have been English style, perhaps I should've taken a photo. Actually, now that I look at those images I've eaten chicken pot pie at least a couple times, but it's my first sweet pie in any case.
* Or meat, but that wasn't the case this time.
By the way, I admit, my understanding of the word did not take into account the possibility of a savoury pie.
heresy~
They aren't commonly eaten separately around here, but they're part of "plantain cake" which features both (in amounts that make it more than a technicality).
FWIW plantains are much less sweet than bananas. In the same vein, pizzas should probably count as pies too.
Edit: Accidentally a word.
I'm currently reading through US military cooking manuals, after getting through a bunch of US southern cooking (don't read these if you have low tolerance for old racial terminology) and wartime advice on how to make mince meat without meat.
Also TIL meatless minced meat is a thing outside Cuba.