Oven Roasted Yogurt-Marinated Chicken

A week or so ago Steve and I (mostly Steve on this one) made a delicious Indian dinner from our favorite Indian cookbook, 1,000 Indian Recipes by Neelam Batra.  We made an Oven-Roasted Yogurt-Marinated Chicken.  Although it took a little bit of time to prep and make, it was very much worth the effort, the chicken was extremely moist and flavorful!  The recipe says you can let the chicken marinate for 2-24 hours and I would have to say if you have the time let it go for the whole 24 hours for the best results.  We kinda puttered out at the end of making dinner and ended up with non-Indian sides of boiled potatoes and broccoli, but it was still a very good meal.

Oven Roasted Yogurt-Marinated Chicken

Ingredients:
(Like most of the recipes we make from this book, we left out a few of the spices because we didn't have them on hand.  I've put an asterisk next to the ones that were left out.)

• 1 1/2 tbsp ginger garlic paste
• 1 whole chicken ( 2 1/2 to 3 lbs)
• 1 cup nonfat plain yogurt, whisked until smooth
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
• 1 1/2 tbsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp fennel seeds*
• 1 tsp green cardamon seeds
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/8 tsp ground asafoetida*
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 cloves
• 2 sticks of cinnamon, broken lengthwise
• 2 tbsp minced fresh mint leaves*

First up, prepare your chicken by removing the skin and making deep cuts all over the chicken.

Next gather all of your ingredients for the marinade.

Start off by adding the yogurt to a bowl and whisking it until it's smooth.

Add the oil to the yogurt, then cut up the cilantro and add that as well.

Next throw in your ginger garlic paste.  You can make your own or you can buy it in any Indian specialty store.

Next grind up your cardamon seeds, and any of the other spices you may need to.  For instance instead of ground cumin we had cumin seeds so we had to grind those.  If you have the fennel seeds you will need to grind those as well.  Do not grind up the cloves or cinnamon sticks. 

Add the spices you just ground ( cardamon seeds, fennel seeds) along along with all of the other ground spices (coriander, black pepper, cumin, cayenne pepper, asafoetida, salt)

Add the chicken to the bowl and cover well with the marinade.  Make sure it really gets into all those slits you made on the chicken.  Cover with plastic wrap and let marinate in the fridge for 2-24 hours.

A few hours later...

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Place the chicken into a roasting pan breast side down.  Pour any remaining marinade over the chicken.  Toss in the cloves, cinnamon sticks, and the mint. 

Make a tent over your pan with aluminum foil and roast for 40 minutes.  Reduce the oven to 375 and turn the chicken over.  Continue to roast for an additional 25 minutes or until done per a food thermometer.

Serve up with any side you please and enjoy.

:)

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Last Wednesday to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, Steve and I sat down to a delicious meal of Corned Beef and Cabbage.  We also had some yummy roasted root vegetables to go along with it.  Hope everyone had a safe and happy St. Patrick's Day!

Spring Cookies

With the weather being the way it's been (sunny and warm! ) the past few days it's hard to remember that winter isn't technically over, but I've decided to be done with it and move into spring ( a few days early).  Every year around this time all I want to do it clean out my apartment and decorate everything I can in bright bright colors.  Out with all the dreary winterness I say.  In that spirit I invited Jessica over today to make these super pretty, delicious tasting spring cookies.  Neither of us had ever worked with Royal Icing before so it was a fun adventure that ended up going very well.  There are a few things we'd do differently if we made them again, one being we would flood the cookies with icing and then put the details on ( we did it the other way around).  We'd also like to figure out how to make the icing nice and shiny.  Overall though for the first time doing this I'm really pleased with the results.

 

 

We used the Royal Icing recipe from Annie Eats

And the cookie recipe also came from Annie Eats  ( I added lemon extract instead of almond to give them a nice fresh lemony taste)

Hope everyone else can enjoy some pretty sunshine too! :)

Weeknight Meals

I think I'm gonna do some picture posts of food we eat during the week because although it's usually really tasty, it's not very exciting and doesn't really need a lot of process photos.  Then on the weekends when we tend to make fancier things I'll make the bigger posts.  So here are a few of the meals we ate this week, all of them were very very delicious and very easy too!  I've added a link at the bottom of the post that will show you the recipes.

Chicken Paprikash

Recipe from Mark Bittman's Kitchen Express

Kale and White Bean Soup

Recipe from the blog F for Food

Avocado Chicken Pitas

Recipe from Taste of Home 2009 Quick Cooking

Click Here For Recipes

Lemon Custard Cakes

Like most weekend mornings I started my day off today scrolling through all the delicious food on tastespotting.com. Usually it makes me really hungry and I end up bookmarking a ton of recipes that I'll probably never get around to actually making. However, I came across this recipe for Lemon Custard Cakes at Cathie Cooks Food and decided it seemed simple enough that I could whip it up tonight for a tasty dessert.

I basically followed the recipe on the blog except that I added lemon extract to give it an extra super lemon flavor. I also only have four ramekins so I had to adjust for that. I would make these again, especially due to the simplicity and ease of this recipe.

Lemon Custard Cakes

Ingredients:

• 3 large eggs
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoon all purpose flour
• 2-3 tablespoons grated lemon zest ( try not to zest your fingers )
• 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
• 1 cup milk ( I used whole milk)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• Lemon Extract (optional, but it will make sure that lemon flavor really stands out)

Start your oven preheating at 350 degrees and get your ramekins ready. Spray them down (or butter them) with oil and place them in a cake pan. Also get some water boiling to pour into the pan later.

First you need to separate your eggs, make sure to keep both the eggs and the whites.



In a bowl mix your egg yolks and sugar.


Add in the flour.



Zest your lemon, then add your zest and lemon juice to the bowl.


Finally whisk in your milk.



In a separate bowl mix your egg whites and salt together with and electric mixer until you get soft peaks.


Carefully fold your egg whites into your egg yolk mixture. Pour the mixture into your ramekins and then fill your pan half way up the sides of the ramekins with boiling water.




Put them in the oven and let them cook until the tops are golden brown. For my four ramekins I cooked them for 25 minutes.


Enjoy :)

Pizza Post!

Slowly but steadily Steve and I have been working on our homemade pizzas. We've made huge strides since this past summer, most likely because we got ourselves a pizza stone. Our biggest problem has always been our crusts. Many times they came out too soggy despite our best efforts. One important factor besides having the pizza stone I think, is to make sure your oven is as hot as it will go. I think before we were cooking our pizzas at a much lower temperature, and to really get that crust crispy you have to crank the oven up as high as it will go.

Tonight we had a regular cheese one as well as a pineapple and green pepper. I will probably post our pizza creations often as they have become a weekly staple.




Enjoy :)

Braised Cabbage with Spanish Chorizo and Beans

Hello! It's been a long time since I updated this blog. We had some camera problems (lack of one) that left us unable to document any of our tasty meals. However, we got a new camera, and not just a cellphone camera! A real awesome, knock your socks off kinda camera! We're still learning how to use it, and we clearly need to work on our lighting (difficult when limited to fluorescent kitchen lights) and our platting. I think you'll notice though that these pictures are far superior to previous ones. Now that I have a new camera I hope to update the blog at least once a week so prepare yourself for some tasty times!

Lately Steve and I have been looking for good healthy recipes that require minimal effort at least during the week. We got lucky at our local library and stumbled upon Mark Bittman's Kitchen Express. All the recipes in this book take 20 minutes to make which is helpful on those hectic nights. We've found some really good recipes so far in the book and this is one of them. I'm pretty sure we'll probably be making it again sometime.


Braised Cabbage with Spanish Chorizo and Beans

Ingredients:

• Smoked Chorizo
• Olive Oil
• Head of Green Cabbage
• 2 Cans Cannellini or other White Beans

That's it! A very simple ingredient list. One thing about this book is he doesn't really list measurements a lot of times so it's easy to adapt the recipes to your liking. I believe we used a quarter pound of the chorizo, but you could use more or less depending on your tastes. Same with the beans, the recipe says a couple cups we just went ahead and threw in two cans.

So first thing first, slice the chorizo into 1/4 inch pieces and throw them in a pan with olive oil until the meat begins to crisp.































While the meat is cooking cut up your cabbage into wedges.








































Add the cabbage to the pot then get
your beans ready by draining and rinsing them.
















Add your beans to the pot, cover and let cook for 5ish minutes or until everything is warmed through.














That's it! Simple, easy, and good.


















Enjoy :)