Its been a really really long time since I posted a recipe. In fact, quite a long time since I did some serious cooking. 1.5 years to be precise. So I decided to start off with something really light to get things going. And for me, eggs are the easiest to get the rusted cooking hands and head moving, so picked off some ideas from tip hero and modified them to my liking.

Eggs and milk have been staples for ages and we have all used them in omelette and cakes and what not. While I love my omelettes with egg and a dash of milk, I wanted to see how they taste with buttermilk. So here goes:

3 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
2 potatoes cut like hash browns
1/5 amount of shredded cheese (1/5 quantity of the potatoes)
2-3 pieces of bell peppers
Some green peas
Salt and pepper

First shred the potatoes. I used the cheese grater and got them ready cut like hash browns. Wash them nicely in water. These seemingly useless steps are very important to get them to cook well, so do wash them twice or thrice till the water is no longer cloudy when you wash them. The next step is to get them as dry as possible!!! Mix the potatoes and the cheese, add some salt and pepper and stuff them into muffin trays with space in the centre as shown. No need to butter the trays if you have the right amount of cheese. Bake them in a preheated oven for 15-20 minutes at 175 degrees till they are nice and light brown.

While the potatoes are browning, beat the eggs with buttermilk and add the bell peppers and green peas to it. Mix well. I used Amul Spiced buttermilk, so I didn't have to add salt or pepper, but feel free to spice the buttermilk the way you want and adjust the final salt and pepper accordingly.

When the potatoes are ready, pour the egg mix into the six muffin potato baskets and bake again at 175 degrees for another 15-20 mins or till the eggs are cooked through. This is when I would get ready myself and get all dressed up! Leave for a few minutes and take them off the tray when you get back and smell the wonderful aromas!

Simple, yet nice and healthy breakfast ready while you are doing the same.

Sometimes the restaurants just don't cut it. Neither do people. Lazy Sunday, want a brunch, but don't want to step out. All brunches don't have pancakes. Don't want to wake up early and head for breakfast. Feel like cooking, but don't want to cook too much. Want to make pasta, but don't want to make the pasta from scratch! Contradictions, contradictions. Life is so full of them! The want-to vs the to-do list rarely matches. Especially on Sundays. So when that happened and the family wanted a brunch, I decided to cook the brunch. Not the chef type cooking, but the lazy man type cooking. And therefore almost everything that went into making food was food itself!

The Menu

Hash Browns; flaky style.
Missing in all brunches, so Pancakes.
Since there was mood for Mexican, Tacos.
And the mood for Italian, so Pasta
And the mood for dessert, so lazy man ice-cream.
What's brunch without some tea, so English Breakfast tea!

So, first the preps!

Hash Browns:

Easy peasy. 3 large potatoes, grated with a cheese grater or any other instrument that makes it thin and long, pinch of salt, generous amounts of oregano, mix and set aside. The most important thing here is that the potatoes must be as dry as possible!
1 down, 5 to go!

Pancake:

This is the lazy man cooking brunch, I picked a box of Betty Cooper pancake mix! 1/2 a box with one egg and 350 ml milk. Mix and make the batter. Set aside. Two down.

Pasta:

I didn't make the pasta from scratch, so I used Barilla spaghetti, so no prep there. Sunday brunch by a lazy man, so no making the sauce too. I used the Barilla Zuchini Pasta sauce, so no prep there. For the chicken, I beat down two breast pieces to even them out and dried them with a kitchen cloth. Marinate with salt, pepper and lime juice for a while. Grate parmesan cheese and mix with equal portions of bread crumbs. Beat an egg and keep in a separate bowl. Prep over. 3 down.

Tacos:

This took the longest time to prep, but also ended being great, so it was well worth it. I bought a Salsito taco kit which came with 12 tacos, a taco seasoning mix and a taco sauce. I had soaked a bowl of rajma in water the previous night. You will need to set aside 400g of minced chicken, but do not add any seasoning to it. Slice lettuce into small pieces and keep a can of American sweet corn and Sour Cream ready. 4 down.

Banana Ice Cream:

Slice four bananas into inch thick pieces and freeze overnight. Prep over. Simple.

Now the cooking!

Start with the tacos as they take the longest to cook. Heat a deep cooking vessel with a dash of oil and drop the minced meat inside for a minute to just coat it. Add the Salsito taco mix to the vessel and mix well and soon as it is coated around the chicken, add two glasses of water and cook until the water almost evaporates. Make sure that you don't over cook, as the chicken should be juicy and not dry. For 400g, it took me about 10-12 minutes.

Get a pan lightly greased with olive oil and keep it over the stove till it is hot. Take a piece of the marinated chicken breast, dip it in the beaten egg mix, coat it with the parmesan - bread crumb mix and shallow fry it. Typically it should take about 4-5 minutes before one side is golden brown and once it gets that colour, turn it and cook the other side till it gets the colour, about 3-4 minutes. Ensure that you do not over cook the chicken, but equally important is to ensure that it is not undercooked. I cut the edge to make sure that the whole piece is white inside! While the chicken is cooking, its a good time to get the pasta rolling, so bring a rice cooking vessel with water to the boil with a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of olive oil. Once it gets boiling, the pasta should take about 8-10 minutes to become al-dente.

By this time time you should have both your tacos and the pasta ready to plate, so its best to keep them warm in the oven or in a hot box.

Now the last part of the cooking. In one pan, grease with some butter and oil and fry the pancakes till they are golden on one side before turing them to the other side. In another flat pan greased with olive  oil, pour a thin layer of the grated potatoes and fry till golden brown. Turning this around takes some practice, but it has to be done! Its okay if a few pieces don't turn properly! Both the pancakes and the hash browns should take about 10 minutes to get done. While these are getting done, you can heat the taco shells in the oven for about 2-3 minutes.

You can start plating the brunch tray now. Place four taco shells on the plate and put in a generous amount of rajma and minced chicken and top it off with american corn, grated cheese, lettuce leaves and top it off with the Salsito Taco salsa and some sour cream. I plated the pasta in a deep bowl which I filled with the pasta sauce, placed the pasta on the sauce and the breast piece on top and finished off with a little grated parmesan cheese. The pancakes can go on one side topped with your favourite topping, for me, this time it was Hershey's Strawberry syrup, but of course maple syrup would be great too and place the hash brown potatoes on another side for a fabulous brunch tray!

Dessert? Put the frozen banana slices in food processor and run it and in a few minutes you will have the lazy man's banana ice cream. Tea or coffee and you're done! Now. Start eating or sharing!

A cheese course? Everybody loves cheese, I guess, but a dish with only cheese? I was laughing when I saw the option in a set meal in Switzerland, but the second time I saw, I was too intrigued to miss it. And then I was hooked for life. Four cheeses, served with thin wafers, walnuts and olives with a description of the cheese, the flavour, the milk used etc, was the second course of the meal. It was preceded by a starter course and followed by a main course, but for a first timer, the cheese course stuck more than anything else. Really, this is not an acquired taste, but a find-out taste. You only need to know that this exists or there is really a different way to eat cheese than spreading it on bread and chances are you will be hooked.

So last week, when there was no dinner at home and I realised that I had four different cheeses in my fridge, I decided to recreate the cheese course. While the cheese course in Switzerland was lots of swiss cheese, none of the cheese I had was Swiss, in a cheese course, it doesn't matter where the cheese came from. So, my platter had Camembert, Smoked Gouda, Parmigiano Reggiano and Percornino Romano cheese. While there are many ways to enjoy cheese, I like to load it on a thin cracker and top it off with olives and walnuts!

The guy with the white border; he is the smoked Gouda. Though Gouda is the cheese that was originally made from Gouda in Netherlands, the name is not protected and cheese made the same way from any where can use that name. This though, was smoked Gouda and it has the distinct barbecue flavour that I love! And the white one standing tall is was Percorino Romano, a cheese made with sheep milk that is made salty and hard was the next on the attack. It has a very distinct salty flavour that may not be on everybody's wish list, but most people I know have not been put off and have taken an instant liking to it! Percorino Romano was recently introduced to me by a friend and I took an instant liking to it!

And then came the Parmigiano Reggiano, also called as Parmesan, which is almost the backbone of Italian dishes, a hard cheese made from raw cow's milk (its not pasteurised, so it is important that you get it from a good brand). While traditionally the cheese is grated over salads and pasta and pizza, it has a flavour good enough to eat as is. And finally the Camembert, cheese, a french cheese, that is super creamy inside with a thick white rind outside! The best way to have Camembert for me is to stick some garlic and oregano into slit holes and bake in the oven for a few minutes before enjoying it  as I noted in one blog post! This cheese has a bitter after taste that most people don't like, but if you like the cheese and don't like the aftertaste, a great replacement for Camembert will be the Brie cheese, but I didn't have it!

When a friend's cousin came down from UK, I got the Camembert and Parmesan while I picked up the Percorino Romano and Smoked Gouda from Food Hall in Bangalore!!!!

So, that is how the cookies looked.

That is how they tasted.

That was my look when I had to reveal how it was done!

This is what I saw.

So there is nothing much to say.

I saw the 'Do it yourself' cookies at Adoniya.
They are priced at Rs. 480
I brought them home, added egg, butter and vanilla.

Shaped them into cookies and put them on a baking sheet.

Put them in an oven and these came out in 10 mins! They were soggy, but after letting them cool for about 10 mins (though the instructions tell you 2 mins), they became just perfect!

I served and got a 'Wah Chef' look on everybody at the party. I then told them the truth. I bought another DIY Cookie - this time the choco-chip one! Already looking forward to it. It took me a total of 25 minutes to get 20 large cookies done!

End of blog post!

So, the cup cake queen who graduated to home baking all cake queen has now further post graduated to guru level! Maaria from Cafe Adoniya who started (ok, started marketing it perfectly) the designer cup cakes has taken the Adoniya brand, added Adoniya Academy to it and has started imparting baking lessons to those who want to learn! Not surprising, considering that this is a natural forward move for any enterprising home baker, but when I heard that she was teaching Biriyani making, I was more than just intrigued. And then, I found that another home cook, Tasneem Ayub, whom I fondly call, Tasneem Aunty and whose Biriyani and Zafrani Sweet is to die for, is doing the teaching! Whoa, the academy is now having guest teachers!

I was late for the event, but of course, just in time to taste the biriyani made in front of a 19 keen women and 1 man! OK, two men, me included, but I was clicking away and tasting away! The chicken biriyani was outstanding, but the shami kebab that she made out did the biriyani! Outdo a biriyani? Really? Is that even possible? Yes, it did. And then she taught the crowd to make Haleem!

There was one thing on everybody's mind - how to make perfect mutton biriyani? So, the next workshop, this Sunday, 17th November, is going to be on The Art of Making Mutton Biriyani! I don't know what it is officially titled, but thats the title for me. After I posted picture of the giant cup with me and the haleem, 3 seats have been taken by the wives of my friends! Sorry, but 3 down and a few more to go, so if you want to learn to make Mutton Biriyani, you know where to go!

Call Maaria - 9840285950
Call Tasneem Aunty - 9884078631

This is not advertiser's feature! If there are other interesting cooking things that you want to make public through this blog, write to me. If the first time is successful and you are having a second batch (or nth batch), I will be happy to announce it.

I love trying cuisines and simple cooking techniques from other cuisines and this recipe that I ripped off from a Brazilian food show turned out so nice that it was licked clean and I was stared at for making 'very little.' When food turns out good, no amount is ever enough, so I can't be blamed. A farofa is Brazilian stuff made of tapioca flour and the main course is a name that I cannot pronounce (or spell), made of different parts of beef/lamb, but I made the whole thing with chicken and adjusted the cooking time accordingly. You should try this at home because if you do it right, it is easy and tasty! A detox patient of mine tried it because it had everything that was allowed for her to eat and raved about it!

So what do you need?

Chicken Breast, marinated for 45 minutes with salt and pepper ( I used two pieces of Real Good Chicken Breast Boneless)
2 cups of black beans, soaked overnight
2 small pieces of ginger, crushed.
1 clove of garlic, crushed.
1 chilly, sliced.
Cornflour
Butter
Oil
Salt
Water

For the farofa topping

Chicken salami
Ginger
Garlic
Butter
Bread crumbs (I toasted bread till hard and blitzed it)

To serve

A slice of orange
Steamed greens
Rice
Coriander

Start with a nice pot and add some olive oil and butter till the butter softens. Add the ginger, garlic and chilly one by one and stir for a bit. Add the black beans, enough water to cover the beans, some salt and simmer for about 20 minutes or till the beans are almost soft and then add the marinated chicken breast to the pot. Cook for a few minutes till the chicken is cooked through and add the cornflour (mixed in water) to thicken the sauce. Cook covered till the sauce thickens.

Farofa time. While the pot is boiling away, in a separate pan, add the butter to melt and add in the ginger,garlic and chicken salami and cook for a few minutes, till the salami starts to brown. Add the bread crumbs and cook till the flavour of the bread fills the air, about 4-5 minutes.

Serve with rice topped with coriander, a slice of orange, steamed greens, the black bean chicken gravy topped with the farofa.

I love the Worcest sauce and I love most things made correctly with the Worcest sauce! I stress on correctly, because, for me, there is a very thin line between an overpowering flavour of the sauce and the right amount of flavour. One of the best examples of the right balance for me is the sauce that comes with the chicken minced steak at Jewelbox Restaurant at Blue Diamond! I tried recreating a similar flavour, but served it completely different! This is a reasonably simple recipe and can be served with a host of dishes like rice, flatbreads, steak or by itself with condiments. Like most times I post a recipe, this is quite generic and the aim is to introduce a cooking concept that can be mixed and matched and played with!

What you need:

3 teaspoon butter and 3 teaspoon of oil
1 cup of chopped onions
300 ml of chicken stock
5 teaspoons of Worcest Sauce (more or less depending on how strong you want the flavour)
A few florets of brocolli
2 pieces of chicken breast, boneless
A little cornflour
Some salt

Heat the oil and and the butter (this is to prevent the butter from burning) and once hot, add the onions and cook till transparent. Add the chicken breasts and once the outsides change colour, add the chicken stock, Worcest Sauce and simmer for about 10 minutes, till the chicken is almost cooked. Now add the brocolli florets and if you time it right, the chicken and the brocolli will be fully cooked at the same time. Add a little cornflour to thicken the sauce and it is ready!


I plated it with ghee rice, mashed peas and some salsa on beans, but you can go crazy. If you don't add the chicken, you can add mushroom and use it as a sauce for steak! It tastes great when done right and it is quite easy! In a variation, I once added semi cooked rice to it and it became a one pot, one shot dish!

So, recipe time, now! I love bread bowls. OK, I love bread in any form, but I have a special place for bread bowls filled with soup, but baking those bread bowls seemed like a hassle until I came across the autolysing technique in the CFG forum and life has changed for the better. For this particular recipe, I kept some of the dough in the fridge for about 4 days and then baked the bread bowl to host the beetroot apple soup and the result was a super hit at home! For a vegetarian dish to be super hit at home, it had to be reasonably good and I hope you are able to recreate this at your home too!

The Bread Bowl:

If you have heard about the autolysing technique, then, great, if not, you will be amazed at how easy it is to bake bread - you don't have to knead the bread! Yes, you, read it correctly and your eyes are not deceiving you. I baked four bowls, three of which I baked on the first day and reserved one portion of the dough to sour in the fridge, so the proportions are for 4 bread bowls.

4 cups of flour
11/2 - 2 cups of water
2 teaspoons of sugar
2/12 teaspoons yeast (I used active yeast)
A pinch of salt


Take the water and warm it (if it is too hot, the yeast will die, if it is too cold, yeast will not work). Mix the yeast till it dissolves completely and add the sugar and salt and mix. Slowly add the flour and keep stirring and when you finish, just leave it aside. I had to try twice to get the technique and the proportions right - the liquid quantity is slightly less than half the quantity of the flour. Leave it covered for about 2 hours and when you open it, it should have risen. You don't have to beat it down, just puff it out with a spoon, roll it into nice balls, place on a buttered oven plate and bake it in a pre-heated oven at 225ºC for about 20-25 minutes and your bread bowl will be ready. Slice the top, scoop out some bread and pour the soup.


The Beetroot-Apple Soup

1 cups of boiled beetroots (boil without salt)
1 apple - cut and cored.
1/2 onion chopped.
1/4 cup old-bread in pieces (I used the ones I baked with the above recipe and left in the fridge for four days)
1 teaspoon oil
25 g butter
100 ml chicken stock (you can replace it with veg stock)
Salt to taste

This is a very simple recipe, just add the oil to a hot pan and the butter to it -this prevents the butter from burning. Once the butter is hot, add the chopped onions and cook till it becomes translucent. Add the apples and cook till they become soft, typically it takes about 5-7 minutes. Once the apples are soft, add the nicely pieced bread till it coats the apples and keep stirring so that they don't stick to the pan. Add the cooked beetroots, cook for a minute and pour all of the stock. Simmer till the stock reduces, about 20 minutes or so. Once cooked, take the whole thing and using a food processor, blitz it and it will become a nice thick soup. I used salted butter and my chicken stock was salty, so I did not need to add salt, but taste it and add salt if required to balance it.

I served it in the bread bowl with chopped almonds on top and corn tortillas, but of course, you can go crazy with the garnish. A dollop of thick curd will also go great with this soup. This soup is best taken with the sour dough bread, because the flavours complement each other extremely well. 

Ok, disclaimer - This is not for everybody!!!!

The reason, I started with a disclaimer is that eating cheese without spreading it on some form of bread - either a bread slice or top of a pizza is not to everybody's taste. But in places abroad, cheese is even served a course in a meal. I am one of those people who loves cheese enough to eat it as a course, but my knowledge of cheese is very limited as I have not traveled enough to master too many types of cheese and I don't like to learn too much by only reading without experiencing it. But this recipe is one of the most simple ones made from one of my favourite cheeses - the camembert cheese.

Camembert cheese was introduced to me by a friend/colleague from my previous company and I was smashed! When I happened to visit Paris, we did one course in a meal that had only cheese and Camembert was there too. Its a super soft, creamy cheese with a thick rind on the outside and comes in circles. When my friend and me were discussing this, he said that his mother in law was coming from England and offered to get me a couple of those. The camembert made from our local farms in Kodai are not upto the mark and though I have tried with those, I did not feel like writing about it. The imported stuff available in India is very expensive - I saw one in a gourmet store priced at Rs 595, so when my friend offered to get it in exchange for this simple recipe, it was a no-brainer for me!

So, camembert has to be had in room temperature and not taken straight out of the fridge. The rind will have a slight saltish after taste and will be thick while the inside will simply melt in your mouth.


1 box of Camembert cheese
1 garlic
2 tsp oregano/thyme/mixed herbs
1 tsp olive oil
A few slices of bread
Butter

For this recipe, take the whole camembert from the fridge, take the cheese from the traditional wooden box and take out the wrapper. You will see the thick rind on top. Poke 7-8 holes in it. Take a few pods of garlic and push it into the holes you made on the cheese. Leave 1 or 2 pods of garlic for the bread. Along with the garlic, you could insert some oregano or herb of choice into it. Sprinkle the rest of the herbs on top of the rind and splash olive oil on top. Put it into a pre heated over at 200ºc for about 7-10 minutes depending on how long it took you do this process after you took the cheese from the fridge.

Roast some garlic in a pan and smash it as much as possible (but do not add water) and in a separate microwaveable dish, put the butter and this thin garlic slices and put in the microwave till the butter is fully melted and becomes a liquid. Smear this on the bread and toast it!

You will have some garlic bread with a camembert cheese dip! Slurp!

But if you don't like it, remember the disclaimer. But that should not stop you from trying this at least once!

Yes, proportions are important in cooking, cooking times are important in cooking, esp baking, but there is one sauce that I find to be very, for want of a better word, dynamic. The proportions, the cooking time and everything seems to change every time I make it and I have to keep adjusting. No amount of writing it down seems to help. I put up this query to seasoned cooks and they have asked me to post the recipe so that they can try it out and tell me what is so problematic with the recipe, so here goes!

This time around I used prawns and I plated it differently, but usually, I put in chicken and I plate it with the chicken breast smeared with lots of sauce and with a salad and rice on the sides. As you can see, this time, it was plated on grilled garlic bread!

The Sauce - It is a simple steak sauce and will not take you more than 15 minutes to make it.

Things you will need:

1 teaspoon onion
1 large onion cut in circles
1 cup of tomato puree
1 cup of Worcestershire sauce (hereafter I will type it as W sauce)
3 or 4 buttons of mushrooms chopped.
Salt and Pepper
Meat of Choice

I start off with a heated pan and put in the onions first till they dry out, then add the oil and cook till they are translucent. Then add the tomato puree and cook till the sauce reduces to half. Now add the salt, pepper, mushrooms and W sauce and keep stirring till the sauce again reduces by half! Now add the meat. If it is a chicken breast, it is best pre cooked, if it is prawns, it can be added right away. Cook for another two minutes in low heat till the prawns are cooked.

Done. I told you it was simple!

Now the problem part. I have found that every time the cooking of the tomato puree is slightly long by even a minute, the W sauce tends to overpower the steak sauce. It is a critical point where the sauce tastes great and since I have been doing this for quite sometime, I am able to add some more puree and cook longer if the sauce reduces too much and still has the overpowering W sauce taste and balance it. You will have to find your way of balancing the time, but once you do, you will love this sauce. This is always a hit at home and is very flexible as you can have any meat in it and can be used as a base sauce!

I'll admit - I have been unfair to most biriyanis in town (or out of town), sometimes going to the extent of calling it Tomato rice - which most believe is the biggest disgrace to a biriyani or the dirtiest word in the dictionary to call a biriyani. Yes, sometimes, some of them deserved it and other times may be not, but yes, unfair would be an understatement! So I am out to discover the biriyani in its various forms. Let us accept the fact that biriyani has been around for so long that it is only natural that it gets localised, retaining just its essence! So what distinguishes the good ones from the bad? Which ones deserve to be called Biriyani and which ones deserve to be called Tomato Rice?

After looking around at most possible sources, Biriyani seems to have originated from around Iran (modern day Persia)! Biriyani comes from the Persian word 'birian' or 'beriyan' which literally means 'fried or roasted before cooking'. However there is always a reference from our Tamilian sources taking some credit for whatever is done wherever in the world and this time it is 'Oon Soru' a reference from as early as 2 AD, in a number of Tamil Literature and Oon soru was supposed to be made with rice, ghee, coriander, pepper and bay leaf. There are also references of biriyani being created to feed soldiers which had the rice to provide energy and also the meat and vegetables to balance nutrition and the spiced to make it tasty enough to make them eat. There are also references to biriyani being created for the poor man who one day decided to mix the rice, gravy meat and vegetables to make it easier to eat it all quickly and go to work, but in general all this seems to have happened some where around Iran.

But, I guess, for all practical purposes, the Biriyani's migration to India can be credited to the Mughals.

The best way to try and make out all those difference is to know how a biriyani is made! Yes, there are many variations, but the basics of making a good biriyani needs to understood! And so, my journey started from the one place where I could see it being done from scratch - home! The biriyani made at home is one that I grew up eating a lot (I am pretty sure you knew that information) and one that my friends love to come home for. The biriyani at home has always been a hit, which is why I am starting from here. It gave me important insights which I am sure will come in handy when I try to differentiate biriyani from tomato rice! Over the next couple of months, I intend to understand this wonderful dish inside out - Join me!

So here is how biriyani is done at home!

Ingredients

1 kg Basmati Rice
300 gm of ghee
1.25 kg of cut chicken or mutton
1 kg tomato quartered
1 kg onion thinly sliced
5 teaspoons of ginger garlic paste
7 cloves
5 pieces of cardamom
1 cinnamon stick (about 6 cm)
2 green chillies
1 cup of curd
5 teaspoon red chilly powder (a little more if you want it spicier)
A bunch of mint and coriander leaves
You will need a large vessel that can accomodate all of this.

The pictures below were not designed to look good but to show you the exact colour of the cooking process and almost represent it the way it looked when it was being cooked.

So take the large vessel and put in on the source of heat - a gas stove or wood fire or whatever! Once it is completely dry, the ghee can go in and wait till it get nice and warm. Now add the sliced onion and cook till they become transparent and slightly roasted. Depending on the heat, this process might take anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes. "The thinner the onion is sliced the better - you know the surface area is more and the onions add a lot of flavour to the biriyani, so make it very thin" says the mom, the chief cook! "See this colour, wait till it gets to this" she says as she points out the onion in the vessel. On a rough estimate, the onions became almost half the quantity when the colour she was looking out for surfaced. Now she put the rice in water and left it to soak. "For this much rice, it must soak for about 15-20 minutes" she said.

"Now you have to add the spices" she says as she drops the cinnamon, cardamom and the cloves inside the vessel. "See, once you add these, the onions will stop cooking, so the onions have to be perfect before you add this. If you add this before the onions, then the onions will also have the flavour of these spices and the flavour of onion will be less" she explains as she stirred what was inside the vessel! After a couple of minutes, she put the ginger garlic paste in and continued stirring and after another couple of minutes the tomatoes went in. "Maybe some of these hotels add tomatoes first or don't put the spices before the tomatoes which is why it might taste like tomato rice" was her explanation of tomato rice biriyanis. How much of this technicality affects those biriyanis, I am not sure, but it was good to know. And so the tomatoes kept cooking and cooking till they started reducing. "This is when the meat must go in" she said put the 1.25 kg of cut chicken.  "If you put mutton, then the gravy has to cook for longer, so you can keep the heat a little lower. Also for mutton, if you are making at home, then you could cook it in a pressure cooker and then put it in this gravy" she said.

In a separate vessel, she put the soaked rice into boiling water. After about 15 minutes of stirring, the uncut chillies and the red chilly powder went in with the curd. "Some how home made ginger garlic paste and home made red chilly powder seems to affect the biriyani. If I use the ready made ones, all of you complain about the biriyani." she said with a smile. "Curd is optional, but I always add it" she added. This is also the time the mint leaves and the coriander leaves went into the vessel.

"If you made it correctly, then by this time, the chicken would have cooked perfectly. If you did not follow time correctly or quantity, then the chicken would not have cooked and gravy will start to reduce too much. If that happens, pour little water, but right now it is perfect" she showed the vessel with the cooked chicken in a greatly reduced gravy with a sense of pride. The gravy was a dark orange. "By this time the rice is also cooked. You must time it correctly so that the rice is cooked just when the biriyani gravy is ready. If you leave the rice to rest and get even little cold, then the biriyani will not taste as good." It was time to now place the cooked rice on top of the gravy and keep it warm to prevent it from overcooking and giving the "dhum".  For that at home, she took a tawa, put it on the fire and then kept this biriyani vessel on top of it. The rice was placed on the gravy and kept on the tava for a little while till we were ready to eat.

The vessel was now removed from the stove and placed on the floor where the mixing process began. "Put the spoon to the base and mix from down to up, not in a stirring movement" she said and I was not sure how much of a difference it made, but once the biriyani was mixed and served with the Chicken 65, the brinjal gravy and the cucumber raita, it was heavenly!!!! After all the hard work (yeah watching biriyani being made with all the brilliant smell and not able to eat that smell IS HARD WORK), we ate! I ate 3 full servings and was stuffed to the nose!!!!

Let me know if you need the recipe for the chicken 65 and brinjal because both of them turned out to be great as well, but is not very difficult to make and the recipes are available on the net. The chicken was not dry like it happens in most places but was juicy! The curd makes a load of difference.

But this is the anatomy of a biriyani, the basis of this wonderful dish. So now that the base is covered, variations (and poor imitations) can now be identified.

Keep checking out this space for the next biriyani recipe coming from another home cook, this time Urdu Muslim style!


* For the research on the origins of biriyani, similar information was found on a number of blogs, websites all of them taken from other websites and blogs, so there is no one particular blog or website to give credit to. Thanks to everyone who helped me get this information.

There are times when I miss cooking, really! And then very rarely, times when I come home after work by 630! When the two happen together, non Sunday cooking happens and it is usually reasonably simple cooking - not the one where you just mix and match a few ingredients, but one that actually involves some cooking! So here is what came out last Monday!

I have been eying this pie for quite sometime. It looked very simple and as you will find out later, it is very simple. All you need is some filling to stuff in it and it will make a really nice dish out of itself. So here is how you make the Stuffed pie and Lasagna. You will need a muffin/cup cake pan for the pies and a baking dish for the lasagna. There was no meat at home, so whatever described here is vegetarian, but you can add any cooked meat of your choice and it will taste the way you want it to taste.

Put some broccoli, bell peppers and corn in the rice cooker, add a pinch of salt, water and boil it. I used the rice cooker, but you can boil it however you want! You can use steamed vegetables to retain all of the nutrients, but that day, I did not care too much! For about 6 pies, you will need about 400 grams of broccoli, 2 bell peppers and enough corn for your liking.

While the vegetables boil away, take flour and butter! As always, the proportion matters and in this case, for 250g of flour, use 200 grams of butter and mix them till they become small clusters. Add in about 150 ml of fresh cream, you can add less or more depending on how much you need, and make it into a chapati dough consistency. Wrap it in cling paper and put it in the refrigerator for a minimum of 20 minutes.

Now let's get into the dressing for the filling. In the proportion of 1:1.5 of Vinegar : Oil, I used raspberry vinegar and walnut oil, mix them, add a bunch of spices, I used the pre mixed Italian spices consisting of oregano, thyme, rosemary and pepper, which is my favourite combination, but you can spice it up the way you want. Mix them well and add fresh cream to this mix, slowly, till it reaches the consistency of something like a cheese sauce!

It's time to preheat your oven to 180 degrees celsius. While it preheats, you  can start getting your stuff ready to put into the oven. Start with the pie - remember the chapati mix you stashed away in your refrigerator, take it out and roll it. Depending on the size of your muffin pan, cut out circles of this pie mix! For each pie, you will need two circles - one for the base and one to cover it. The base circle must be bigger as it will have to fit into the muffin tray's base and sides as shown in the picture. Butter the muffin tray, put the pie base into it, take half of the boiled vegetables, mix them with the the dressing you made and stuff them into the pie base. Take the smaller circle and cover the top, pinching the edges to make sure they are closed. Put them into the oven and bake them for 20 minutes!

While the pies are baking, you start layering your lasagna. You can use lasagna sheets, just dip them in water till they are soft and you can then cut them into the shape of your baking dish, or you can use thin potato slices - I have found them to be equally good if not better! Make sure that the first layer is the dressing you made. Spread it thinly, then add either the lasagna sheet or a layer of potatoes, make sure that overlapping of either of them is very minimal, add the vegetable mix (with or without the meat of choice, just make sure that the meat is cooked well) and then add a layer of cheese. Repeat the order till you have three layers, so the last layer will have cheese on top.  You can use cheese slices or grated cheese - cheddar is easy to use, but for the last layer, grated parmesan will be ideal, but don't fret if you don't have it, regular cheddar is good enough.

The pies must have been out of the oven right now and with the oven still hot, put the baking dish with your layers and bake for 45 minutes or till the cheese on top is nice and brown.

If all went well, you should have your lasagna and your pie, your way.

Remember that this blog is not about recipes but about cooking. It is about trying to get you to cook using your brains! Ideas are presented here, basic recipes, but to be a good cook, you must experiment with flavours. So once you get the hang of the pie, try it with different fillings and wow your family or friends or boyfriend/girlfriend or all of them!!! Go cook!

And hey, if you enjoyed reading this, please share!