Saviolo
Saviolo's JournalMurgh Makhani or Butter Chicken Recipe (video)
I have a weakness for Indian food. I will continue to eat well past the point that I am full and always end up hurting myself, but I just love it so much. Butter chicken is one of my very favourite Indian dishes, and it's surprisingly easy to make at home. This is one of those recipes where everyone has their own method and different spice blends and substitutions. Some people use cream, some yogurt. Some people use almond flour, some cashew flour. Don't be afraid to experiment and shift things around. It's traditionally a mild curry, but we like to spice it up with a little bit of dried hot pepper mixed in with our other whole spices.
You definitely want to toast the whole spices a little before you blend them up, because it really wakes up the flavour quite nicely. For the onions (and shallots if you decide to add shallots!), you want to make sure you're cooking them over a medium low heat. You don't really want to sear them, you're just trying to caramelize them very slowly without getting a whole lot of sear on the outside. This is a low and slow recipe, and does take some time to cook, but is definitely worth it for the flavour!
Cajun-style Shrimp Etouffee Recipe (video)
Back to the Cajun food this week! Étouffée is French for "smothered" and these shrimp are smothered in a rich brown roux-thickened gravy made with shrimp stock and butter. This recipe is also sometimes made with diced tomatoes, but apparently that makes it Creole instead of Cajun.
The trick of making a darker roux is two-fold. Firstly, you will want to use a bit more flour than you normally would, because as the roux darkens the oil will come out a little bit, and the flour will slightly lose some thickening power. We're not aiming at a dark roux for this one (as we did for the gumbo video we did), but we're looking for a roughly peanut-butter colour of brown. Second, you want to watch it pretty closely, because it can scorch very quickly. Keep it moving in the pan, and keep an eye on it so that it cooks evenly and doesn't burn.
Homemade Fried Mozzarella Sticks and Homemade Ranch Dip Recipe (video)
Some classic pub food for St. Patrick's Day! The mozzarella sticks aren't really the main event in this recipe, they're dead simple. Breading and frying single-serving mozza snacking cheese until they're melty is the easy part. The homemade ranch dip is really the star of the show, here. I was honestly pretty amazed at this recipe. It was like regular ranch, but everything was turned up to 11. Really bright flavours, and extremely versatile. We obviously used it with the mozza sticks, but it also went really well on fried chicken the next day, and would make an excellent pizza dipping sauce, too.
The recipes we adapted this from used sour cream along with the mayonnaise, but we went ahead and used our own homemade creme fraiche, which was delicious. Sour cream will work just fine if you don't want to go through the process of making your own creme fraiche, though.
Homemade Frybread Apple Fritters Recipe (video)
We based these fritters on a similar dough to the Navajo frybread we did a couple of weeks ago, but with a couple of alterations. We added some sugar and yeast to the dough, and gave it a little bit of proofing time, and just enough kneading to incorporate the apples, which makes a little more gluten development in the final product. These came out delightfully crispy on the outside and very fluffy on the inside. We were partially inspired by Chef John (from foodwishes.com) and his method of cooking the apples a bit first in brown butter before adding them to the dough.
This video is interesting, it sort of shows what not to do in some ways. We tried adding the apples after the dough was ready, but it was only later that hubby realized that we should have added the apples at the same time as we added the milk to help incorporate them better and easier. We managed to get it done, but it would have been easier if we'd done it differently!
Black Bean and Squash Soup Recipe (video)
A couple of weeks ago we made that amazing Three Sisters salad, but it left us with a bunch of leftover black beans and roasted squash. No worries! This week we're turning it into soup! No, we started these beans from dry and raw, soaked them, then boiled them ourselves. As you can see in this recipe, we also used the liquid from the beans. If you prefer to use canned beans, we recommend you rinse them when they come out of the can, and then you can replace the bean water (aquafaba) with some stock or water.
There are lots of variations we can use for this recipe. If you don't want to burr mix it and leave it chunky, you may want to use diced canned tomatoes instead of whole. Also, if you want it to be super smooth, you may need to push it through a strainer to get rid of little bits of bean skin. We loved the texture as it was, nice and smooth, but still with a little bit of texture. Also, this recipe is vegan, but we found that a little bit of crumbled feta on top was extremely delicious. Also, if you sweat the aromatics in something like bacon grease, of course it will cease to be vegan or even vegetarian!
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Gender: MaleHometown: Ottawa, Ontario
Home country: Canada
Current location: Toronto, Ontario
Member since: Wed Oct 29, 2008, 04:34 PM
Number of posts: 3,280
