Food for the Soul: Mains

Spicy Potato Chips

Scrambled Egg Sandwich

Chicken Tikka

What you need:
1 Whole Chicken with bone, cut into medium sized pieces
Ginger-Garlic paste                   1 Tablespoon
Greek Yoghurt                          2 Tablespoons
Turmeric                                    ½ teaspoon
Red Chili powder                      ½ teaspoon
Coriander powder                     ½ teaspoon
Black pepper powder coarse    ½ teaspoon
Five spice powder                     1 teaspoon
Salt                                            ½ teaspoon
Coriander leaves                       some for marinate and some for garnishing
Vegetable Oil                            1 Tablespoon

Method:
Mix chicken with ginger-garlic paste, spices, salt and coriander leaves. Let it sit in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 hours
Heat oven to 180 C. Mix marinated chicken with oil (optional), if you want a healthier version you could skip the oil
Place the chicken pieces on a tray, and bake for about 20 to 25 minutes.Serve warm with chopped coriander leaves !

Five Spice Fish Curry

The key to cooking Asian curries the right way is to discard all those spice packets that you have from the supermarkets, and make your own spice paste at home. It is super easy to prepare and makes the curry taste a lot better and much more fragrant.

What you need:

For the five spice paste(will make about 2 teaspoon of paste):
1 inch Cinnamon stick
2 cardamoms
2 cloves
1 dried red chilli(optional)
8 black peppercorns
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 inch ginger (peeled)
3 cloves of garlic(peeled)

For the curry:
Fish(12 cubes)           cut into cubes and marinated for 15 minutes with half a teaspoon of turmeric powder and half a teaspoon of coriander powder
green chilli                1
bay leaf                     1
Onion Chopped        1 medium
Sugar                        1 pinch
Salt                           1/2 teaspoon
Chopped Coriander 1 table spoon
Five spice paste       2 tablespoon
Olive Oil                   2 tablespoon
Water                        1 cup

How to Cook:
1.Put all the ingredients in the five space paste into a mixer blender, and grind to a fine paste. Alternatively you can use mortar and pestle to make the paste. This is your five spice paste.
2.Pan fry the marinated fish about 1 minute each side, and set aside in a plate.
3.Add the chopped onions to the oil. Then add the five spice powder, bay leaf, sugar to the oil and sauté for 2 to 3 minutes, till the onion has turned brown.
4. Add green chilli, salt and water, and simmer for 2 to 3 minutes over high heat. Then add the pan fried fish to the boiling curry , and let it simmer over low heat for 3 to 5 minutes.
5. Turn off the heat. Garnish with Chopped Coriander and serve hot with white rice.

Start Cooking

As a kid , I absolutely detested the idea of cooking. Looking at my mother constantly juggling between her job and cooking, first breakfast and our lunch and then dinner, and all those homemade snacks, jams and pickles, I used to say to myself, when I grow up, the first thing I am going to do is get a job and pay for a butler to cook for me. I felt a lot of pity for my mom toiling through the day unnecessarily.A lot of the times, my mom asked me to help out, but I always refused, as I thought it was so boring to make that dough, or chop those vegetables. Ughh! what a yucky time pass. I grew up, a dreamy little teenager, mostly submerged in fiction books or chatting with friends, and absolutely loathed home food. I preferred gorging on junk food, at the slightest given opportunity. And once in a while, when mom requested me to make a cup of tea for her, I just refused to cooperate. To this day I hate making tea. But surprisingly I do love to cook now, and enjoy every moment of it. It all started with my travel to foreign locations for my first job. It was Belgium, and I loved the place, the people. But very soon I got bored of the food in the restaurants, and the takeaways, and started craving for home food. Food that my mom cooked every day, and food that I used to loathe eating as a teenager. I called up mom, and asked her for a few recipes, that she recited to me over the phone and I jotted them down. I cooked my first fish curry on a Sunday that week, and it turned out so delicious, that I invited my Belgian girlfriend to join me for dinner. And she loved it too. And so started my love for cooking.The confidence that I could cook, with the additional bonus that I loved the food I cooked, and was specially overjoyed when someone else loved it too, overhauled me into the long journey of cooking which I enjoy to this day. The abundance of creativity that you can add to known and unknown recipes coupled with the fact that almost every time you try and cook something new, you learn something new is a joy for a lifetime. And I would definitely suggest everyone and anyone, to try to cook. It is an easy and forgiving pastime, and it gives you the opportunity to impress. What more, it uplifts your taste buds, and helps you know and accept food in all its multitude.

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