Tomato and Herb Pasta

This afternoon while at university, I decided that I really needed a cooking session to unwind. I wasn't in the mood for anything complicated though so I chose to make pasta. Easy, simple, tastes good, and guaranteed results. I made a spaghetti with tomato, walnuts, breadcrumbs, and coriander. I'm thinking that perhaps rigatoni, fusilli, or penne would have worked better with this, though... just cause there wasn't so much of a sauce in this pasta.

Chicken Pulao - Recipe Included!

So one of my favourite dishes that are made at home is chicken pulao. I've been meaning to learn how to make it for ages now and today finally did! Here are some pictures of my experience as well as the recipe.

Chicken Pulao Recipe

Serves 12-15

Ingredients

• 1 or 2 green chillies, sliced
• 1.25kg medium tomatoes cut into fours
• 1 ½ whole garlic
• 3 1 ½ inch ginger
• 5 cinnamon sticks
• 4 bay leaves
• 3 pieces big, black cardamom
• 6 pieces small, green cardamom
• 1 handful black pepper corns
• 2 tbsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp cloves
• 9 medium onions, sliced
• 200g ghee
• 100ml vegetable oil
• 3 800g whole chicken: breast, legs, thighs separated
• 1 tbsp salt
• 2 medium potatoes, chopped
• 3 tsp chili powder
• 1.55kg basmati rice
• 2 handfuls coriander, chopped
• 2L water

Procedure

1. Blend tomatoes with green chili until thick and chunky.
2. Separately, blend ginger and garlic to a puree.
3. Heat oil and ghee in a large pot until steaming hot. Then, on high heat, add cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, cardamoms, black pepper corns, cumin seeds, and cloves. Stir until fragrant, then add onion and cook until almost brown. Hint: proceed to the next step when ghee and oil bubbles subside.
4. Add garlic and ginger mixture and cook. Color of mixture should be a rich golden and light brown.
5. Next, add chicken to pot and coat thoroughly with mixture. Add 1 tbsp salt and mix very well.
6. Put lid on and cook for ten minutes until chicken juices emerge.
7. Remove lid and stir the chicken so that the mixture does not stick to the bottom of the pot and so that the juices evaporate
8. When juices evaporate, add tomato mixture and cook until tomato liquid reduces by half.
9. Add potatoes and chili powder. Stir well.
10. Put lid on and cook for 10-15 minutes until chicken is fully cooked. Hint: oil should be present in pot.
11. Meanwhile, boil water in separate pot.
12. Add coriander to chicken and potato mixture and stir until (even more!) fragrant.
13. Add uncooked rice and stir very well. Then, add boiled water to pot and stir.
14. Add salt to taste and stir. Put lid back on and bring to boil.
15. When liquid has reduced, lower heat and simmer until liquid has absorbed.

A Table, a Main Course, and a Dessert

Inventing your own dishes!

This is always fun! No recipes, no limits. Maybe not even a trip to the supermarket! It's always a pleasant challenge inventing dishes on the spot but sometimes they can go horribly wrong. Here are some simple, guaranteed things that you can do to invent in the kitchen.

Six wonderful foods on earth:

1- pasta

2- pizza

3- risotto

4- salad

5- soup

6- stirfry

These foods are akin to heaven-sent when it comes to you wanting to invent hassle-free.. But what's the fun in that? Isn't the fun really trial and error? Yes, I agree with you. But when you're short on time and your stomach needs something ASAP, these six dishes are great.

Soup and salad are kind of the safest options to put whatever you want in it... In the past, and to this day, people who are not fortunate enough to have access to a supermarket or food the way we do, place whatever they can find in a huge pot with water and cook it for hours for the flavour to emerge. Lamb, chicken, fish, vegetables of any kind, and even dried fruits can be added to soups.. you just need to know in which order! You must look at the vegetables and try to decide the cooking time of each. You don't need to be an expert for this. Just look at, let's say, mushrooms, and you'd realize that they'd take longer to cook than, say, spinach. (Spinach by the way, wilts to a third of its size when heated and cooked.. it's always a pleasure to observe!)

Meat should always, always be cooked first! That's to ensure that it HAS enough time to properly cook and also, so that the flavours of other ingredients manage to blend well with it.

Pasta is always fun to cook.. and it doesn't have to be boiled penne with bottled tomato sauce if you don't know how to cook or are short on time. Throw in onion, garlic, corn, mushrooms, fresh basil (at the end!), capsicums (always my favourite) and whatever else you have in the fridge!

Today was the first time that I invented with stirfry. I was making a Sang Choi Bow. (Here is a sang choi bow if you don't know: http://bit.ly/dn65aU ) The recipe I was using only included chicken, garlic, ginger, and red capsicum. I, obviously, wanted a lot more in it and so I added vegetables that would go well with oriental flavours... hence, I picked mushrooms, corn, other capsicums, red chillies, pak choi, and beansprouts. I threw everything in the wok at once which wasn't a very good decision on my part, as the stirring and cooking took longer than supposed to, but it turned out fab! And I love how the iceberg lettuce acts as a bowl!

The iceberg lettuce was BELIEVE IT OR NOT, the toughest part! You'd think it would be the easiest, what with just having to separate the leaves and wash them. But their shapes were unimaginable... There were hardly any that looked like "bowls" (as they're supposed to) and hardly any seemed fit to be able to "hold" the mince mixture well!

Iftar Cooking with my Girls

Two of my really good friends came over this afternoon to cook for Iftar.

They let me choose the menu and so it looked like this:

Starter- Tomato and Basil Soup

Main Course- Chicken Chilli Stirfry and Lemon, Mushroom, and Spinach Risotto, Vegetable Couscous

Dessert- Chocolate Self-saucing Pudding with Vanilla Ice Cream

Drinks: Lemon and Mint Spritzer

These were all some of my tried and tested recipes as we wanted a nice, fun, relaxing time to cook and not a crisis situation in which the stock overflows from the pot... (which it did!)

Here are some pictures of the food-in-the-making:

The vegetables for the couscous

Stirfrying the vegetables for the stirfry! Yes, that blurry thing is a hand!
Our little joke.
The vegetables all cut up and ready to be used!
My attempt of an artistic shot of the vegetables.

What the table looked like! Red, orange, and white!

The risotto!
Stirfry

Chocolate Selfsaucing Pudding! Looks messy, doesn't it?

Vegetable couscous

Chocolate self saucing pudding.

These last three pictures courtesy to F & A. :D

Lots of love,

Spontaneous Euphoria

xx

Food

baby potatoes that I boiled. Cut them open and stuffed them with sour cream and mayo. I just realized they look like Pac Mans.

Tomato bruschetta! Enough said!

Up next, English trifle... custard with berries really. Then, a dish that I cannot remember the name of! I can't even decipher what's in it by looking at this photo.. Aaaand a calzone... the first thing I cooked in 2009. Stuffed pizza.. heaven..

Dinner Party

These pictures are from a dinner party that I hosted two weeks ago for some very good family friends who had come over to Dubai. Yes, the theme yet again is very feminine, but only because I was asked to! I had initially chosen a scarlet, ivory, and gold theme but switched after I was asked to! Feminine themes seem to be my speciality...

This is a close up shot of the crockery/cutlery/glassware. Since the table was predominantly pastel shades of pink, I placed white roses at each individual setting to break up the color. White roses are my favourite. I can use them everywhere.
Close up of the napkin fold. This was placed on top of the soup bowl! I'm always at a loss where to place the napkin. Big dilemma, I know. These gorgeous pearly napkin rings are from John Lewis. *advertises*
Yes, I like having the foreground in my photographs blurred.
Similar trick done with the chairs as I did for the tea party! These sashes have little cream- coloured pouches with potpourri in them strung to the knot.

Another closeup of the rose and glassware.

What this side of the table looked like.

The glasses. Those papers in them are the placecards!

What an individual setting looked like.

I would love to post pictures of the centerpiece which was a wickerbasket filled with flowers in a contrasting HALF and HALF theme.. half of the basket had an abundance of pink, white, and yellow roses, chrysanthemums, and carnations and the other half just had leaves and some baby's breath (breadth? sp?) There were also cream colored candles scattered around. The pictures of the centerpiece TURNED OUT CRAP. So I won't upload them :) Enjoy.