Happy Diwali

We celebrated Diwali this past week. For those who are unfamiliar with the holiday, Diwali is the celebration of a new year, the fesitval of lights and perhaps one of the most important festivals in the Hindu religion. To recognize the day, I prepared the following menu:

• Rajma: red kidney beans with onions, tomato sauce and spices
• Alu: potatoes with onions and spices
• Bhindi: Okra cooked with lots of chili and spices

I garnished each dish with a lot of cilantro and served our meal with sides of garlic naan and rice. Happy Diwali. Here's to a successful and lucky year ahead! 

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Chicken Piccata

Chicken Piccata is a wonderful, classic Italian dish. I've always enjoyed eating this dish because it has a nice, fresh tang which comes from the lemon-based sauce.

While I have ordered it several times at restaurants, I have never attempted to cook it. It wasn't until my good friend Lucille (who happens to be a fiery Sicilian) had me help her prepare it for a typical Italian family dinner. It was easy enough to cook the dish with her, so last night I decided to cook it for myself.

Here's what I did (and apologies in advance that I don't have exact measurements. I did, after all, steal this recipe from a family):

Ingredients

chicken breasts

flour

butter

garlic

white wine

mushrooms

lemon juice

parsley

capers

If the chicken breasts aren't thin enough, use a tenderizer to pound them until they are thin. Afterwards, lightly coat each side with flour. In a pan coated with butter, cook the chicken breasts thoroughly and set aside.

Throw more butter in the pan and sautee the garlic and mushrooms. Afterwards, pour in the lemon juice and white wine, letting it simmer until the ingredients thoroughly mix with each other. Both Lucille and I--on separate occasions--added too much lemon juice, and we needed to balance out the taste by pouring in more white wine. So, be sure to constantly taste the sauce!

Add more flour to thicken the sauce. Lastly, throw in some Italian parsley and capers, and let it simmer for a few more minutes. Once the sauce is done, pour it over the chicken, and serve the dish with pasta (I prefer to have Piccata with linguini).

Tip: Make enough sauce to pour over your pasta. Also, don't forget, be easy on the lemon juice.

Buon appetito!

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My Father's Daughter

Yes, I did it. I bought Gwyneth Paltrow's new cookbook My Father's Daughter.

But before you role your eyes and name the many reasons why cookbooks should be written by real chefs instead of over-ambitious actors, take the time to watch a few episodes of Spain...On the Road Again. You'll soon realize that this girl knows her food.

I'm dying to try her 10-hour chicken recipe. I just need to find the 10 hours to actually do it...

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Potato and Aubergine Curry

by Milesh Gordhandas, Amateur Palate guest blogger from Brussels, Belgium

I'm a Portuguese-born Indian and a vegetarian. I have been an "amateur chef" since September 2001. At that time, I left my family in Lisbon to start a new life abroad--first in London to study and work, and now in Brussels. Indian food is not cooked everyday as it takes some time and energy. Here is a report of one of those evenings where suddenly I had a lot of energy and drive to produce this amazing--yes, it tasted really good, so why be modest?--yet simple curry. It was, of course, my Mum who taught me this recipe.

This humble potato and aubergine curry serves one pretty well. You need one potato and one aubergine of these sizes, half of this onion, and one garlic clove...

In a saucepan, put some oil, heat it up, chop the onion and saute them until they are crisp brown. Cut the potato and the aubergine in cubes, and add them in the saucepan.

This is the "critical part." Spread one teaspoon of curry powder blend onto the pan. My Mum made this powder from a mix of spices. These include red pepper powder, saffron and cumin. You may get this in your local supermarket, but you'll find a better range in specialty Indian shops or grocery stores.

Cover the food in water, and cover the pan with a lid. Let it cook on high heat for half an hour. Half-way through, you will need to put some tomato sauce. You can either put two big spoons of tomato sauce or--like I did--grate half of a tomato onto it. This helps to add colour and consistency. Cover it again and let it cook for the remaining time.

Have the curry with some nice, warm Indian breads, like chappatis or naans. And, of course, eat it with your hands! At the end of the dish, you can have the curry with rice.

Enjoy your meal (cooking and eating it) by listening to some nice Bollywood beats!

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The Art of Cooking in New Brighton

Ah, news of me and my amateur palate is spreading. When finding out about this blog, a colleague of mine gave me a cook book that the lovely ladies from the church of his home town in New Brighton, PA created. It features fun recipes from Eastern Europe, and his Croatian grandmother contributed a few.

I received permission to share one recipe on An Amateur's Palate, courtesy of my colleague's grandmother.

Enjoy!

Chicken with Sour Cream
2 1/2 or 3 lb. whole spring chicken, cut or already cut selected choice pieces.
1 c. of diced onions
1/2 c. shortening (or butter)
1/2 c. diced green pepper
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. black or white pepper
1 tsp. paprika
1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper-optional
1/2 c. sour cream
1/4 tsp. marjoram

Saute onions in shortening. Add cut chicken, salt and pepper. Fry slowly covered for about 1/2 hour. Add diced green pepper and saute all for 10 minutes. Add paprika, cayenne pepper, marjoram and sour cream. Keep uncovered and fry 10 more minutes. If you desire you may add about a 1/2 c. more or less of boiling water for gravy.

Give it a try, and let me know how it turns out.

This blog write-up is dedicated to Daryl G. Grecich (1966-2011).

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Chicken Adobo

Chicken Adobo is one of the most popular dishes in Filipino cuisine. The recipe to make it is also one of the most versatile, which the New York Times so eloquently reported earlier this month.

So, I thought I’d share my version of the dish, which I learned from my mother. It’s salty, sweet and sour—encompassing all the typical flavors of Filipino food. Here it is:

Ingredients

2 cloves of garlic

1/2 of a yellow onion

1 cup of water

3/4 cup of soy sauce

1/2 cup of white vinegar

2 bay leaves

4-5 large chicken breasts

1 tsp. of sugar

Sauté the onion and garlic until they sweat. Then, in high heat, put in the water, soy sauce, vinegar, bay leaves and sugar. Gently place the chicken breasts in the pan. When the mixture is boiling, lower the heat to medium and let it simmer for 45 minutes. Do not stir or mix the liquid while it’s cooking.

You’ll know the dish is finished when the liquid turns cloudy and the chicken is cooked. It’s best when it’s served the next day with white rice.

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Teeth Cracking Eye of Round Roast

I hosted my first holiday dinner this year. While I've had a high batting average on new dishes, this particular dinner was not a hit.

Without doing much research on different cuts of meat, I took a trip to Costco beforehand and bought a six-pound hunk of eye of round roast. For those who don't know, the eye of round roast is taken from the cow's upper hind leg where there is a lot of muscle. As a result, the meat is tough, and doesn't have the same marble as you'd see from a softer cut (such as a rib eye). This is what makes the cut less desirable, and thus, less expensive.

And what you save on price, you pay in embarrassment. Even though I marinated the beef for 28 hours and left it medium rare, it remained tough enough to break a few plastic forks and stress my guests' jaws from chewing--an unfortunate result given all the hard work put into the dish. I couldn't help but apologize for the cut and pour more wine in their glasses.

My guests did enjoy the taste, which was a result of the marinade and seasoning. Here's what I did:

1) Mix 1 cup of vegetable oil, 1 cup of whiskey, fresh thyme and dried basil. Marinade the beef in this for about 24 hours.

2) Pat the beef dry and lightly season it with salt and paprika. Heavily coat it with black pepper.

3) Cover the meat with bacon, then roast in your oven to your desired finish.

Give it a try. Just don't buy the eye of round roast.

Happy holidays, everyone.

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Amateur Cooking Hour: Poulet Au Paprika

Perhaps it's because I'm an amateur in all things food, but it took a couple of tries to cook the rather simple French dish, Poulet Au Paprika or Paprika Chicken. The recipe I followed came from Phaidon's I Know How To Cook, and it called for a 2 1/4 lb. chicken, butter, stock, crème fraiche and paprika.

My troubles started when I couldn’t find a chicken that was exactly 2 ¼ lbs., and I assumed that the slightly heavier poultry I purchased would need to be accompanied by more of each ingredient. So, I estimated how much more butter to include, which inadvertently led to estimating how much more stock, crème fraiche and paprika to add.

After an hour of cooking the chicken in the oven, I quickly combined the leftover stock with the remaining ingredients to make the sauce. In five minutes, the meal was served.

The result was soggy chicken drenched in a thin, white sauce. And the sauce itself tasted like stock bothered with the sourness from crème fraiche. If it weren’t for my dislike of wasting food, I would have thrown the whole thing away.

Now, there were two things learned from this experience. The first is do not estimate the measurements for ingredients, especially for a dish that you never tried cooking. The second is patience. In this case, the chicken needed to sit on the pan and brown before putting it in the oven for an hour. The sauce needed time to boil and thicken, even if it meant adding an extra 30 minutes or more to the overall cooking time.

Last Sunday, I gave cooking Poulet Au Paprika another try. This time around, I stuck with the measurements and patiently waited for the chicken skin to brown to a slight crisp and the stock to truly merge with the crème fraiche and paprika.

The end product was exactly what I expected it to be the first time around: tender chicken coated in a butter cream sauce. The sauce itself reflected the mild, smoky flavor of paprika. Delicious.

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