Month 1 day 5: Tandoori-Spiced Chicken and Chickpea and Cauliflower Curry

Today had some excitement-- when we woke up there were emails in our inboxes about a gunman sighted on campus! We were supposed to shelter in place. I wasn't planning on going to work today anyway, so it was all the encouragement I needed to stay at home in PJs. Anyway, I had a term paper to write for my education class. It turned out to be kind of just a rant the lack of clear goals and learning objectives in Intro Bio and what a lame class it is.

We had a couple no-cooking days since the last post. On Thursday G attended our dorm's hot-pot night while I attended a panel discussion and dinner about careers in education for graduate women. It was actually a great panel-- the ladies spoke candidly about realizing that they weren't meant for academia (mostly in the infamous 4th year of their PhD programs...) and how they bumbled along and randomly wound up working in other sorts of education/outreach jobs that turned out to be their dream jobs even though they never would've thought of it. Friday was another event at our dorm, Open Doors Night. On this biannual event, residents can volunteer to host a party in their room. The dorm pays for the food and non-alcoholic drinks, and residents can just go from party to party. We decided to go with a selection of cheeses and chocolate. We have so much leftover cheese now, we will be eating this for breakfast for a while:

With all the preparations (and me losing, but luckily recovering, my wallet) we didn't have time to cook beforehand, and mostly filled up on cheese and baguette ourselves, but afterwards we did end up getting hungry so we fried up some Italian sausage with bell peppers and onions. We cooked it for long enough that the onions were caramelized and the peppers were nice and soft too. Yum.

Anyway, today I got the chance to cook again. We meant to make this earlier, but had forgotten to soak the chickpeas. So it was delayed until today:

• Tandoori-Spiced Chicken, Cooking Light January/February 2011
• Chickpea and Cauliflower Curry, Food Network Magazine January/February 2010

These were both dishes that took a long time, although not so much hands-on time. The tandoori chicken was supposed to marinate for two hours. I don't know how long we actually let it go... probably somewhere between one to two. Is it accurate to call it tandoori chicken? It's not cooked in a special oven, it's not pink, and it doesn't seem to have much overlap with what are typical spices at least according to wikipedia. The only similarity is that the marinade has yogurt in it. I don't know if it's because of the yogurt or not, but it was really juicy! That was nice. It wasn't super flavorful, and the flavor didn't penetrate, but the outer layer at least was good. I could see setting up the marinade in the morning and letting it sit all day, and then it would be a quick meal because it actually only broiled for 15 minutes.

The curry (can we call it a curry if it doesn't actually have any curry powder?) was kind of interesting to make. For Open Doors Night, I had just bought these empty tea bags that you can use with your own loose leaf teas, so I used one of those to put all the spices in. It smelled like we were making chai! The curry took a while, but didn't require much supervision, so this is a fine recipe for lazy weekend days. It wasn't spicy at all. I may have used the wrong type of pepper. Our grocery store has a chart of different chiles and their spiciness levels, but the pictures don't particularly look like what is in the baskets down below. It's always a gamble.

We happened to have some leftover rice from Indian takeout in the freezer, and G got some naan at the grocery store. He made some mango lassi too! It was really frothy and good.