It has been a while since I took up a cooking project. The last thing that I cooked/baked was a Nutella-Choco chip brownie for my birthday. Not my best piece of cake since its curst got burnt, but after removing the charcoal, the cake below it was ‘yums’. This was followed by a group-project of 12x Paneer-Aloo Paratha and Vanilla-Blueberry cake. Which surprisingly despite of three people trying to make it, turned out to be good. Thought I would recommended to make it into a Vanilla-Blueberry-Lemon cake.
First things first, you time to make chicken tikka masala. I bought the ingredients, as in chicken from the Aldi. The plan was to cook it for dinner so I marinated it in yogurt and spices for a couple of hours and I went out to Ice Skate (my first time). Little did I know I came back a bit late and did not have the energy to cook a length-y dish. So it was a job for the next day.
I started the usual cleaning up the dorm kitchen and set up my stuff. First task was to shallow fry the chicken as I had forgot the barbeque sticks and had no other way to bake it in the oven to give it a tandoor like feel. The next greatest thing to a tandoor is tawa fry. So be it.
Kept the haphazardly marinated chicken to simmer in a closed pan on medium heat. Side-by-side, chopped the onions and put in all sorts of spices from Garam Masala, Chili powder, Paprika, Cumin and Coriander powder. As soon as I saw the recipe to check what's next, it said Tomato puree. Huh, did not realize I needed one. I quickly checked the kitchen cabinet and luckily found a canned unpeels tomatoes. Well, its better than nothing and I was not in a mood to go to a supermarket to buy puree at that point in time.
I poured the semi pureed tomatoes without thinking directly in the golden glazed onions and masala in the pan. I slapped my head, there still were some whole tomatoes. My smart move was to crush them while stirring the masala mixture. Not the best move…
As I am accustomed to the Indian problem solving ability called ‘Jugaad’, I quickly picked out the whole tomatoes and put them in my strained and smashed the puree out of them. Things were turning out to be of the color of the Chicken Tikka Masala photos.
Kept it to cook for 5 mins and added cream to it and as soon as I did, it hit the perfect restaurant style color. It was radiating the warmth of the masalas and the spicy chicken. A quick taste test and addition of some spices balanced it out.
Since I was out of chili powder, it was a bit sour than I would have liked, but hey, I can call it a fusion dish: Sour Cream Butter Chicken Tikka Masala right ?
You can follow the exact recipe of the Chicken Tikka Masala and the Vanilla Blueberry cake on the link below.
