Food Revolution: Chicken Korma to Chicken KorMex

This is part of a series of posts in which I cook something from Jamie's Food Revolution and then make it again with a twist. Find the other posts here.

I have definitely learned something from Jamie's Food Revolution: I really love Indian food, especially when it's homemade. This time I made Chicken Korma, and the rule definitely still holds true. This stuff is amazingly delicious. I technically tweaked Jamie's recipe a little, but that was just because some of his amounts were stupid:

• 2 chicken breasts (translated to human measures from "1 3/4 pounds chicken breasts")
• 2 medium onions
• optional: 1 fresh jalapeño (translated from optional: 1 fresh green chile)
• a thumb-sized piece of fresh root ginger
• a small bunch of fresh cilantro
• 1 x 15-oz can garbanzo beans
• peanut oil
• a pat of butter
• 1/2 cup Patak's mild curry paste
• 1 x 14-oz can lite coconut milk
• a small handful of sliced almonds
• 2 heaped tbsp unsweetened shredded coconut
• 2 cups lite natural yogurt
• 1 lemon

Cut the chicken into chunks. Halve and finely slice the onions (tip: be sure to slice, not crush, to avoid tears). Slice the jalapeño from the tip up to just before the seeds, cut the remainder in half lengthwise, cut off the end, and push out the seeds (this is the technique that I've finally figured out will work to get the seeds out cleanly, let me know if you have a better technique). Put a few of the prettier slices aside for plating Peel and finely chop the ginger. Pick some cilantro leaves to use in plating and finely chop the rest. Drain the beans.

Put a large pan on high or medium-high heat (Jamie says high, but everything gets golden before 10 minutes either way, and I had to turn it down to avoid burning) and add some oil (about enough to just cover the bottom of the pan). Add the onions, pepper, ginger, cilantro, and butter. Cook for about 10 minutes (until the onions are golden), stirring pretty close to constantly. Add the curry paste, beans, coconut milk, coconut, almonds (except a little for plating), garbanzo beans, and slicked chicken. Stir. Half-fill the empty coconut milk can with water, and add it. Stir again. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer 30 minutes with the lid on. Jamie says to check it regularly to make sure it's not drying out and add extra water if necessary, which makes me think Jamie usually cooks in a desert with a dehumidifier running; this stuff was soupy when it finished, there was no risk of it drying out. The chicken should be tender and cooked when you finish. He says to season with (sea) salt and pepper, but I didn't need to add anything to make it delicious. I cooked some rice during the last 15 minutes or so of the simmering, and served the korma over that with some yogurt, the pretty bits, and a lemon wedge.

Trying to come up with a way to remix this one was daunting. First off, it was so super delicious, I didn't want to mess with it. Second, Patak's is a super cheaty way of cooking, but I wanted something at least close to the same: a paste of spicy goodness. What to do?

I decided to pick a type of food, and just substitute each of the ingredients as best I could, and see what happened. I knew I'd have a lot of work to do, so I picked something I'm familiar with: Tex-Mex. Here's what I did to Tex-Mexify each ingredient:

• 2 chicken breasts to 2 chicken breasts (we have chickens in Texas)
• optional: 1 fresh jalapeño to not optional: 1 fresh jalapeño
• a small bunch of fresh cilantro to a large bunch of fresh cilantro
• 1 x 15-oz can garbanzo beans to 1 x 15-oz can whole-kernel sweet corn
• 1 x 14-oz can lite coconut milk to 14 oz 2% milk
• a small handful of sliced almonds to a small handful of crumbled pecans
• 2 heaped tbsp unsweetened shredded coconut unchanged, because I need to use this stuff up, but I think I'd use shredded jicama if I didn't already have coconut
• 2 cups lite natural yogurt to 2 cups lite sour cream
• 1 lemon to oh crap I forgot the lemon
• a thumb-sized piece of fresh root ginger to I can't think of anything ginger-like, and ginger is tasty, so we'll call it fusion; I probably could have switched this to a few cloves of garlic, though

That leaves the paste. Well, this is supposed to be Texan, so I used 1/4 cup Salt Lick Chipotle BBQ Sauce thickened to something more paste-like with 1/4 cup chili powder.

I made everything just like in the original, except I added the milk last at the add-everything-else step, and didn't quite bring it to a boil after adding the milk. I had no idea how this stuff would taste.

It came out pretty tasty, but my crazy concoction just couldn't top the concentrated deliciousness that is Patak's. Curries are just so good. I'll probably make it again, but probably not before I run out of curry pastes.

If you have any ideas for things I could have picked that were more properly Tex-Mex, or if you try a remix using a different theme, let us know in the comments.

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Posted in: almonds,chicken,chilis,cilantro,coconut,coconut milk,corn,curry,food revolution,garbanzo beans,ginger,milk,onions,pecans,sour cream,yogurt

Food Revolution: Salmon Tikka to Chipotle Chicken

Last week, my sister, Libby, invited me over for amazingly yummy Chicken Tikka Masala. She purchased Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Food Revolution, and wanted to try out one of the curries while her less-adventurous-foodwise hubby is out of town. It's hard to say for certain, but I think that chicken might be among the five best things I've ever eaten. I'm sure it was at least in part my sister's touch, but that recipe was amazing, so I bought my own copy of the book.

Part of the goal of the book is to get the people reading it to get their friends and family to cook, thus the "Revolution" part of the title. I'm stealing Libby's idea of using my blog to serve as part of that part of the process, but putting a bit of my own spin on it. Each time I make a recipe from the book, I'm going to try to also make my own dish inspired by that recipe. Hopefully by the end of this post that'll make more sense.

Since I loved the Chicken Tikka Masala so much, I decided to try the Quick Salmon Tikka with Cucumber Yogurt (that recipe is very close to the same, but the one in this book uses cilantro rather than coriander leaves) first. But before I could try that, I had to find some curry paste. Jamie mentions a specific brand, Patak's, as particularly good curry paste, but really any would have been fine... if Libby hadn't told me that her grocery store had the specific one he recommended. I tried four grocery stores (including the awesome MT Supermarket, "Central Texas's Premier Asian Grocery") with no luck, and was about to drive out to Libby's grocery (about a 20-minute drive) when I decided to try one more grocery store... which I happened to be near when I started my quest, but had assumed wouldn't have it. For the record, HEB at Parmer and Mopac currently has a special on Patak's Curry Pastes, while the HEB at Parmer and I35, the Hancock HEB, and the Far West HEB didn't have it as of yesterday.

When I finally made it home with the Patak's and the other ingredients, I started a timer. The book said the  would take 17 minutes, and it did have "Quick" right there in the name, "Quick Salmon Tikka with Cucumber Yogurt." My attempt didn't go quite that fast. Still, 33 minutes didn't seem too bad, especially since a good part of that was spent scaling the salmon that I thought was scale-less but turned out not to be. I'm pretty sure I could get it down to 17 minutes if I made it a few more times, so strong work there, Jamie. I somehow managed to forget the lemon juice, but it was still fantastic. It wasn't quite as good as the Chicken Tikka Masala, but, given the reduced prep time, it definitely passes. And, holy crap, it even turned out pretty (except for that piece of I think skin falling off on the left, I'm not sure why I allowed that in the photo)!

I had half a cucumber, half a lemon, and a ton of cilantro leftover from that recipe, and I purposefully got a bit extra plain yogurt with the intention of making more things with it... so I decided to try something, which is where I get to the whole point of this series. Each time I try one of Jamie's recipes, I'm going to try to also make something similar but not quite the same. To add to the leftover ingredients, I grabbed a jalapeño, a red bell pepper, and some chicken. Importantly, I already had some Tabasco Brand Chipotle Pepper Sauce (because that stuff is awesome and I try to always have at least one bottle of it around). This is what came out when all of that turned together in my head. It serves a little more than one but probably not quite two (I have leftovers, but I don't think it's quite a full meal's worth of leftovers). Add a chicken breast and make more of the Tabasco/cumin mix to coat it if you want to fully serve two:

• 1 chicken breast
• ~2 tbsp Tabasco Brand Chipotle Pepper Sauce
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 cucumber seeded and chopped
• 1/2 cup nonfat plain yogurt
• ~2 tbsp finely chopped cilantro
• 1/2 jalapeno seeded and deribbed, finely chopped
• ~2 tbsp chopped red pepper
• 2 pieces flatbread

Heat the flatbread in your oven at 225 °F (just so it's warm when you put everything else on top of it). It can keep heating while you make everything else.

Combine everything but the chicken, Tabasco, and cumin in a bowl (although you should keep back a bit of each of the veggies to add to the top to make it pretty).

Heat a frying pan, and add just a little olive oil to the heated pan. As that heats, cut the chicken into strips. Combine the Tabasco and cumin in a bowl. Lightly coat the chicken in this mixture. Cook the chicken in the oil for about a minute and a half a side. I ended up cooking that covered on low for a while as I sorted out the other half, but, with the thin strips, it shouldn't take much longer than that to cook it completely. It stayed plenty moist for me, though, so it doesn't seem to hurt to throw a lid on the chicken, turn down the heat, and let it go for a bit as you sort everything else out..

Serve on the flatbreak (flatbread, yogurt mix, chicken, bits of veggies for pretty).

BTW, I had the flatbread from the Salmon (because I didn't feel like going on another hunt for naan, as much as it probably would have been worth it). If I didn't, I would definitely have used a tortilla of some sort to properly fully southwesternize this.

If you try it, please let me know... especially if you adapt the general idea into another variation.

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Posted in: chicken,cilantro,cucumber,food,food revolution,jamie oliver,salmon,yogurt