As I mentioned in the first post, this blog is supposed to be from the perspective of a fairly novice home cook. If you were looking for polished recipes and beautiful photography (Me? I’m using a digicam from 1999. Yeah, that’s right, this camera is OLDER THAN A THIRD GRADER), you might want to check out Smitten Kitchen instead. I mean, I can usually execute a fairly complex recipe just fine, but sometimes things just turn out weird.

Like this:

This was supposed to be the Chicken Tikka Masala from the Sept/Oct 2007 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Now I have made a good chicken tikka masala before; you saw it in the first post. But that recipe, from Fine Cooking October 2006, takes four hours.

This recipe is definitely much quicker (just over an hour total), but it’s also…not chicken tikka masala. Now, I admit part of that is my fault. I was missing two notoriously hard-to-substitute ingredients, tomato paste and heavy cream, and tried to make do with ketchup and yogurt. Oh, and my serrano chile was way past its prime so I used half a spoonful of Chinese hot sauce instead. Still edible, and perhaps even tasty, but the flavors were slightly off from where they should be.

A much bigger problem was the texture of the dish. Whenever I’ve had chicken tikka masala in a restaurant, the sauce has been silky smooth. This sauce was chunky, like marinara, and that’s not really my fault, though the heavy cream probably would have helped. The diced onion has to go, though.

I will say the chicken from this recipe is very, very good and much quicker than the Fine Cooking recipe. You salt and spice the chicken, refrigerate for half an hour while you do the rest of the prep, dip in a yogurt sauce and broil. After the chicken rests, cut it into chunks.

Since I have a bunch of leftover yogurt, I think I’ll try again this week, making the chicken the Cook’s Illustrated way (but with boneless, skinless thighs instead of chicken breasts) and the sauce the Fine Cooking way. I’ll keep you posted.

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It got eaten today. Somehow it slipped my mind that I hadn’t done any menu planning or grocery shopping for this week (the salmon and curry were carryovers from last week’s menu), thus we had a scrounge-for-food, fend-for-yourself dinner.

Well, scrounge for food-like substances. Fellow In Defense of Food readers will agree that something that comes in a box with instructions probably fails Pollan’s test.

Ahh, the infamous “flavor packet” and the brick of noodles.

Added one cup of water to the noodle brick and popped it into the microwave for four minutes. In the meantime, I cut open the flavor packet and peeked inside.

Bright yellow-orange powder, as expected. Have you ever seen real cheese this color?

Let the noodles sit in the microwave for one additional minute, then dumped the cheese powder onto the noodles.

And stir. Or rather, do that grab-pull up-fold over-mix thing with chopsticks.

My verdict, upon tasting: “This is better than I expected.”
My husband’s verdict, upon tasting: “This isn’t yakisoba!”

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This was NOT on the list I gave him:

He’s taken full responsibility for disposing of this…thing. I hate mac and cheese to begin with, and…SO. WRONG.

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