The Tandoor Saga, Part 1

Since Tuesday's Acapulco chicken threw the proverbial monkey wrench into the supper schedule at Chez Boeckman-Walker, the husband and I decided to move Pizza Tuesday to Friday and to try our hand at making tandoori chicken for Indian Feast Thursday.

Before I went overboard with the Indian cooking stuff, I'd written down a pretty simple tandoori chicken recipe from one of my Weight Watchers magazine-sized cookbooks. There was only one thing that kept us from trying it: It required the chicken be broiled five minutes after being baked for 20 minutes--and our ancient oven's broiler was a cesspool of filth and missing its broiling tray. Well, that second part we solved on our second trip to a Tuesday Morning, and I eventually got around to cleaning out the cesspool shortly after returning to unemployment. (Rescued countless milk jug rings and twisties--placed there courtesy Muffin and Bucket--along with one of the kiddo's Hot Wheels.)

This morning I tracked down the tandoori recipes from Jaffrey's Step-by-Step Cooking and Vaswani's Easy Indian Cooking and compared them to the Weight Watchers version. Needless to say, the WW version on paper seemed flavorless. Plus there's that whole broiling issue, which I have zilcho experience with. Even though the broiler is clean and we have a brand-new tray for it, I don't trust my ancient Lady Kenmore to broil and not burn down the house.

Ladies and Gents, Start Your Cuisinarts
I opted to use Jaffrey's recipe instead of trying to meld the two acceptable ones; I just didn't have that much desire to experiment. And that's fine because I had to whip out the food processor! Woohoo! Any recipe that requires multiple kitchen appliances is fine by me. What's even better is this time I got to make paste from onions on purpose.

Of course, I failed to follow the instructions and steps precisely. (The FSM forbid I do such a thing as follow the instructions!) I used ready-made garlic paste and ginger paste in lieu of the six garlic cloves and 1.5 inch peeled ginger root piece I was supposed to combine with the onions and three tablespoons of lemon juice to create a paste. No, I just paste-ified the onions, then threw in a tablespoon of ginger paste (a total guess) and two tablespoons of garlic paste (totally overcompensating I'm sure, given that half a teaspoon of minced garlic equals one garlic clove). And then I remembered the bit about adding the lemon juice; it went in after I'd already added the cup of fat-free yogurt. But that didn't appear to muck things up.

Crankin' It Up With the Spice Weasel
After the gooey stuff was in and relatively mixed, I got to add the spices!


Doesn't that look yummy?

I did have one substitution: Since I have no mace (and opted not to stop into Gandhi Bazaar this evening on the comics run to pick some up), I bopped over to Cook's Thesaurus and discovered my multitude of mace substitution options. I picked up allspice since I just recently acquired some for the oatmeal fruit no-bake cookies I made a few weeks back.

Both Jaffrey and Vaswani include the option of adding orange food coloring to the marinade to give the final product a more authentic look. While I don't have orange food coloring (which is difficult to believe since I love using that color for the boy; he has orange walls and a purple ceiling in his bedroom, after all), I do have reds and yellows. So after I made sure all the spices were stirred into the yogurt-onion-garlic-ginger-lemon juice paste and saw the...not entirely appetizing mustardy color of the marinade, I decided to throw caution to the wind and try out some food color.


Looks pretty edible, right? Pretty amazing what six drops of McCormick's red and two drops of its yellow coloring will do.

Once the marinade was ready, it was showtime for the chicken breasts. As my husband said while I was prepping the chicky boobs, dressed in the short satin halter nightie I wear post-shower, "There's nothing quite as sexy as a woman who wears a skimpy bit of satin while cutting fat from raw chicken meat." Ahh, thanks, honey!

Unlike the other two recipes we'd considered, Jaffrey recommended making diagonal slashes in the meat and rubbing marinade into those slashes to make sure the meat really absorbs the spices and flavor. Since I'd already thrown caution to the wind with the food color, I slashes and rubbed (using the spoon-shaped rubber scraper--my nails were funky after cleaning out the junk drawer today and spilling Crazy Glue on them while attempting to readhese the magnetic disc to Greg's Vader head magnet), then dunked those chicky boobs into their yogurt bath in the fridge for the night.


Nighty night, chicky boobs! Marinate well! I'll see you tomorrow evening for some fun in the oven!

Speaking of the Bam!-Meister....
By the way, my usual audience/sous-chef, Nickelbucket, was kept from his perch atop the stove (yes, I know, not incredibly sanitary) by the husband, so instead my audience was a family of bats.


Batzarro and Batman live in the spice/drug cabinet. Greg's job is to surprise me with some lewd/crude/bizarre arrangement of the two, often with special guests from the shelves of the Star Wars room/study. They're fun. And with Batwoman in tow, I felt just like Emeril cooking with this fun family in the audience.

Stay tuned for "The Tandoor Sage, Part 2," which I should have up tomorrow evening (after supper, obviously). Trust me, there's still ample opportunity to muck this up.