Okay, It's Not Exactly Indian

With Diwali happening this weekend--or at least on Saturday, according to my Hindu art calendar), I wanted to do something appropriate to celebrate, not just with the fam but also with my ever-dwindling number of students in my noon yoga class in South Austin. Mind you, Gentle Reader, I can't exactly bring curry, rice and naan to a yoga class, but I was inspired by the weekly dispatch I received from Indian cooking maven Tarla Dalal to make some sweets to share.

If I'd had time and courage, I would have tried a traditional Indian sweet. The FSM knows I've got recipes for various burfis and halvas out the wazoo in my ever-growing collection of Indian cookbooks. But when you're cooking for folks you only have a casual acquaintance with, you don't want to hit them with something that for them is probably really exotic and maybe even off-putting. So out went the idea, however fanciful it was, to make burfi. Instead, I whipped up a batch of molasses-spice crackles, another recipe I'd been eyeballing for a while, with the boy's help.

And with a wee bit of help from the boy, the more than 40 cookies we made were gone within two hours of their coming out of the oven. For that reason, Gentle Reader, I have no pictures of the savory and sweet treats to share with you. Fear not, though, for the boy has made me promise I'll make him another batch soon, so stay tuned for more on this topic.

In case you're wondering, I did have 20 cookies left come Saturday, so I took them to class. The gym was a ghost town since the Red River Rivalry started at 11 a.m., which means I had just 10 students. They were all very grateful for the treats and raved about them. Success!

Tomatoes A'Plenty
As for our Diwali celebration at home, it somewhat mirrored my attempt to share the celebration with my students. For you see, Gentle Reader, the husband and I had identified earlier in the week a Moroccan recipe from Ziryab: Authentic Arab Cuisine by Farouk Mardam-Bey that we thought held much promise of tastiness that the boy wouldn't overly object to being served. Come Saturday, the choice was either to make this recipe or have pork chops, which I'd picked up on sale Friday at HEB.

Yes, Gentle Reader, pork chops aren't exactly a great fit for Diwali, but they're even less appropriate than a dish from Morocco. Okay, yeah, there's vindaloo, which came to India from Portugal and is traditionally made with pork, but for all the Indian food I've eaten, I've yet to have vindaloo (my loss, I know) and highly doubt pork chop meat would be great for a vindaloo recipe. The dish from Morocco, in my mind, was far more appropriate since Arab cuisine was brought to India by various invaders and traders (although I think the Portuguese brought tomatoes to India) and incorporated into that deliciously varied landscape that is Indian cuisine.

Djej b-matisha
or
Chicken With Caramelized Tomatoes4.5 lb. very ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
1 large chicken, cut into 8 pieces
1 chopped onion
3 garlic cloves, chopped
8 T butter
3 T honey
1 C water
1 C toasted blanched almonds
1 T toasted sesame seeds
1/2 t pepper
1/2 t ginger
1/2 t saffron
1 t cinnamon powder
Salt

1. In a heavy pot, place the chicken, tomatoes, butter, onions, garlic, salt, pepper, ginger, saffron and water, then cook over medium heat for 45 minutes.
   
2. Remove the pieces of chicken from the pot as soon as they are cooked.
   
3. Caramelize the tomatoes by stirring them frequently, and then add the honey and cinnamon, still stirring.
   
4. Place the chicken back in the pot for a few minutes to give it the flavor of the sauce.
   
5. Arrange the chicken in an attractive serving dish, pour the sauce over it and top with toasted almonds and sesame seeds.

Yield: 4 servings

Nutritional Info
Mardam-Bey does not provide nutritional information for the recipes in his book. That's probably a good thing because, well, do you really think 8 tablespoons of butter makes for a low-fat dish, Gentle Reader?

The Faudie's Futzings
If you think, Gentle Reader, that I probably did something about those 8 tablespoons of butter, you're right. But I'll get to that in a moment. First, I want to talk to you about tomatoes.

When I was growing up, my dad always had tomato plants in the garden. He loves tomatoes. I think Mum liked them too, but now her GERD has made them verboten to her. Anywho, the most my parents ever did with the tomatoes we grew was to wash them and slice them for salads or sandwiches. I suppose that if I enjoyed raw tomatoes I would have a better memory of what happened to our crops, but I don't enjoy raw tomatoes. Cook the suckers!

Because of my less-than-intimate relationship with raw tomatoes, I tend not to buy fresh ones for various recipes. Yes, Gentle Reader, I'm a lazy cook: I buy canned ones. But as Cook's Illustrated has noticed in some taste testings at its kitchens, canned tomatoes are more likely to have actual tomato flavor (the result of additives, no doubt) because the mass-produced fresh tomatoes available at your local grocery store are sort of like iceberg lettuce: no flavor whatsoever. It's been bred right out of them for the sake of size and speed. Why do you think heirloom tomatoes are all the rage?

Sorry, I digress. As I prepared to make these caramelized tomatoes, I was unsure what canned tomato product I should use. Did I use whole, peeled Romas? Could I use no-salt-added diced ones, but wouldn't those pieces still have their skin and also entail draining them? Would crushed tomatoes be to obliterated to properly caramelize? You can undoubtedly surmise, Gentle Reader, that I was in quite a pickle over the tomatoes. I wanted the right texture for the toms and didn't want to jeopardize the caramelization by having too much liquid involved.

In my indecision, I made a bold move: I bought fresh tomatoes. Big suckers too that were sure to have no flavor. And, as I learned as I tried to seed the damn things per the instructions I found in The Best Kitchen Quick Tips, the suckers weren't "very ripe" as specified by the recipe. By the time I was finished coring, peeling and seeding them, I had a big pile of juicy red guts on my cutting board. So much for trying to keep the liquid in check!

By the way, Gentle Reader, if you've never peeled a tomato, you have to try it. And I thought peeling roasted bell peppers was a hoot! There's something rather enjoyable about boiling a tomato for less than a minute, then dunking it in icy water then tearing away its flesh as easily as one might peel a sticker off a slick sheet.

Fun fun fun!

While I'll admit that I didn't exactly futz with the tomatoes, I did make a few changes to the recipe:

• Forget the whole chicken. I thawed two giant chicken breasts (again with the modern production techniques breeding out flavor in favor of size and speed) and cut them into smaller pieces so they'd cook faster. All that fuss with the tomatoes took up a lot of time, and the boy was getting crankier and crankier as he grew hungrier and hungrier, so this momma was in a race against the clock to get supper on the table.
  
• Forget the 8 tablespoons of butter. I poured in maybe 2 teaspoons of olive oil, heated it, browned the onions, then the garlic (minced from a jar) then put in the chicken, tomatoes, spices and water.
  
• Speaking of those spices, I inadvertently added the cinnamon at the wrong time. In my efforts to achieve mise en place while the tomatoes boiled, I combined the teaspoon of cinnamon in the little pinch bowl along with the saffron, pepper and ginger. Once the onions and garlic were browned and the chicken and chopped tomatoes were in the pot, I dumped the pinch bowl's contents into the pot and stirred. Only when I doublechecked the recipe to determine if the contents needed to cook covered or uncovered did I discover the cinnamon was to go in later. Oh well!
  
• I didn't use the almonds or the sesame seeds. I was so kerfluffled over the tomato fiasco that I just wanted to get the food on the table and totally forgot about the garnish.

Caramelization is a curiosity to me, Gentle Reader, because I only have a vague notion of what the end product of such a process should be. I believe that caramelization is simply heating a food hot enough and long enough so the natural sugars within it undergo some kind of chemical change. Yes, I suppose I could look it up somewhere (I understand there's this online encyclopedia thing that anyone can contribute any information about any topic to called Wikipedia....), but sometimes I prefer to live with my ignorance: It saves me from feeling like a total jackass in my own kitchen.

Whether or not I achieved caramelization with my tomatoes is unknown. The husband set to stirring the pot after I'd removed the cooked chicken, and I checked it every now and then to see how much the liquid had reduced (I was busy making strawberry fluff for dessert later--another far-fetched food for an Indian celebration). I'm not sure how long he stirred, but at some point I decided the stuff in the pot had reduced and thickened enough to add the honey, then I took over stirring until I figured the sauce was finished. Why did I do this? Haven't a bloody clue, Gentle Reader. Perhaps I too was out of my mind with hunger.

Despite the tomato fiasco and the half-assed preparation, the finished dish was incredibly flavorful. Adding the cinnamon when I did allowed the chicken to absorb even more of that sweetness. Happily, the saffron didn't get lost in the sweetness of the cinnamon and the honey and the caramelization, and it served as a delightful counterpoint. Served atop Basmati rice, it was rendered a curry--and while curry really isn't native to India in the grand scheme of things, what's more quintessentially Indian than a curry?

Next time, though, I'm going with diced tomatoes from a can.