Today we celebrated our 70th dinner by cooking something we had never cooked before: Tandoori-style chicken along with raita, naan, rice and a chickpea salad. We had eaten these foods in restaurants but wanted to recreate them at home. Alex started the dinner Saturday before by chopping up a whole chicken and preparing the yogurt marinade for the chicken. And then we both finished the meal on Sunday night. We loved it!
For the Tandoori-style chicken:
Max had test prep for his big high school entrance exam so I chopped up a whole chicken. I was glad I had kitchen shears: they really helped. Then I made a marinade out of plain yogurt, chopped garlic, chopped ginger and garam masala. Garam masala is a blend of spices including pepper, cloves, cinnamon and cumin and is used a lot in Indian cooking. I definitely smelled cinnamon. I squeezed lemon and salt on the cut up chicken and then spread the yogurt marinade on them. The recipe said we could add red and yellow food coloring to make the chicken more tandoori-style orange, but we didn’t have any food coloring so we left it plain. (We later bought food coloring and added it so the chicken looked more like traditional tandoori chicken). I covered up the chicken tightly with plastic wrap and let it marinade over night in the fridge. We cooked it Sunday night
This is what the marinading chicken looked like after we added the vegetable food coloring:
For the salad:
I wanted to make a salad that used some of the ingredients I had seen in the Indian cook book we used for the Tandoori-style chicken and I saw a lot of the recipes with chick peas in them. So I decided to make a salad with spinach, crispy chick peas, tomatoes, goat cheese and papitas. I love chick peas after they have been sauteed in olive oil and get crispy. They are a great snack by themselves.
For the raita:
Raita is a yogurt cucumber dip that often accompanies spicy Indian food because it cools down your mouth. Traditionally it is just yogurt and cucumber (and a few spices) but we like to add tomatoes as well.
For the naan (flat Indian bread): we bought that! We can’t make everything!
