With wide variety of Chicken Kebabs that we try every now and then, some cooked at home and some eaten at restaurants. This Kebab dish is from one of our favorite restaurants, which has quiet a few branches around New Jersey and a few neighboring states. This Kebab was always a family favorite and a dish we regularly ordered.
And then for some reason the restaurant nearest to our house shut down. Now, for people who live or have been to United states know that nothing is “close”, but when we think 5 miles, we mean its close. So, we basically didn’t have any of the restaurant branch anywhere close which definitely makes us sad, but there is always an option to try and make what we like. I feel this is sometimes a test just to prove ourselves our caliber.
So, I got down to trying out making these awesome bites of goodness. It did take a few trials but I think the perks of being in love with your food and being able to play with your spices makes you enjoy cooking food that satisfies your taste buds. The hard part is to just try and get the correct amount of spices to make a dish taste exactly like how we have eaten. The best part is that these experiments make get some wonderful dishes to your dining table which are always a delight and loved.
Chicken Kebabs are an all time wanted and favorite for everyone. Chicken Kebabs go so well with Daal Chawal as a side dish and even by themselves. I love making Chicken Kebabs for my get together with friends as well. People always feel that you cannot experiment much with Chicken Kebabs at home, where as experimenting with different Kebab flavors at home is the best thing to do.
The basic thumb rule is follow the fragrance and the flavor. If there are spices that go well together and there are spices that don’t go too well. Spices like Black pepper is something that you need to add little at a time, since if its too much the dish tends to get bitter. If you need to enhance the flavor of Black pepper in your dish, its always better to add less of Black pepper and more of White Pepper to balance the pepper taste. Adding Tandoori masala gives a lot of kick to Red chili powder and makes kebabs more flavorful. You can always use citric acid in place of Vinegar or Lemon juice. Adding Flour with Rice flour and Corn starch Powder will add a lot of crunch to your kebabs if you are frying them.
With the Hyderabadi Chicken 65, I added Red chili powder and other spices with Ginger garlic paste and mixed it well. Further rolled the spiced Chicken pieces in Flour, Rice flour and cornstarch powder and fried them. Later cooked them in a sauce made with Onions, green chilies, various spices and Yogurt. I also add a little cornstarch powder to the gravy to make it a little thicker.
Chicken 65 is made in different ways in different places of India. Though the original recipe was made in Chennai, but different places modified their ways and made it suitable to their taste buds. Honestly, every pace has their unique flavor and we always tend to have our favorites but making them in different ways is always great to add more variety to your dinner table.
Shrimps are one of my favorite kind of seafood and I would always try shrimps with new kind of gravies or new styles of marinade and fry them or grill them in different ways. Mr. Parveez always preferred eating an actual fish to eating shrimps. He finds Shrimps to be a little tasteless. So, when I started making Shrimp curries, he was still not a big fan. He would eat, but you know not really enjoy it as much as how I would like him to.
We watch a lot of travel shows and during one such show, the host happened to be travelling around restaurants in Kerala and one such restaurant was cooking Malabar shrimp curry. Now before anything let me tell you this. We were watching this program around an hour or so before dinner time. While the chef in the restaurant was showing how he prepares his special Shrimp curry, we were glued to the TV and wished we could see it live in person and have a bite of that scrumptious looking curry. Anyways, just as I mentioned that it was around an hour or so before dinner. Looking at that curry, I was determined that I have to try making it. Funny enough I remembered that my freezer has a pack of frozen shrimps. I always believe in miracles and this might have been one such lucky day. I got down to making it that very moment. The curry came out amazingly delicious and a family favorite too. Now the chef had only given in a rough idea on how to make the curry and few things that I have added to my curry recipe was not a part of the show that we watched. So, you might not find this different from an authentic Malabar Shrimp Curry, but you will definitely get the hint of Malabar flavors and savor each bite.
I deveined the shrimps but left the tail on. I feel it makes the shrimps look prettier in a curry, but you can always take the tail off if you prefer. After washing and pat drying, I marinated the shrimps in Ginger garlic paste, Red chili powder, Fennel seed powder, Tandoori powder, salt and lemon juice for 15-30 minutes. I also added a bunch of curry leaves. Further added some Rice flour, All purpose flour and corn starch powder and deep fried the shrimps. Frying makes the shrimps crunchy and the texture with the curry sauce is very flavorful.
To make the curry, add mustard seeds and fenugreek seeds along with dry round red chilies. Once they splutter, add curry leaves and further add chopped onions. Add ginger garlic paste followed by black pepper powder, Turmeric powder, Red chili powder, coriander powder, fennel seed powder, salt and cumin powder. Add the Dry red chili paste, tomato puree and green chilies along with fried shrimps and dry fenugreek leaves.
This shrimp curry is pretty easy and would make a special place in your menu. Its goes along great with garlic naan or plain naan and also Kerala Parantha.
Indian Chinese dishes are pretty popular with people. I experimented this dish which c is made with crispy chicken chunks. Its lightly tossed in a spicy chili sauce.
You will like this dish if you like the Indo Chinese fusion dishes. Its wonderfully delicious and the technique in various dishes where the flavors are combined always makes the dishes scrumptious.
If you have never had this dish before then definitely try it out. If you enjoy takeout dishes like sweet and sour chicken, then you will probably enjoy this dish as well. It uses the Chinese takeout technique of ‘deep frying and tossing it in a thick sauce to coat it’ that most of us are very familiar with but uses a dark spicy chili sauce instead of the usual sweeter sauces.
This recipe is a dry chili chicken version, however if you prefer the gravy version of chili chicken then just double up the sauce recipe to make it more saucy. The type of peppers you use in this dish will be your preference, depending on how spicy you like your food. Though my kids are pretty good with taking spice, I used bell pepper and dry Red chilies to flavor it up.
I personally LOVE crispy foods, but find it slightly irritating when it when it is 60% batter and 40% chicken. This dish is lightly coated and therefore has a very light crispy exterior. This makes for a less greasy end product as well.
This was a recipe that I got from the internet or may be some book. Honestly, its hard to recall. Newly married, I was in USA and taking up my new role of being a homemaker, all set to impress my better half with my cooking skills. Those days I would try any recipe I would come across and honestly I couldn’t make out what he would like. I was still new to his choice of flavors and he was also getting accustomed to my style of cooking. So, there were always some great experiments and many failed ones too.
So, I would always search for recipes and honestly, its been 15 years and those days when I saw a good recipe I would note it down in my recipe book [yeah, I know I am old school]. I am still pretty old school making my grocery list on a paper, but that’s how I like it.
Coming back to this recipe. I was pretty new to fish marination. I knew little but I was not really of the level where I could make a decision looking at a recipe and tell what it would taste like, though now things have completely changed, trust me loads of practice and patience, less of me and more of my husband. He would always praise my good trials and encourage me when things go wrong.
This fish has a marination of spices, Ginger, garlic and tamarind. Marinating the fish lets the fish soak up the spice, so you should try and marinate the fish for at least 1-2 hours. Further, you roll the fish piece in Rice flour and corn starch mix and pan fry them. The Rice flour and corn starch helps the exterior a lot of crunch. This fish goes great for Tea parties and as a side dish with Rice and Daal.
This is a recipe from Bangalore. All Bangalorean Muslims love to cook varieties of Non vegetarian food and one of the commonly made food includes, Surmai / King Fish Fry. As much as its a part of all da’awat or get together, it is made quiet often at homes, since it makes a perfect side dish with Dal Chawal.
I was introduced to this kind of fish after becoming an official member of The Parveezes. My father in law was a real foodie. May his soul rest in peace, he would travel an hour or two to get the best fish fry for the family. My husband, Mr. Parveez has loads of fond memories of various restaurants and places he went with his father as a kid and my boys are always happy listening to his childhood stories.
My Father in law was a friendly guy and he would make a little more effort with people who served good food, to get a hint of what all ingredients they use… its funny but I think that’s how all us foodies are. a close by market to that restaurant sold some masala in a packet that my Father in law started buying since it was recommended by the cook of the restaurant. Since then every time he went to buy the fish, he would get loads of packets of those masala so, we could mix up some lemon juice and ginger garlic paste with fish and fry them. The fish would be very similar in taste to that from the restaurant.
For the first few years after we got married, I would bring those masala packets from Bangalore and every now and then use them on special occasions only, since India trip was only once a year. Then one fine day, I thought of giving up using the masala packet and make my own, so we could enjoy the yummy fish more often. I wouldn’t say it was exactly same as to what we get from the restaurant, but very close and close enough for us to not crave the fish when we visited Bangalore.
Not just that, my late Father in law loved the fried fish I made with homemade masala and since then, there was no looking back. This masala makes your King fish taste even better. Its an easy marination and makes a quick fish side dish that goes great with Sambhar and boiled Rice.
We are a hard core Non vegetarian family. But, as much as people see our love for non vegetarian food, we equally love vegetarian as well, which kind of goes unnoticed. I don’t blame anyone, since with the huge variety of Biryanis and kebabs that we make, people believe that we can never go complete vegetarian.
Anyways, so I tried this recipe not just to test my veggie cooking skills but also because most of my close friends are vegetarians and that I think is the first reason why I tried a chicken dish with cauliflower.
This dish is as delicious as the chicken one. The good thing is that being vegetarian, it keeps your belly feeling lighter and less bloated. It can be served with plain boiled rice on the side or just by itself. Makes a great side dish or an appetizer.
This one is different from the regular Manchurian, which is partially dry. This one on the contrary has enough gravy to be served with boiled Rice. I substituted Bell pepper with Big green chili or Badi Mirch to change and experiment with flavor, or if I use the right term, I did that to to make the taste different from the regular dry Manchurian.
Isn’t it funny how playing with flavors id so exciting and yet so easy, even then most of the time people refrain themselves from trying out something new or do not make an attempt to alter the taste that they have inculcated with time. But, the fact is that basic flavor of all food is the same. The difference is only with the timing of when that flavor is introduced to the dish or which member of that family you pick. Like choosing bell pepper, Green chili or ghost pepper, same family, different members and each one holds the capability of changing the taste of your dish completely.
Now, at times, people use ingredients as a substitute and new flavors are invented. I, personally do not agree to substitute ingredients unless you willingly accept to experiment with the flavor. I am against using tamarind in place of lemon. Oh! yes I know people who would do that and even then disagree that they knowingly messed up a dish.
Cooking is an art and we all know that, and the one who masters this art becomes a very respectable artist/ chef and we all wish to be in that group and that’s the reason I created this website and the same reason why you are here. So, my suggestion is stick to the rules of nature. Switch flavors that you can imagine with your taste buds. Introduce new flavors little at a time because then you always have time to improvise. Making mistakes is acceptable but try to not ruin a dish to an extent where it isn’t edible.
This dish is an awesome option for school/ office lunch box. My boys look forward to Manchurian in their lunch box and it goes well with boiled rice.
I always had a soft corner for Chinese cuisine. Despite of all the horror stories about how unhealthy it can be at times, due to high contents of sodium in soya sauce and restaurants using MSG and more. The only thing was that my love for Chinese food was restricted to seafood only since most Chinese restaurants in USA do not serve halal food and if you are a meat eater, you do understand that sometimes, you just want your meat and though, fish is wonderful in taste but, doesn’t give you that satisfaction of meat. So, we got down to trying our own chicken version and when its Chinese and chicken, what can be better than making chicken Manchurian.
Its funny but the first time I tried Chicken Manchurian, I measured the ingredients tsp by tsp, and now I am so pro at it that i can cook this dish with my eyes closed, I mean it. Its a family favorite and the flavors are sweet and sour with a dash of spice and easily impresses anyone.
This version of Manchurian is dry, so its best served as a side dish or an appetizer. You cook serve it with strips of Butter naan [recipe in Bread] if you are looking to make it more fancier.
We attended a kid’s birthday party and they ordered this wonderful looking Pizza with chicken dipped in hot sauce all over it…Sounds incredibly delicious, right??? Well, it looked super scrumptious too, except that I couldn’t take a slice or even a bite…Why??? coz the chicken wasn’t Halal…Yupp!!! a food loving Muslim family juggling to stay positive and eat what the religion allows…You think its tough? Not really, its isn’t as bad as it used to be 13 years ago. You find loads of Muslim joints and food trucks now and I am sure it will increase with time. But, Meanwhile, for all these yummy looking dishes, there are people like me, all set to cook and share recipes.
So, if you are like me who would love to have their taste buds enjoy the juices of these wonderful flavors, you are on the right path.
