Feeding Friendship: Lentils

For this round Ellie chose the humble, yet powerful lentil as our key ingredient. I have a good lentil pasta soup recipe, and one for a lentil and rice "casserole" that we used to put in burritos when I was younger, but I wanted to branch out. In my continuing quest to try cooking more Indian food, I had already found a recipe for Dal Ke Samose (lentil samosas), so this was an easy choice try to it out. The recipe I used is from a blog called Food Wanderings, which you should check out, so I won't reproduce all the directions. Here's the ingredient list though for planning/shopping purposes.

Filling:
1 cup toor dal/ split pigeon pea/lentils
1/2 cup spring onions, finely chopped
1/4 cup mint leaves, chopped
1/4 cup coriander leaves, chopped
1 green chili, finely chopped
1 tsp red chili powder
1 tsp garam masala spice mix
1 tsp roasted cumin powder
Salt to taste

"Glue"
3Tbl water
1/4 cup AP flour
(I might cut this in half if you don't intend to make millions of samosas, you can always make more glue)

Dough:
1 package frozen spring roll wrappers, thawed to room temperature

 I didn't use all the spices listed because I wasn't crazy about the idea of mint, and wasn't sure what to do about coriander leaves, so I just omitted those. The author's idea to use spring roll wrappers is genius and was a big time saver over making dough.  It also meant the crusts were thin and even, which (let's be real) wouldn't be likely with homemade dough.

Your first step is to prepare your lentils, which means rinsing them, picking out the weird ones, and then boiling them until they are tender. Mine were a little too done at 45 minutes boiling, so I would start checking them at 30.

rinsed

boiling

tender 

You basically just mix in your spices and cut your spring roll wrappers in half, then stuff the mixture into the wrappers. 

spice mixture

cut your wrappers in half, making 2 strips

I had to really burn the grey matter to understand the folding instructions on her page, but practice made perfect(ish). They weren't unclear, I just have trouble doing spacial reasoning based on 2D pictures. My samosas were increasingly triangular, and after about lucky number 9 they started to look like her pictures, more or less. The step I added to her process was to put a little water/flour "glue" along the left edge of your wrapper after you make the first fold she talks about. So, you've got glue running along the left edge starting from the top of the diagonal fold and going to the top of the wrapper. This helps your little dough cone stick together better while you are filling it with lentils and prevents leaks later. 

filling the dough cone with lentils

finally starting to look samosa-esque

Her recipe says this makes "10-12." Either I'm seriously under-filling my samosas, or this is a terrible estimate. I got tired of filling around #14 and could have probably made 10 more with the amount of lentils I had left. So I'd estimate more like 2 dozen, depending upon how much you stuff yours. 

The next stage is frying and her suggestion to use a wok is a good one. The high sides helped keep the samosas in check and the pan heats up quickly. I used canola oil, but you can use whatever strikes your fancy. 

frying the samosas

the finished pile

The nice thing about the spring roll wrappers is that they make it obvious when they are done. When they are golden and bubbly all over, you're good to go. After I had gone through all these steps I had a moment of panic thinking about the red dipping sauce I had seen in her photos. I hadn't planned anything for the sauce and was suddenly overcome thinking of all the hard-to-find Indian sauce ingredients that I surely hadn't bought. Imagine my relief to read these 3 words: serve with ketchup. Done. I whipped up a little quinoa pilaf to go on the side and called it a night. Not too hard overall, you just have to start early due to the 30 minutes of lentil boiling you'll need to do ahead. 

I thought they were tasty and not very spicy, just flavorful. George ate about a half dozen in one sitting, so they passed the husband test. All in all, I would definitely recommend this recipe. 

Feeding Friendship: Greek Yogurt

Our ingredient for this challenge, as chosen by Veronica, is Greek Yogurt. I was intrigued by this choice, since I knew there would be a lot of options for what type of meal I could make, and yogurt is very good for you, but I don't eat enough because I don't like it straight up. I found lots of great ways that you can substitute Greek yogurt for sour cream in a lot of recipes, but I didn't end up doing that. I also decided that I'd made enough dessert in December for a while and that I wanted to make something savory.

I've been fairly active on Pinterest lately, and I've been using it as both a source of recipes and a good place to save recipes I find on the far corners of the Internet. (for those of you who aren't familiar, Pinterest is a place to "pin" pictures and links on a series of virtual bulletin boards and then share them in a social networking kind of way. You can follow my pins if you care- I'm sarahmk16). Some random person had pinned a slow cooker Chicken Tikka Masala recipe from a blog called Smells Like Home. This is my favorite Indian dish, and I knew that if I made it that I could control the level of spiciness. Plus, I got to use my crock pot, which is one of my favorite ways to cook since it produces such tender meat and magically has dinner ready when you want it.

Here is the link to the original recipe she posted. It made me feel good that this cook and blogger is not someone who fixes Indian food a lot, so I thought that lowered my chances of messing it up. I followed her process exactly, but made a few key substitutions. First, I halved the recipe, as she said she did. I also used 3 large chicken breasts cut into roughly 1-inch chunks because I don't cook much with chicken thighs and had a lot of chicken breasts in the freezer. I also substituted some leftover diced green chilis from a can instead of using a jalapeno, since it scared me. Here are the ingredients for the dish as I made it:

For the chicken:

• 3 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1/2 tbsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tbsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 7 0z 2% Greek Yogurt
• 1 Tbsp diced green chilis (or use 1 whole jalapeno, piereced several times with a knife)

For the Sauce:

• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1/2 large onion, diced
• 3 cloves equivalent of minced garlic
• 1/2 tbsp of kosher salt
• 1 1/2 tbsp garam masala spice
• 1 piece of fresh ginger about 1/5 inches long, grated (freeze first to make grating easier) 
• 2 cups crushed tomatoes (I used fire roasted Muir Glen brand) 
• 1/2 tbsp sugar
• 1 1/2 tbsp heavy cream 

To Serve:

• 2+ cups cooked rice
• cilantro garnish (if you want) 

I started out by chopping up the chicken breasts into bite-sized chunks. I dumped these into the crock pot bowl, sprinkled in the coriander, cumin, and salt, and gave it a good stir to try to coat all the pieces with spices.

Next, I added the yogurt and combined it with the chicken evenly.

Once I stirred in the yogurt, I put the peppers on top. 

Then I got all my elements for the sauce ready to go- diced the onion, minced the ginger, and got out the garlic, butter and spices. You may want to open your tomato can ahead too, just to save time. Then I melted the butter in the pan and then sautéed the onion, garlic and salt on medium high until it started to brown. I turned the heat down a touch because it seemed like the butter was cooking pretty hard.  

After the onion looked slightly browned, I stirred in the garam masala. I thought my go-to spice store would have it, but their website doesn't list it, so I just got some at the grocery store.  

That put some scent in the house, let me tell you! A minute later, I added the crushed tomato and sugar. Stir it all up, making sure to scrape any caramelized action off of the bottom of the pan. Mine looked like this: 

...and smelled amazing. Now, into the crock pot! Resist the urge to stir, readers! You don't need to mix the yogurt chicken and the tomato sauce at this point. 

The recipe called for 5 hours on low. I started a little late in the day, so I cheated with an hour and a half on high and then 2 hours on low. Let me say that this is not a meal you're going to cook on the sly or not notice. It announces: Indian food! all day long, so it makes it hard to wait until it's done. Your neighbors may smell it too ;) During the last hour, or last 15 minutes (depending upon whether you have minute rice or not), make rice to go along with the chicken. I made 4 "servings" of rice, since you can always repurpose it later if you have too much. I had brown minute rice, but you could use just about any long-grain variety. Once your chicken and sauce has been in long enough, or you can't wait anymore, give it all a good stir to combine the chicken and tomato elements. Then the recipe said to add in the heavy cream, stir again, and cook for another 10 minutes. Honestly, I completely forgot about this part with no ill effect, in my opinion. It does account for why her sauce looks a little more orange and mine a little more red though. Here's how it turned out: 

It was delicious! It had a ton of flavor without being too terribly spicy. As a person who is a little timid about cooking Indian dishes, I was really pleased at how it came out. You should try it!