Chicken Pilau

Today we had Indian food. We have a cookbook called The New Indian Cooking Course that I decided to try out. I like Indian food, just haven't tried making it too much, and had never tried anything from this book. It was quite tasty. We had this with some lentils - they were awful - too salty -see next post. We did have to shop around for the ingredients. I had looked around at my local grocery stores, and not found what we needed. Then we went to a grocery store called Fiesta that has more foods from other cultures, and still found it difficult to find some items, but while there we ran into an Indian guy who sent us to a little Pak-Indi grocer to get the rest of our ingredients. I took a picture of our cookbook and some of the ingredients we used that were not normal. We found the garlic/ginger paste at the HEB, the 2 types of lentils and mustard seed at Fiesta, and the onion seed at the Indi-Pak grocery store. Everyone really liked this chicken dish. I did use a lot more chicken than it called for. I also was super lazy -(OK, I guess it can't be called lazy if you are making 3 different recipes for 1 meal, but I did take many short cuts which I will note in parenthesis. It actually made this portion of the meal relatively simple.)


Ingredients

• 2 cups basmati rice
• 6 Tablespoons low fat margarine (I used butter)
• 1 medium onion, sliced (I used 3/4 -1 cup frozen diced onions)
• 1/4 teaspoon mixed onion and mustard seeds (we used 1/8 of each - didn't have them mixed.)
• 3 curry leaves - we were told these were out of season that we could substitute bay leaves which we did.
  
• 1 teaspoon ginger pulp
• 1 teaspoon garlic pulp (I bought a ginger/garlic stir fry mix and used 2 teaspoons)
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tomatoes sliced (I used 1 15 oz. can diced tomatoes, drained)
• 1 medium potato, cubed (I used frozen diced potatoes (hash browns) 1/2 -1 cup)
• 1/3 cup frozen peas
• 6 oz boneless skinless chicken, cubed - I used 1 chicken breast but it was 14 oz.
• 4 Tablespoons chopped fresh coriander -didn't use this -it is cilantro by the way
• 2 green chilies, chopped - didn't use this either
• 3 cups water

Directions

1. Wash the rice and soak in cold water for 30 minutes, then set aside in a sieve to drain.
2. In a medium - heavy based saucepan, melt butter and saute the onion until brown.
3. Add the onion and mustard seeds, curry leaves, ginger, garlic, ground coriander, chili powder and slat. Stir-fry for about 2 minutes.
4. Add teh tomatoes, potato, peas, and chicken to the onion and mix everything together well.
5. Add the rice to the pan and stir gently to combine with all the other ingredients.
6. Finally, add teh fresh coriander and green chilies (if using) Mix and stir-fry for a further 1 minute. Pour in the water.
   
7. Bring the rice to a boil then lower the heat. cover and cook for about 20 minutes.