Cooking...thousands of miles out of my comfort zone

Yesterday I got the idea to make Indian for dinner. I wanted to cook from my Healthy Indian Cookbook. It took a while to get the necessary ingredients, and by the time I got home it was far too late to begin what I knew would be a time-consuming adventure.

So I made my Indian feast today. It took about four hours to get it all done. And while some things worked and one didn't, I'm glad I took on the challenge. We ended up eating after 8 p.m. and our portions ended up larger than we'd have planned, so the "healthy" aspect kind of went out the window.

Like other things I've made recently, once I got going, I had far too much going on to stop and take pictures along the way.

I started my prep by making my Tikka paste. This paste was the base for my Chicken Tikka Masala.





I also got my naan dough going. No pics of this because I wasn't sure at the time it'd work. In the end, what tasted like naan didn't resemble the stuff I'm used to.

The meal included Chicken Tikka Masala, which is chicken pieces cooked in a creamy tomato sauce.




Here is the entire meal put together with the Chicken Tikka Masala, Vegetable Pilan and Naan. My naan tasted good, but it was really puffy. I'm not sure why.


The meal was quite tasty, but I made far too much rice (doubled the recipe for some reason). And it was a lot of work. In the future, I'd probably just make a meat dish and serve it with regular basmati rice. But it was a fun way to spend an afternoon and the early evening. Now I need to go clean up.