Chicken Tikka Masala (aka Butter Chicken)

I've been craving Indian food for a while now, and while we do have two good Indian restaurants in town (maybe more), we don't go.  It's expensive to eat there for dinner, and lunch is a buffet and you leave feeling gross.  And besides, I like to cook, and I can totally handle Indian food....if only I had some recipes. 

Enter the Public Library.  I LOVE the library.  Ours has a great cookbook section, and I've been known to check out cookbooks just to read them, with no intent of ever cooking something from it.  Yes, I'm weird.  I call it 'idea gathering'.  America's Test Kitchen is probably my favorite source of recipes (they also have Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country).  They have a nearly perfect track record for good tasting recipes for me.  However, this time I checked out the book Indian Home Cooking and pegged about 20 recipes I want to try (some day).  I made two recipes for dinner last night - Chicken Tikka Masala and Parathas (a thin griddle-cooked bread that Steve called "Indian lefse").

The chicken dish was surprisingly easy.  Sure, it used a few more dishes and pans than I normally like, but nothing about it was hard and the ingredients were pretty straight forward (i.e. no eye of newt or terribly strange spices).  All of the chopping happens in a food processor, so even the prep went pretty quickly.  You marinate the chicken then bake it separately.  I baked it while I was making the sauce and then put everything together and simmered it for an hour until Steve got home from work, though the recipe doesn't call for the simmering part.  The final dish was really, really good too.  I'll absolutely be making this again.

The parathas were also very good and pretty easy, though also pretty tedious.  You make a simple dough of 1c. wheat and 1 c. white flour, 1 t. salt, and up to 1.25 c. water, and knead it together until a soft dough forms. Divide into 14-16 pieces.  By the time I'd rolled out 8 of these I was ready to be done and still had several more to do!

Roll out into 5-6 inch circle.  Brush with a light layer of canola oil, then to make nice flaky layers cut a slit in one side and roll up like a cone.  Squish the cone flat and roll out again to 5-6 inches.  Stack the rolled parathas with plastic wrap between them.

 

Cook in a skillet (preferable cast iron says the cookbook) on both sides, brush both sides with butter or oil, flip a couple of times until golden spots are on both sides.  See, they're tedious, but really tasty.  I rolled out more than we could eat so they're in the fridge.  I'm hoping they'll keep well or maybe even freeze well.  I don't know that I'd have the patience (or time) to make these very often, especially because you can buy them in the freezer section of our local Asian market...

This one is a wonky since it stuck when I pulled it off the plastic wrap.  The rest were definitely rounder.