More Cheese More Chocolate

This weekend flew by so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to cook anything until noon on Sunday.  We more or less finished painting the bathroom on Friday night, and then I spent the better part of Saturday at a bachelorette party, which started with a beer-filled 5K Saturday morning (so fun!) and ended with some cabin time just north of the Cities on Saturday night.  I failed to take a single picture because I was so drunk all day.  Just kidding, although I did drink some really good beer.

I had intended to run seven or eight miles on Sunday morning to practice for an upcoming half-marathon, but my training style involves me waking up and remembering that someone once told me that on any given day you can run three times your longest (somewhat recent) run, so I then decide that a somewhat shorter run should suffice.  In other words, I get lazy, but if lazy is running six miles instead of seven, then I’ll take it.  I whipped up a quick post-run breakfast before running a few errands and then returning to the kitchen to for several hours to cook an Indian food feast. Some (er, Matt) might believe that I chose to make chicken tikka masala so I could spend the entire weekend rewriting the lyrics to a certain Iron Butterfly song (chicken tikka masala, baby…), but I will neither confirm nor deny it.

Cheddar and chive omelet, chocolate chip bagel, kiwi, tea

Part of my time in the kitchen was spent turning old bananas into my favorite banana bread, this time without the lemon zest and with a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar on the top.

I made this interpretation of Saveur’s perfect brown rice, and it was the most perfect brown rice I’ve ever made – no mushiness mixed with crunchiness mixed with stickiness. Just perfect. I’ll never make brown rice any other way. It’s especially awesome when you buy rice in bulk and don’t have package instructions to follow. After it was cooked I added a little cumin, coriander, turmeric and fresh cilantro.  I usually avoid rice at all costs, but I couldn’t stop eating this.

You can’t have Indian food without naan, and I used this recipe with great success.  It was really simple, and I only veered slightly from the recipe. I mixed and kneaded the ingredients in a big bowl instead of making a well of flour, and I also just flipped the naan in the pan to cook the second side rather than holding it over a flame (Too much was happening on the stove to deal with moving a heavy pan around).

I looked at million recipes for the chicken and ultimately pulled elements from two different recipes to make something to my specifications (marinating for just a few hours, cooking under the broiler instead of on a grill, using plenty of cream…).  The result was a creamy tomato sauce with a bit of brightness from fresh cilantro and lemon juice.  A little more char on the chicken would have been nice, but aside from that I wouldn’t change a thing.

I threw a pan of cauliflower under the broiler at the same time as the chicken, and it was charred to perfection.  Nothing photographs quite like Indian food…