My mother’s kitchen — Sunday chicken

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Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read
Sunday Chicken, served!

Though I’m not one to blindly follow tradition, I am fascinated by the idea of certain family traditions that are handed down from one generation to the next as if they were a legacy; an expensive piece of jewellery, a wedding gown or even recipes!

I remember watching an episode of MasterChef UK in which one of the participants walked in with a book of her late mother’s recipes. She said that months before her mother passed away, she wrote down recipes of all the dishes they enjoyed as a family. As she missed her mother dearly, this home cook kept recreating her mother’s recipes in order to keep her memory alive. How heartwarming!

Ever since I got married in January this year, I’ve been experimenting quite a bit in the kitchen. My husband and I are foodies and we love eating delicious food whether it is take out or home cooked. Watching that episode of MasterChef got me thinking about the recipes that I’ve enjoyed with my family. Though we are Mangaloreans, my mother grew up in Mumbai among local brahmins (vegetarians) and Sindhis (natives from the northern state of Sindh, now in Pakistan, who migrated to Mumbai among other places after the partition). After she got married, she moved to Bahrain, a thorough cosmopolitan, where she brushed shoulders with people from different states in India as well as other countries. A foodie as well, my mother conducted her own culinary experiments, which is why I never grew up eating just Mangalorean food. In this series, ‘My mother’s kitchen’, I will share the treasure trove that is my family’s favourite dishes, as well as other recipes I discover on my journey as an enthusiastic homemaker.

Sunday Chicken is the first in this series. Usually, lower middle class Mangalorean Catholics enjoy a good chicken curry on Sunday. During the week, we eat vegetables, pulses and fish, and reserve chicken for the weekend when the whole family sits together and lunches. I usually make my mother’s North Indian style chicken gravy. It’s packed with flavour and goes extremely well with rice or bread. We usually have it with rice, slice bread, chapati (flat Indian bread), or pilaf (flavoured rice). The dish is meant to be a thick, semi-gravy recipe. It takes hardly any time to cook and even lesser time to scarf down!

Ingredients:

500gms chicken

2 medium onions

2 medium tomatoes

1 big potato (optional)

2 bay leaves

1 cinnamon stick

3 cloves

3 cardamoms

6–7 black pepper corns

1/2tsp tumeric powder

1tsp coriander and cumin powder

1tbsp chicken tikka masala

A pinch of saffron soaked in warm water

1/2tbsp ginger and garlic paste

4tbsp homemade ghee/oil

Coriander leaves to garnish

Salt to taste

Method:

Wash the chicken. It’s better to use a mix of boneless and on the bone chicken.

Heat the homemade ghee and crackle the whole spices.

Add sliced onions and saute well until golden brown.

Add the ginger garlic paste and fry well to get rid of the raw flavour.

Add chopped tomatoes and allow them to mash well.

Add the powdered spices and fry well. My mother tells me that spices give out their best flavour only when fried well. I usually use bafat, a traditional Mangalorean spice mix, but if we want a change, then I use ready made chicken tikka masala; I’m a new home cook and so, I save myself the trouble of making the spice mix.

Add the chicken and fry well.

Add salt and simmer until the chicken is cooked. If you decide to add potatoes then keep the salt for later. My mother tells me that salt keeps the potatoes from cooking fast.

Then pour the saffron water and garnish with coriander.

Serve hot!

If you try this recipe and like it, do leave me a comment!

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