Butter Chicken

There are few things I can eat as often as a well made hot, buttery naan with  butter chicken. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not played some subtle subconscious role in my falling in love with Atul…. some latent sub-conscious urge to get closer to the genes that created butter chicken. Since forever, I have measured life in terms of butter chicken. If a book is good, it will have the right butter chicken recipe in it. If the foodie is real, s/he will recognise the real orangish hue of butter chicken from the fake brown one, if a restaurant is good, they will know not to add any onions… if the lachcha parantha is smart, it will know to shine next to a perfect butter chicken.

Mutton Belli Ram and Butter Naan – Enough said.

I’m going to cut to the chase here. Really there is nothing to be said except – this is probably one of the best Indian mutton dishes out there. The technique is unique, hard to screw up and plain genius. But then, why wouldn’t it be? Its Jiggs Kalras favourite recipe and he is the biggest star of Punju, nay, cooking there ever was. Maybe the original Indian celebrity chef even. Far before the likes of Sanjeev Kapoor, Tarla Dalal started popping out of the woodwork offering a mix of pseudo continental and accessible Indian recipes by the galore.

Easy does Yum 4 – Microwave potato chips and a creamy yogurt dip

I used to be crazy about potato chips. Not all but a particular variety. To be specific  the thin, almost transparent type that we used to get at the Delhi halwais. The variety you don’t get anymore. Infact a couple of years back, I bought 10 packs of chips from various shops in Mumbai (yes, I can get crazy like that) in my quest for the perfect chip..alas, to no avail. The fancy packaged ones never do it for me. And nor do the local ones anymore. The ones that I crave were really really thin, translucent and had oil bubbles trapped in it (yes..they were gross, greasy and utterly yummy), and NEVER flat. Instead these were all messily folded and ruffled up … As a kid I would go to birthday parties (this was the best place to find these) just to scarf these down in huge quantities (and I was still a reed thin kid…damn the injustice of it) and then at NID, I would buy and eat 250 gms worth of these every single day for a whole year (which is what caused me to put on those 10 kilos in 6 months). Ask my friend Kritika. She never lets me forget it.