When we grilled through the night

Soon after the Assamese food festival, the next night, Ms Quiche and Ms BakeAnything invited me to Ms Quiche's place for a night of fun cooking and drinking.

Ms Quiche: "BYOB and BYOF is what it's gonna be."
Me: "Eh?"
Ms Quiche: "Bring your own booze, and bring your own food."
Me: "Oh OK", I said, and I thought to myself, "Wicked!"

The ladies were onto something and were planning on sausages, grilled chicken, salads and what not. The salad was quite a hit even though there wasn't a shred of meat in it. Pineapple, watermelon, and lettuce with a dressing made of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and honey. Divine! Quite simply fabulous. I'd personally never thought of using honey in a salad dressing (or anywhere), but then again, my culinary expertise is very limited.



The chicken was marinated with ginger, garlic, chilli and paprika, and some vinegar and sugar with salt. At the end, we were tearing into the chicken like cavemen. Here's the link to their recipes.



Everyone got a welcome drink, a mojito, and it was quite a superb one. I wonder if these women are moonlighting somewhere without my knowledge.



There was also some grilled fruits - pineapple, raw mango, tomatoes and peppers. The pineapple and raw mango was also a hit.



I decided to make bacon-wrapped prawns. This dish is a result of my hatred towards all places that batter-fry this marvelous combination, thus killing two birds with one proverbial stone. Grilling, or pan frying the combo is the way to go, and the best way to go about doing this is by creating a nice pasty marinade for the two main actors in this show.




Recipe for prawn marinade:

20 medium sized prawns (use large ones if you please), deveined, with tails on (keeping the head on is optional, depending on personal preference)
4 cloves garlic
2 tsp sugar (preferably powdered)
2 1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp red chilli powder / cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp pepper
3/4 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp cumin powder
3/4 tsp salt
1.5 tbsp oil (I used olive, but again, your choice)
1 lemon, juiced
10 rashers of Bacon
40-50 Toothpicks

Recipe for bacon marinade:

2 tsp paprika
1 tsp chilli powder
1/2 tsp cumin powder
1/2 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp pepper

Method:

Wash and de-vein the prawns, and dry them using paper towls. Mince the garlic as fine as possible. Make a paste out of the garlic, along with the sugar, paprika, chilli powder, pepper, coriander powder, cumin powder, salt, lemon juice and oil. Mix well, and then apply on the prawns and allow to marinate in room temperature for about 30-45 minutes. Now, heat a pan (without oil) and once it's hot, add a few rashers of bacon on it and start to fry them. No, no oil. The bacon has enough fat and we want to fry it in that itself. The idea is to partially fry them, until some of the fat melts and is rendered in liquid form. Do not fry until crisp; we need the bacon to be in a state where we can fold it around the prawns. Once the bacon is slightly cooked, take them off and dry them on paper towels. Collect the fat from the pan and keep aside. Repeat this until all the rashers of bacon have been partially fried, and collect whatever fat you can.

Once all the bacon has been partially fried, prepare the marinade. Mix all the ingredients for the bacon's marinade and use the fat collected (as much necessary) to mix all the dry ingredients and make a paste. Apply it on the bacon and allow it to marinate for about an hour. Once both the bacon and prawns have been marinated, take one rasher of bacon and put two prawns, heads together, into it, such that the tail ends stick out of opposite sides. Roll the bacon over them and secure this with 2 toothpicks, criss-crossing each other (or as many needed to secure it - I used 3 in some cases). Repeat this for all the rashers of bacon and prawns. Keep the 'parcels' in the refrigertor until about 30 mins before they are to be grilled.

Once your grill is ready, and the charcoals are hot, use a skewer and brush a little oil on it and run it through each bacon wrapped prawn(s) parcel. While skewering, leave the toothpicks on or it would fall apart. Skewer about two or three per skewer and set on the grill. Turn the skewers over periodiclaly to cook evenly. If you're using a pan, then leave the skewers aside and set the pan on a high flame, and once the pan is hot, add a half teaspoon of some of the fat collected from frying the bacon. As soon as it starts to sizzle, add the parcels onto the pan. how you manage to do this with the toothpicks still in the parcels is a test of your ingenuity. But rest assured, removing the toothpicks will spoil the show because you want the prawn(s) wrapped under the bacon blanket to get infused with some of that bacon goodness while it cooks.

Home cooking: grilled chicken legs and yummy soup

After a long time, mom ended up being busy on a weekend, and I jumped at the prospect of cooking again. The weather was cloudy and there was rain in the air - perfect soup weather. In fact, I'd been wanting to have soup for a while now but wasn't able to (work's been keeping me busy).

So I decided to make soup, but I knew that we'd need something else as well, and I thought of making some nice chicken wings. But they don't sell wings at Spar!!! Horror of horrors! Luckily I spotted these yummy drumsticks and so decided to switch from wings to legs.

Some of the ingredients

Seasoning

Into the marinade

After grilling

I read about this way of roasting garlic to bring out an intense aroma. Basically, it involves heating oil in a pan and then bringing the flame down and tossing in the garlic cloves whole - without removing the skin. Cover and allow the garlic to cook for about 3-4 mins or until lightly browned. Turn the garlic over and repeat the process for the other side. Remove the garlic, peel the skin off, and grind it using a pestle and mortar or whatever and there you have it. A little lemon zest, oregano, thyme, the usual salt and pepper, some curd, and into the fridge she went for more than 24 hours. You could marinate it for a shorter period, but I knew that this was for Sunday night, so this was sitting in the fridge from Saturday afternoon until Sunday night.

I used the grill in the microwave, and realised that you need a lot of patience to do this :) It would have been so much more fun to do this in an open grill with charcoal, but you make do with what you have.

For the soup, I knew the only way my bro would have it was if there was some chicken in it, so I cut a couple of chicken breasts into cubes. I also realised I didn't have any stock, and it was too late to prepare stock, so I just used water. I had purchased a bottle of Thai seasoning (it constituted lemon grass, chili flakes, and a few other things) and so knew I'd be using that.

Onions and carrots thinly sliced

Peppers, mushroom, and seasoning

This is when the chicken cubes went in

As good as, if not better than any soup I've had

For the soup (actually, I'm not sure if that's the right word, coz as mom later told me, the pieces of chicken were too big, and there were too many 'things' in it to call it a soup), I started out with an onion and a carrot into some water that was boiled and brought to a simmer. Salt and pepper followed, after which came the red and yellow peppers and the mushroom. Then came the chicken cubes (which I had marinated for a few hours in salt, garlic paste, red chili powder and lemon juice).

To make the soup thick, I added an egg and quickly stirred it (the heat will cook the egg, so be sure to stir and break it up quickly), but I realised this wasn't enough, and so mom asked me to add a couple of tablespoons of corn flour and the resulting thickness was what we wanted. Add corn flour in small quantities by first dissolving it in some water at room temp and then toss it into the pot. Some spring onions and coriander later, with bits of bacon into my bowl, and Sunday night ended in an awesome way. Burp.

Mother's day: Sandwiches

"Finish the cheese that's in the fridge", that was mom's 'warning' before she left in the morning. I had a photography workshop to attends, so on my way back, I stopped at Spar Hypermarket and bought some minced chicken and some bacon, a couple of loaves of bread, and made use of the tomatoes and peppers that were there at home to make some sandwiches for dinner, into which I was going to toss in the cheese.

The ingredients

And so the better part of the evening/night was spent in the kitchen, with a few moments sneaking out to check if Chelsea would miraculously lose or draw their game against Wigan Athletic to allow my team Manchester united to win the title, and sneak a few moments out to watch a woeful Indian cricket team capitulate under their own cocoon of bullshit in the T20 World Cup.

No snaps of the chicken or the bacon being cooked because...I have a brand new lens, a Nikon 50mm F1.8 (with which I've taken these pictures as well), so there was no question of getting it close to the flame or oil or grime etc. The end result, nonetheless, was great, although the snap here is of the sandwich before it was toasted/grilled. Suffice to say, it was superb.

The mother's day sandwich

PS: Reviews aren't appearing on the blog because of a few things happening at the BM office that are being sorted out. Hopefully, things'll be back on track from this Friday onwards.

The All American Diner, New Delhi

I'd been to New Delhi from the 26th of June to the 1st of July to attend a friend's wedding there. I also got a chance to meet up with a couple of old school buddies whom I never met after we passed out of school. They'd moved to Delhi after graduating (they aren't engineers, so we didn't meet much during the under grad years). So I went with one of them (although I wish to call him by a name we used to call him back in school, since he was such a great host, I'll stick to his alter ego name, Neo) for breakfast to this place called the All American Diner, nestled nicely inside the India Habitat Centre on Lodhi Road. This place has an all you can eat breakfast until 10:45 AM for 395 + tax and we were preparing our stomachs for that.

Upon reaching the place, we were told there wasn't place and we had to wait, and so we waited. We waited and waited and when our names were called out, the time showed 10:50 by my watch. Dang! Missed it by a whisker. And so Neo and I set about sifting through the menu in solemn silence, disappointed at the near miss.

The place was nice, a retro look with the classical diner feel. The music kept getting stuck (I'm guessing the computer through which they were playing it was overloaded, just like the kitchen). I decided to go in for a Pierre's french toast, which came with French toast (duh!), choice of bacon or sausages and scrambled eggs,
and also a Sunset skillet comprising of a couple of pancakes, pork sausages, bacon, and eggs.
Neo decided to go in for a Santa Fe skillet, which comprised of toast, sausages and eggs,
and a pancake stack with butter.
Of course the usual suspects accompanying pancakes were there: Maple, orange and strawberry syrup.

Service was a little awry since they had their hands full on a Sunday morning - that, or our waiter was waiting too many tables as they were probably understaffed - I don't know. But he took a while to get water, to a while to get the drink for the couple seated close by - OK, lemme stop taking their case now. I was a tourist there, and I don't know what are the funda about this place. I loved the food, although the Egg Factory provides an equally sumptuous breakfast for half the cost (minus the meat and pancakes though). Maybe I should ask Yogesh to introduce pancakes and maple syrup on the menu as well.

Wallet Factor: The Sunrise skillet cost 225, while the Santa Fe skillet was 185, the Pierre's toast was 190 and the pancake stack was 110, so with taxes, it amounted to 870 (thanks to Neo for giving me the breakup)

The All American Diner, Habitat World, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi

TGIF

Finally I get to go to the famed TGIF, and it didn't matter at all that I happened to be there on a Monday. And surprisingly enough, there was a pretty decent sized crowd even for a Monday evening. Ms BakeAcake had asked us to be there for her birthday dinner (her birthday was on the 31^st), and as usual I was there first, and soon was joined by Ms WeightConscious and her boyfriend...well, let's just call him Saucy :) Soon everyone but Mr P were there, and so we dove in for what seemed to be an interesting night ahead.

Now the interiors of TGIF are more or less similar to another restaurant here called Indi Joe, with an almost retro American look and feel inside, and the loud music and the look of the bar gives you the impression that they're also trying to make it look and feel like a pub where the patrons would have to speak in higher decibels to be heard over the music being played.

Since the happy hours were still going on and we would get a free drink with every ordered drink, we started off with orders for a White Russian,

an ultimate Long Island Ice Tea,

and a Blue Martini.

Since Mr P said he'd be late, we started off with our appetizers. A plate of chicken wings was ordered

along with a plate of Fried Mac & Cheese.

And since I'm still on my quest to make a list of the ten best burgers available in Bangalore, I ordered the Bacon Cheeseburger.

Everything was good, from the drinks to the food ordered to the speed at which our food and drinks were served to us. My ultimate Long Island Ice Tea was served in a glass the size of a cauldron, and it's the most potent Long Island Ice tea I've ever had. I mean this baby was mean! Not even halfway through my drink I could feel the room starting to spin a little, and standing up was something I did not want to even think of. However, of the three drinks ordered, the martini was the strongest, but since it didn't measure to even half the quantity of the Ice tea, it was a no contest. We later ordered a Manhattan, which is a Jack Daniel's whiskey with Vermouth and Angostura bitters with ice, and a Pina Colada.

For dinner, I continued on the burger trail (which turned out to be a mistake). I ordered a Jack Daniel's burger, which has a 7 ounce patty (and I said mistake because it turned out to be the exact same as the Bacon Cheeseburger, only difference being this one was served with the JD sauce and the patty was bigger. Sigh!),

Mr VP and Ms BakeAcake ordered a Jack Daniel's Chicken which they were going to share,

Saucy ordered a Sirloin steak,

and Ms WeightConscious ordered a broken noodles pasta (penne) with tomatoes, basil, olives, mushrooms and cheese.

Well, everything was good, and I don't think anyone was disappointed (except for me a tad). Since both my burgers were more or less the same, and the bacon cheeseburger had only 2 strips of bacon, unlike the bacon burger I had at Millers 46 during Mr P's birthday, I felt the guy making the burger got it wrong. It was good, but since there was so little bacon, and the JD burger was a larger replica of the bacon burger, I was a lil disappointed. What's more, the bacon was really salty! I mean, maybe if it was eaten with the bun and the patty and all the stuffing it would have been ok, but I love to take a bite of my bacon before I tuck into it and this thing was salty to the core, like it came out of the dead sea or something.

That apart, the other dishes were fabulous and the JD sauce was simply phenomenal. The service was quick and we never felt like we were let down on any front, and I'm willing to let the burger incident pass (I may still have some of the alcohol swimming inside my head). This place is a little heavy on your wallet, but if you enjoy American comfort food and booze, then once in a while, it certainly is worth it.

Food: Pretty good
$$$: Expensive
Service: Decent, prompt
Verdict: If you like American food, and alcohol, pay a visit once a couple of months or so
Extra Info: Happy hours are till 2015 hrs - buy a drink and get another glass of the same one free

TGIF, Carlton Towers, Old Airport Road, Bangalore. Phone: 25210570, 25210571