Green Street Style: Chicken with Yogurt and Indian Spices and Fried Polenta

Kyle, the designer of this computer based periodical you’re looking at right now, was in town from DC for the weekend. Clearly we had to make dinner. Sometimes it feels cruel making Kyle work on this project about delicious food that he rarely gets to enjoy. Someone please offer him a job here so that he can move to New York and come over for dinner all the time.

Anyway, I sent him a list of things we could make, and we decided on Chicken with Yogurt and Indian Spices, a curry dish with a yogurt base, and Fried or Grilled Polenta (in this case, fried).

Polenta was something we made a lot back when I lived with Kyle in Cambridge, Mass. Well, we made it once or twice, then stopped, probably because we were buying that kind that comes in a tube. That stuff looks, feels and tastes like rubber, lightly fried.

I’m not sure why we used that stuff, because real polenta is really easy to make, even though it takes some attention (read: constant stirring). Boil water (plus milk, not necessary but recommended by Bittman) with some salt, add the polenta, lower heat, and whisk constantly until it thickens. It should be about as thick as sour cream, says Bittman, but “for Grilled or Fried Polenta, you want something approaching thick oatmeal.”

Then you smooth it out, let it harden up a little bit (this is a very similar technique to a recent Minimalist recipe) and pan fry it. You can also brush it with olive oil and grill it, which I might try in the broiler next time. If you do fry it, though, do yourself a favor and use a nonstick pan, because we started with a regular skillet and could not get a single piece to lift off easily, no matter how much oil we used. Anyway, this was really really delicious stuff, and with some practice, I think it could get even better.

The Chicken with Yogurt and Indian Spices is a really nice simple curry, where you brown your chicken (breasts and thighs in this case, but use whatever), remove it, sautee some onions in the oil and fat from the chicken, throw in a bunch of garlic along with cumin, coriander, cardamom, turmeric, and cinammon… and maybe some others that I may be forgetting? I think there was cayenne as well. You let the spices cook for a minute or two (your kitchen goes from smelling good to smelling like magic), then stir in the yogurt. Add the chicken back into the pan, cover and let it cook over fairly low heat until it’s done… this was about 20 minutes for me.

What you end up with is a chicken dish that photographs pretty poorly (it’s a very brownish shade of grey) but tastes awesome and leaves a lot of sauce. Next time we’ll need some naan bread or rice or something. Susan made a delicious Israeli salad (cucumbers + tomatoes, no leafy funny business) to go along with it, nothing from the book, but it had Drunken Goat cheese in it. Drool.

Oh, and it was totally Kyle’s fault that all the polenta stuck. You can’t let that guy do anything.