Tandoori Chicken

 This is what I made for dinner last night: Tandoori Chicken!

My approach to cooking meals is fairly simple: cook what you've got! I shop the market sales with coupons in hand to fill our pantry shelves and freezers. Typically, I have quite a few choices when it comes to ingredients. Sometimes I get the perfect combination of ingredients and inspiration, and something wonderful will come from the kitchen. Et voila, last night's dinner! 

As per the usual, I started thinking about dinner before breakfast. I try to rotate through meat: pork, beef, chicken, fish so that we have more variety in our meals. We rarely have the same thing for dinner more than once a month, and often I will only recreate the same dish once every 2-3 months. Yesterday, I spun the wheel o' meat (no, I don't actually have one), and it came up on chicken. All we had in the freezer was chicken thighs, and when I am cooking with chicken thighs my mind immediately turns to thoughts of Indian food. Usually, I make some sort of curry, but I wanted to do something different because I didn't have any Indian "bread" to go with it. I decided on a dish that I didn't think required the bread: Tandoori chicken. 

I found a recipe in my Indian cookbook and went through the ingredient list. Then I checked some other recipes on-line to get a baseline for the preparation. This is usually my process when trying a new recipe. I am bad at following a specific recipe, so I like to combine the best ingredients & processes from multiple recipes. My go-to place for recipes is allrecipes.com. My favorite things about this website are that you can change the serving size and it will alter the entire recipe for you, and I also highly value the comment section because you can see what other cooks did differently. 

The bulk of the work for this recipe lies in the marinade. I am so grateful for the fabulous box of Indian spices my mother sent me for Christmas last year. It's wonderful! I skinned and scored the chicken thighs and set them to bathe in a spiced yogurt marinade all day. I decided to bake the chicken, but I wanted high heat with easy broiling (without heating up the whole house), so I put the chicken in the toaster oven. I used a drip pan to keep the chicken from getting mushy. 

I cooked the chicken at 500 for 10 minutes and then poured ghee (clarified butter used in many Indian recipes) over it to "seal" it. I only saw this process mentioned in one recipe, but it sounded authentic and just plain delicious. Then I coated it with more marinade and put it back in the toaster oven, lowering the temperature to about 450. Then I just watched for it to get the charred appearance that Tandoori chicken is known for. 

Usually, we eat family style so I don't do a lot of  "pretty" plates, but I was so pleased with how colorful & perfect everything looked that I couldn't resist throwing in a dash of display! And it wasn't just a pretty dish, it was delicious, too! I will definitely be making this chicken again!