Bon appétit

Today's post is primarly meant for my mother, who's delicious dishes are actually the only things I miss here. So following the natural evolution of mankind - out of need rises skill (or based on Spiderman "With great need comes great skills") - I put some food and a bit of self confidence into the pan and hoped for the best. Attaching some photos of the outcome.

The item on the left picture is "Chicken Minimum", a chicken dish with minimum use of almost everything (masala, onion, tomato). This is the result of missing the top line of the recipe which said "1/2 kg chicken". My chicken was at least 1,2 kg. Nevertheless it stilled my hunger for a whole weak and was even tasty to a certain extent. My sincere thanks to that chicken.
The item on the right picture which looks like some colony of wurms is just a simple "Carrot Thoren". It consists of three mature carrots and two onions. To cut the carrots in that way took me a whole movie-time. So for the next time I found an easier way. More on that later.
The third picture is my whole meal with carrot upper-right, chicken in the middle and left, fish-pickle of my mother lower-right and fresh 3.6% fat-yoghurt on top of everything. I don't think I'll need more than that in my entire life. As long as I am capable of preparing such a dish I don't need to marry a woman to just cook for me. Hope my mother is listening ;-)

That dish you see on the left side is most probably the best chicken ever cooked (by me). It indeed had a dramatic prehistory. This time I had decided to structure the whole cooking process ("Business Process Management" from college is atleast of some use). Additionally I wanted more gravy this time, so I took a lot of onions and tomatos and cut them into small pieces. Then I went on with garlic and ginger, which according to the recipe should be grinded. Since I had no grinding machine I cut them into the smallest possible size, which took me quite a lot of time and earned me some witty comments from my flatmate Malte ("Da ist einer aber sehr gewissenhaft" - "Now there is someone being quite conscientious"). Afterwards I put together many spoons of masala powder, chilli powder and curry powder and mixed them with water. So now everything was ready actually. The only missing ingredient was the chicken itself. This time I had bought 1 kg of chicken thighs instead of a whole one, because last time the skinning and cutting itself took me like 2 hours or something. It costed only 2.83 € which is a fair price considering usual Dublin-prices. So I took it out from the fridge, opened it and now guess what happened. No, it didn't fall on a muddy floor. It just smelled awful. Of course it was not the chicken's or the fridge's fault but only mine. I had taken out the chicken 3 days ago out of the freezer to cook it in the evening. But that evening laziness visited me, so I put it back in the fridge. So no wonder the chicken was quite annoyed about me doing that, so it just decided to change its smell to get back at me. Honestly, I can't blame the chicken.

Now the problems were 1) I had cut everything else nicely 2) I was hungry and 3) One fucking pissed-off chicken was going to ruin me my dinner.

So I paused for a moment to think about this situation. Where would I get 1 kg of fresh chicken at 8 p.m.? Well, thats when I realized that I'm not in Vienna anymore, but in great Dublin where we have a Spar-shop just attached to our complex and its open till, now hold on guys, 11 p.m.! From Monday to Saturday, and Sunday till 10 p.m.! I know busroutes in Vienna which don't operate till 11 p.m., so Dublin, thumbs up.

Unfortunately this Spar is not at all a cheap shop here and their outlet here also only have a small collection of goods, a kg of chicken thighs like I wanted not belonging to that collection. All they had was 400 gramm portions of chicken breasts priced 4.5 € each. Remember, that one kg thighs from Tesco cost me only 2.83 €. But I was determined to cook a chicken that evening, even if it meant that I was risking my return-ticket to Vienna. Because now it was personal, either that chicken or me was going to succeed. Nothing else mattered.
I payed 9 €, felt a pain somewhere near my heart, ignored it and bought 800 gramms of extremely tender chicken breasts and the rest is history (as seen on the picture).

For a while I had enough of chickens to be frank. They taste delicious, but have a somewhat nasty nature. So that is when I saw Malte making Pasta and realized how easy it actually is. Next day bought minced beef, Madras gravy (yeah you can buy that in a jar in Tesco, a very useful supermarket), one hour later the result was what you see on the right picture. Of course its not Pasta, but a speciality of my mother, found nowhere else.

As I already mentioned, Tesco is THE supermarket. It has a innovative variety of products. One of them being already cut vegetables in different combinations, which saves the cook a lot of time. Just put them in the pan, add some powders you wish, cook for 15 minutes and the outcome is what you see on the plate on picture 3. Carrot, beans, peas and some yellow thing of which I forgot the name mixed together. Now imagine buying them all seperately and cutting. No thanks.