bon appetit: chicken makhani

I've spent a lot of time here griping about the difficulty of finding certain foods.  Most imported goods (cheese, any pork product, green, leafy vegetables, Cheerios, berries, good coffee, the list goes on) are either entirely unavailable, really expensive or located in stores that can take over an hour to get to.

So, one of my New Year's resolutions was to learn to cook Indian food.  There are a few reasons why I haven't done this yet.  I'll give them to you, even though I admit, they're all pretty lame.
1. I can cheaply and easily BUY prepared Indian food.  And that's usually what we do on nights when I don't feel like cooking.
2. For some reason I thought I'd actually have to have a person teach me, or find a cooking class
and
3. If we eat too much Indian food, we sort of start to smell funky.

Eventually, I realized that a cooking class wouldn't be unnecessary.  And that maybe we already smell funky. So I followed this recipe, with a few adjustments from the comments section.  Shopping for ingredients was a breeze.  I didn't even have to cross the street.  Cooking wasn't hard either, and the results were, I must say, even better than our neighborhood restaurant (pat, pat, pat on my own back).  Brad thought it was good too, almost scarfed the whole thing.

I did experience a complete failure, and that was in trying to make Indian bread.  I blame the yeast.  Fortunately, I planned for failure and bought a package of pre-made chapati. 

 I used crushed cashews instead of cornstarch because lord knows where I'd find cornstarch.  And when does it ever hurt to add cashews? 

 Pretty fancy setup, huh? 

If you can't find chapati, use tortillas.  When I can't find tortillas, I use chapati.   

I need to work on this food photography business.  Also, the yellow plates were provided to us, not intentionally purchased.  Yuck. 

All this cooking inspiration has been great.  Not buying imported food will definitely cut down on the grocery bills, and I love learning new things.  Also, I've been getting cooking tips from the neighborhood food vendors who used to mostly just eye me with suspicion.  Problem is, cooking inspiration may be coming at the cost of grad-school-essay inspiration, something I am completely lacking.  I haven't written a single word.

But at least now I have a plan B.  If grad-school-essay inspiration never comes, I will work toward my other goal: becoming the Julia Child of Indian food.