Mmm...Indian Food...

So, once upon a time I blogged about how much I adore Indian food. Because I do adore Indian food. I love Indian food so much that I hope when I die, heaven is actually just an Indian buffet that is all-you-can-eat and you never get full.

That being said, however, I've really been wanting to make Indian food in the meantime (before my all you can eat Indian buffet heaven plans). :) While I have always been a huge fan of Indian food, the budget is a bit tighter now and a typical Indian restaurant trip usually runs us in the $40 range once you figure in all the delicious appetizers!

So when I came across this recipe for Chicken Tikka Masala (aka my favorite Indian dish!) on AllRecipes, I knew I HAD to try it.

It sat in my recipe box for a while (btw, I'm going to take a quick minute to plug AllRecipes. It's awesome. And the recipes are endless. And most of the ones I've made have been delicious! So I suggest that you finish reading this blog and head over to AllRecipes to log in and create your own account!), but I finally decided I really needed to eat Indian food since I don't think I've had anything save my Trader Joe's frozen meals since New Year's Eve. Or maybe February. But that is too long ago.

The one thing I noticed (which surprised me a bit) was that I pretty much had all of the ingredients already: chicken, plain yogurt, lemon juice, cumin, cinnamon, cayenne pepper (okay, well, had to borrow this from the neighbor since ours ran out a few months ago and forgot to replace it, but now it's been replaced!), black pepper, ginger (recipes calls for fresh, I used powdered), salt, butter, garlic (minced), paprika, tomato sauce, jalapeno pepper, heavy cream & cilantro. Aside from the heavy cream & yogurt, most of the ingredients were here or already on our regular grocery list.

The recipe was clear and easy to follow. Aside from using powdered ginger instead of fresh ginger, I didn't really make any modifications. Chicken marinaded in the fridge for about an hour while we ran some errands (including to get some cilantro, since the stuff we'd bought about a week earlier was already gross). Trader Joe's has frozen naan, both plain and garlic, but I decided not to get any this time.

After marinading and soaking the wooden skewers in cold water for about 1/2 hour, we threaded the chicken onto skewers and tossed them on the grill.

While the chicken was on the grill, we started on the cream/tomato sauce. The recipes calls for melted butter and then jalapenos and a whole bunch of spices to be sauteed prior to the cream & tomato sauce being added. Almost burned the butter! but was able to keep it from burning by hurrying up the spices and tossing in the cream. Phew. Crisis averted. The jalapenos and spices combined with the cream & tomato sauces turned into the lovely orange chicken tikka masala sauce that I know and LOVE! :)

I also had a bag of basmati rice so I made sure to cook that up to go along with the meal, especially given that I had passed on the naan.

After the chicken was grilled and the sauce was ready, we added chicken to the sauce & let it simmer for about 10 minutes.

THIS. WAS. AMAZING.

Holy crap and holy crap again. I honestly think this is one of the best dinners we've EVER made and that's saying something as it includes the Sprecher beer cheese soup, the Pioneer Woman mac & cheese, the chicken tortilla soup, the Jamaican jerk chicken and any of Andy's awesome chili. So yeah, I highly recommend this. A lot. And did I mention you should possibly go out and make this tomorrow?

So given that a chicken tikka masala dish at a good Indian restaurant will usually run about $10 (on the low end), and I don't really think this is "healthy" (though it yields 4 servings at 404 calories a pop, so really not as bad as I thought it would be), but I think it fits the "frugal" aspect.

Chicken: 3lbs @1.99/lb = $6

Heavy Cream: 8oz @0.89 = $0.89

Yogurt: large carton = $2.25

Tomato Sauce: 8oz @ ~$1

Cilantro: ~$1

Jalapeno Pepper: ~$0.50

Cumin, Cinnamon, Lemon Juice, Cayenne Pepper, Black Pepper, Salt, Ginger, Butter, Garlic & Paprika, Basmati Rice: Already found in the house. :)

So for the whole dish, it was roughly $11.65. For 4 servings. No tip necessary! :)

Next time, however, I am going to try a few different things to try and make it a bit healthier. The entire recipe as written calls for 7 teaspoons of salt. Uhh...sodium much? A few of the reviews on allrecipes said the salt didn't matter. So I think I'll just do a bit of trial and error with that. The recipe also calls for a tablespoon of butter, but it really was just to saute the jalapeno and spices. I am going to try substituting grapeseed oil for that next time. No risk of me burning then either....

Overall I give the recipe an A+. It tasted pretty similar to my favorite Indian restaurant's chicken tikka masala (though I'm not going to stop frequenting my favorite Indian restaurants because of it). I was really surprised at how relatively easy it was to make, and I was very impressed.

Lauren's Organic Chicken Noodle Soup (+recipe)

A few days ago I attempted to post my chicken noodle soup recipe, but blogger was making me mad and was putting the picture wherever it felt like putting it! So I finally gave up, but then it posted anyway...yeah, it was fun times with blogger! :)

Anyway....so my husband had the flu last week so I decided that I wanted to make chicken noodle soup from (mostly) scratch because there is nothing better than chicken noodle soup when you're sick.

I didn't really use a recipe, aside from the basic concepts of chicken noodle soup: chicken, chicken broth, carrots, celery and salt/pepper.

However, I made two little adjustments and I think that the finished product was even more tasty. Not quite to the level of taco chicken soup I made a few years ago with leftover taco chicken and homemade (yes, you read that right HOMEMADE noodles), but it was still quite tasty.

Adjustment number 1: Use organic!

Adjustment number 2: Curt's Cooking Spice!

And now, Lauren's Organic Chicken Noodle Soup. Apologies in advance as this is the first recipe I've ever written. :)

Five 14oz cans of Swanson's Chicken Broth.

1.5-2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts (I used Trader Joe's).

2-2.5 cups uncooked Trader Joe's Organic Fusilli Pasta.

3-4 large organic carrots

5-6 large organic celery hearts

sea salt and freshly ground pepper to taste (can use just regular salt & pepper too, but it won't taste as good!) :)

Curt's Cookie Spice to taste.

Bring medium sized pot of water to boil and add chicken. Boil chicken for 20 minutes. You may have to boil the chicken half at a time. Remove chicken from water and shred with two forks. General chicken shredding instructions here.

Slice up carrots and celery as desired. Set aside.

Add chicken broth to a large pot and simmer until chicken is fully shredded. After chicken is shredded, add the chicken to the broth and continue to simmer. I also added about 14oz of water to the broth even though it said "do not add water." It gave more broth, but I didn't find it to be any less flavorful.

Bring medium sized pot of water to boil and add noodles. Cook noodles about half-way, drain.

Add noodles and vegetables to chicken and chicken broth, turn up the heat. Add salt, pepper and Curt's to taste.

Once spices are added as desired, cover pot, and turn heat on high for 5-7 minutes.

Turn heat back down to simmer, uncover and eat.

As one can imagine, this soup was not very high in calories or fat (a little high in sodium though).

Chicken broth = 10 calories per half can, 20 calories per can x 5 cans = 100 calories.

Carrots = according to this website, 100g of carrots have 43-48 calories. I had a hard time figuring out how many carrots is 100g...I'm guessing that the 3 carrots I used would be about 150 calories?

Celery = according to this website, 110g of celery has 18 calories. I'll go out on a limb and guess that I had about 60 calories of celery.

Fusilli Pasta = per the bag, 3/4 of a cup has 210 calories. I'm going to guess I used about 2 cups, so that's approx 500 calories or so of pasta.

Chicken breast = I had a hard time finding a definitive calorie count for chicken breasts, and the package is long gone. Generally, 8oz of chicken breast = 250 calories. I used about 32 oz of chicken breast so roughly 1000 calories.

Salt, Pepper and Curt's = 0 calories.

So for the whole, huge pot of chicken noodle soup, we're looking at 1800 calories. This sucker had about 8 servings in it, so per serving we are looking at 225 calories per bowl. Not bad!

There are different ways to add fewer calories. Add more veggies, less chicken. Add less pasta, or take a whole wheat pasta with fewer calories and more fiber. Use egg noodles, they are bigger and take up more space, so you can use less. You could also substitute rice for pasta. The possibilities are endless!

My next quest is to try and reproduce that taco chicken soup- probably won't make the noodles from scratch again though.