I've been reading 'Stone Into Schools' by Greg Mortensen, and when I saw this recipe for this Afghani biryani, I knew it'd be the perfect meal to go along with my book. If you haven't read this book yet, you really should. It's very insightful and deeply touching on top of it all. You'll walk away with a better understanding of the circumstances and culture in Afghanistan/Pakistan and a greater appreciation for the people out there. Awesome book. And, the meal was awesome, too. And not even that hard to make. I wish I would have had time to maybe make a little side salad or something. I think that would have made it truly perfect, but at any rate, this will be a perfect meal for a coolish fall day, in my opinion. Give it a try!
Ingredients:
1-2 tablespoons of oil
1 yellow onion - chopped
2 cups of chicken/beef/lamb - cubed (I used chicken)
2 cups of water
1 tsp of salt
11/2 tsp of cumin
11/2 tsp of cinnamon
11/2 tsp of cardamom (if you don't know what this is, you should get it - it's the bestest spice in the world and it will go with any dish that calls for cinnamon, and make that dish that much better)
3-4 carrots thinly sliced
1 cup of raisins
1/4 cup of oil
1 tsp of sugar
2 cups of basmati rice
Directions:
1. Sautee onions in oil until fairly dark. Add the cubed chicken and brown lightly. Then add the water, salt and spices to that. Give it a good stir, and then cover it and let it simmer until the chicken is nice and tender ( I let it cook for about 30 minutes).
2. Heat up your 1/4 cup of oil and then fry the carrots in it, together with the sugar until lightly browned/kind of tender. Remove the carrots, and put in the raisins. Sautee them until they swell a bit, and then add them to the carrots.
3. Check on your chicken. If it's done, remove the chicken/drain it, but save the juice!
4. Boil the rice in the juice you saved. I did this in a rice cooker, and just made sure I added enough juice to match the liquid I needed for 2 cups of rice (I ended up not having enough juice and adding some water, which the recipe calls for anyway). Once the rice is done mix it up with your meat, carrots and raisins.
5. Put your whole mix into a baking dish. Cover it with foil and bake it for 30-60 minutes at 345 degrees. You may want to add a little more water to the baking dish so nothing dries out.
Optional: I added cashews to my mix before I baked it, which fit really nicely with the whole dish.
I just made this tonight. It was DELICIOUS. I wanted to eat the whole pan. I did use quick cooking brown rice and that worked too. Yum!
ReplyDeleteSo, I made this dish again on Friday and simplified it more. I still did the rice in the rice cooker, and this time because I omitted the meat, I simply added all the spices to the rice along with the water I needed for cooking the rice. In a frying pan I simply sauteed the carrots and onion with the sugar and oil, and added the raisins (and cashews) half way into the carrots being done. Then when the rice was done, I simply added that to the whole mix as well, and sauteed it. I did add some extra water and some butter. I thought it tasted great, and wasn't much different from the original version.
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