Arabic Chicken Rice - Customised Version

Recently I’ve got a query from one of my blog readers asking why I’m not giving any recipes for Main dishes like Rices/Rotis/Pathiris e.t.c. It was actually an eye opener for me in fact. A lot of yummy rice recipes passed through my mind in fraction of a second. Amongst those, I prepared the one I love the most, a customized version of Arabian chicken rice/Majboos. I believe the below formula of mine will help you...

 

Ingredients:

Basmati Rice – 2 cups

Chopped Onion – ½ medium sized

Tomato -2 (1 tomato as whole and one tomato chopped)

Cloves – 3-4 no.s

Cinnamon – 2 pieces

Cardamom – 3-4 no.s

Pepper – 10-12 no.s

Green chilli – 2 no.s

Oil – for frying

Chicken with skin – ½ Kg (Preferably 4 Chicken legs without cutting into pieces)

Salt - to taste

Turmeric powder – ½ tea spoon

Saffron essence – 1 teaspoon or Saffron -1 pinch

 

For Frying chicken (optional)

 

Chilli powder – 2 Tb spoon

Turmeric powder – ¼ teaspoon

Curd – 1 Tb spoon

Ginger & garlic paste – ½ teaspoon

Salt – to taste

 

How to:

1.       Wash the rice and soak in water for 30 minutes.

2.       In the rice cooking vessel, add oil. On heating, put chopped tomatoes, onion and sliced green chillies. Sauté for few minutes and mix the spices – cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. Crush pepper with a grinding stone using hand and add to the mixture. Add turmeric powder, salt and saffron/saffron essence and sauté for two minutes.

3.       Put the washed and drained skinned chicken leg pieces into the above mixture and mix well. Pour 3 cups of water and leave it to boil. Put the whole tomato too into the mix. Let the chicken boil for about 15-20 minutes in high flame. Make sure that chicken flesh should not start to get separated from bones.

4.       Take off the chicken pieces and whole tomato from the boiling water and keep it aside. Confirm that remaining water is enough to cook 2 cups of rice (as per the quantity of water you use to cook Basmati rice). Add the washed and drained rice to the boiling water and leave it to get cooked. Switch of the flame once the rice gets properly cooked and water is drained.

5.       The Chicken should be grilled until its skin turns brown. If you would like chicken to be spicier, you can spread the paste made by mixing red chilli powder, turmeric powder, curd, ginger garlic paste and salt before grilling chicken. This chicken can be deep fried in oil too.

6.       While serving, you can garnish the rice with Grilled chicken pieces and boiled full tomato on top along with some fried nuts and raisins.

 

For Tomato gravy:-

 

Ingredients:

Tomato – 3-4 big sized

Garlic – 10-15 cloves

Red chilli powder – 1 teaspoon

Turmeric powder – ¼ teaspoon

Salt – to taste

 

How to:

1.       Cut the tomatoes and put into a mixer jar add 1/2 cup of water and make tomato juice.

2.       Pour the tomato juice into a cooking vessel and add red chilli powder, turmeric powder and salt and leave it to boil for 5 minutes.

Slice the peeled garlic cloves into long pieces an put this into the boiling tomato gravy and boil for another 5 minutes. 

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