The Yum Yum Factor

I make my  Instant Pot Butter Chicken  fairly often but I don't always plan well enough to marinate the meat overnight and I do believe that an overnight marinade is essential to achieve a rich depth of flavour in the final dish and avoid it tasting like bland chicken plunked into delicious sauce. My theory was that if I added the chicken marinade ingredients INTO the meatballs, it wouldn't have to sit for so long before I can cook the finished dish. We also really, really love meatballs. A quick search for meatballs on The Yum Yum Factor will reveal my obsession with these orbs of tender delight so it stands to reason that I eventually try to meatballify every favourite recipe at some point. I have been mulling a meatball conversion with Butter Chicken for a while but I have been so busy cooking at work, that I have barely cooked more than scrambled eggs in my own kitchen all year but I finally got around to making it this week. don't be alarmed by...

Butter chicken is like the moo goo guy pan of Indian food. Unlike other recipes that were first made hundreds of years ago in some small village, passed down through generations from grandmother to granddaughter, this is a relatively new dish. In fact, it only dates back to Delhi in the 1950's, an invention of some chef at the Moti Mahal hotel but the Brits fell in love with this mild, flavourful curry and it is now one the most popular Indian dishes in the world. I have been trying to perfect butter chicken in the pressure cooker for months now. I started out by trying other, popular butter chicken recipes and some of them were better than others. A couple called for using cornstarch to thicken a too thin sauce, which is just wrong in my book. None that I could find called for marinating the chicken in a masala before making the final dish and without that step, there is a depth of flavour that is missing for me.  Now, I understand that the whole appeal of the  Ins...

Butter chicken is like the moo goo guy pan of Indian food. Unlike other recipes that were first made hundreds of years ago in some small village, passed down through generations from grandmother to granddaughter, this is a relatively new dish. In fact, it only dates back to Delhi in the 1950's, an invention of some chef at the Moti Mahal hotel but the Brits fell in love with this mild, flavourful curry and it is now one the most popular Indian dishes in the world. I have been trying to perfect butter chicken in the pressure cooker for months now. I started out by trying other, popular butter chicken recipes and some of them were better than others. A couple called for using cornstarch to thicken a too thin sauce, which is just wrong in my book. None that I could find called for marinating the chicken in a masala before making the final dish and without that step, there is a depth of flavour that is missing for me.  Now, I understand that the whole appeal of the  I...

I was invited to an event at beautiful The St Lawrence Market Kitchen (upstairs at the market) to introduce me to Fresh Canteen  , a new dinner prep concept launched earlier this summer here in Toronto. It's a service that caters to people who want to cook fresh, delicious dinners in their own kitchens but are often just too busy to shop for all the ingredients they need. They are quite committed to using locally sourced products whenever possible and that appeals to me very much. I have used Supperworks in the past to stock up for those times that I am too busy to shop but you still have to put aside time to drive down there, put all of the stuff together and get it back home. You also have to remember to take those damned bags out of the freezer the night before so it will be thawed by dinner time so you can actually cook it which doesn't come easily to me.  I love the idea of everything for a dish being brought to my house for me by a handsome stranger. Okay, I just li...