Chicken Biryani

What an exciting evening; I don't know what went wrong and I might have killed us both. If I don't post a recap on tomorrow's dinner, that's why — I'm dead. I've never had a disaster with a curry-type dish before. This whole meal went awry! And, by now, you're probably curious of the details.

My main dish, a true meal in itself, was Chicken Biryani. The flavor is very similar to butter chicken, which is a favorite dish of Shannon's, but there is no butter. Despite the lengthy list of ingredients it is actually quite simple to prepare. This is where the first and potentially fatal problem occurred as, either through fault of my own by cooking or by perhaps failing to properly thaw the meat to begin with, the chicken was not cooked. However, only the very center of the meat was bloody - yes, not just pink, but bloody - and the rest seemed to be cooked perfectly. To me this is somewhat of an accomplishment in itself. Chicken biryani is good, but it's not so good I'd risk my life for it like fugu or something. I imagine we'll be fine, but the fact that I undercooked chicken that we actually ate is a bit of a blow to my culinary confidence.

The second foible was the only other dish, which was a simple Dhal. Dhal basically comprises all cooked and curried legumes that yield a creamy texture in my books, but in this case I used yellow split peas. Not too long ago I made Split Peas and Ham and they turned out great. A nice, smooth texture in surprisingly little time. This time around I soaked them longer, cooked them longer and they were still hard and tasted like hard peas.

After an hour on the stove top I transferred them to the microwave for an additional 20 minutes and, aside from cooking off a lot of water, nothing changed. I tried to look up the cause of this and the only thing I could find was that if you added sugar or an acidic ingredient, such as tomatoes, wine or vinegar, to them that they'll take a comparatively longer time to cook. Is turmeric or onion acidic enough to cause such a problem? Does boiling them for too long before switching to a simmer inevitably render them uncreamable? I even went through the trouble of making my own ghee for this! There's hardly anything to the recipe but water and peas! I'm very disappointed and perhaps the food borne illness god or goddess will punish me for my disastrous results. At least the pita bread we had with it was good.