Kashmiri Spiced Chicken Pittas

Kashmiri spiced chicken pitta, that worked out even better than I thought it would!

This is an idea that got carried over into this week's menu list, having been bumped from last week's good intentions.  I have done similar things with meat and pitta bread very successfully in the past (see Spicy Chicken In Pitta Bread, Kibbeh Meatballs in Pitta Bread and Minty Aromatic Pulled Lamb Pittas), so I had a good feeling about this one.

As dinner concepts go, it really is simplicity itself.

Good sized chicken breast chunks are marinated in goat yoghurt, lime juice, Kashmiri chilli powder and curry powder, then oven baked.  Easy peasy!  Plus, don't be worried about making too much of the chicken, as it is just as good the following day as a cold sandwich filling.  It is very well worth finding the Kashmiri chilli powder, as it has an interesting flavour being not terribly spicy hot at all but very flavoursome.  It also has an amazing red colour that is particular to the Kashmiri chilli and I've put a link at the bottom of the page to Amazon, where they have a number of different suppliers.  We found our Kashmiri chilli powder in our local ethnic shop (one of these shops that sells all kinds of spices, fruit and tins of things you've never heard of) so do keep an eye out for it.
 

The wholemeal pitta (it's worthwhile using wholemeal as it adds to the nutty flavour and tend to stay softer than the white versions) has hummus and a home made raita - plus the chicken of course - inside of it.  Serving everything is the work of minutes to grill the pittas, then smear in some hummus, add the chicken pieces (a pair of tongs works very well here), drizzle over the raita and you're done.

I served them with some home made salt & pepper potato wedges and a watermelon & tomato chopped salad with a pomegranate molasses dressing, which provided a nice freshness.

Everyone loved these pittas - the heat of the curry spices, cool cucumber and mint together with the nuttiness of the pitta and hummus was a complete winner.

KASHMIRI SPICED CHICKEN PITTAS   (serves 4)

Ingredients :

3 skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into large chunks
3 dessertspoonfuls of goat yoghurt (or Greek yoghurt)
2 heaped tsp of mild curry powder
1.5 tsp of Kashmiri chilli powder (or 1 tsp ordinary chilli powder)
half a tsp of Garam Masala
a pinch of sea salt
the juice of half a lime
4 wholemeal pitta bread
8 heaped tsp hummus.

For the Raita :

2 inch piece of cucumber, peeled and seeds removed, chopped fine
1 tbsp fresh mint leaves, chopped fine
pinch of sea salt
pinch of black pepper
2 dessertspoonfuls of goat yoghurt (or Greek yoghurt).

Method :

1.  Mix the goat yoghurt, curry powder, chilli powder, Garam Masala, lime juice and sea salt together in a bowl.  Add the chicken chunks, stir to coat in the mixture and leave to marinate while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

2.  To prepare the raita, mix all the ingredients in a bowl and set aside for the flavours to get to know one another.

3.  Place the chicken pieces along with the remains of the marinade, onto a baking tray with sides, as there will be liquid produced as the chicken cooks.

4.  Cook the chicken at 200degC/400degF/Gas 6 for 25-30mins, until the edges are just beginning to char and the chicken is cooked through.  Half way through the cooking time, remove the chicken from the oven and pour the cooking liquid away.  Return to the oven for the remainder of the time.

5.  Grill the pitta bread and slit down one side.

6.  Spread 2 tsp of hummus onto one side of the pitta bread.

7.  Fill the pitta with chicken pieces, then drizzle with raita.

Serve the pittas with a side salad of your choice and salt & pepper potato wedges.

Printable version

Quick lunch : sausage & vegetable pot

Lunch - two sausages, each broken into three pieces and fried, then removed from the pan and three mushrooms and half a sliced courgette went in to cook.  Once softened, a huge handful of curly kale went in, a shake of Worcestershire sauce, a pinch of sea salt and a tablespoonful of double cream.  Toast a pitta bread, return the sausages to the pan for the last 30 seconds, then decant into a bowl and eat with a huge smile on your face.

Oh yes.

A little light lunchtime five-tier pitta!

So, you all know that I run a Facebook page in conjunction with the blog here, right?  Well, if you hadn't realised, it's here at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jenny-Eatwells-Rhubarb-Ginger/161388070631031?sk=wall where I post up all the stuff that doesn't really belong on the blog.

Except, I started to think that perhaps it was a shame not to put some of the Facebook photographs on the blog too.  Like today's lunch.  Oh, it was stellar.  Oh yes indeed.  Why should you guys who don't indulge in Facebook, miss out on what might give you some inspiration to create your own stellar lunch?

You see, this is one of the changes I was talking about earlier.  From now on, you'll find some shorter (stop cheering at the back!) blog posts appearing, dealing with breakfast, lunch or just a fantastic biscuit we've found.  (Have I told you about Asda's Chocolate Melting Moments?  Get some, you have to).

Okay then, so what was so great about today's lunch?

From right to left or left to right, I could.  I really could.  Mmmmn.

Well for starters it was in a pitta bread, so low GI and won't cause bloating in me - which is good to begin with.  I lightly toasted my pitta bread, which left it puffed up and warm.  So what did I put into it?

Firstly, some of my home made hummus.  Aaah, Yotam Ottolenghi how I do love you.

Next, a layer of super finely sliced Milano salami.  Aha!  That's got your interest, I can tell.

Then, a smidgeon - just a smidgeon! - of mayonnaise, to provide something for the rocket (aha, token green stuff) to stick to.

The rocket, in turn, provided a home in which to nestle two halved cherry tomatoes and three halved queen green olives.  Ta daaa!!

That's ... that's just beautiful, that is. 

Oh yes.  Take me home, country roads - it's a taste of summer.  I commend it to you all!

Minty mustard lamb's liver pitta bread - a spur of the minute lunch

I'm currently going through a phase of loving pitta bread.

Now I've always liked pitta bread, but just recently I seem to have taken to them in a big way.  I suppose the fact that my tummy seems to accept them more readily than ordinary bread (~sob~ I love my bread!) has made all the difference.

There are a number of other benefits to pitta bread, as I've discovered.  For instance, there's very little on this earth that can't be put into one for a yummy and fairly portable lunch.  Everything from steak and chips, through stew, to trifle can be contained in a pitta bread.  Although why anyone would want to put trifle in a pitta, is another matter.  Anyway - I do think that soup is really the only thing that won't go into a pitta bread - but you can dip your pitta bread into soup, so it still wins!

Pitta bread is also self-limiting, quantity wise.  As an example, I was making scrambled egg to go in my pitta this morning.  As I was just scrambling the one egg, I used just the one pitta.  Now had I have been making scrambled egg on toast, I might have felt I should just use the one slice of bread - but you could guarantee that I'd have put two into the toaster because of habit.  With pitta, just one comes out of the packet at a time and just one does the job with no reason to feel hard done by.

Creamy, minty, mustardy - what's not to like?

The whole butter question is another thing that is improved by the use of pitta bread.  With a sandwich, you would butter both slices of bread.  Not so with a pitta.  Very often it isn't necessary to use butter at all - but if you do, then just butter the one side and the job is done with half the amount.  How good is that?

With regard to quantity, putting a whole bucket load of salad into a sandwich just results in your having to use two hands to hold the whole collapsing mess.  Not so with a pitta.  Jam the salady loveliness in there as hard and fast as you can!  You might need two hands as you go, but only because of the sheer weight of health giving salad inside your cheese or egg pitta.  *wink*

So, when we picked up a little pack of fresh lamb's liver from the Ferndene Farm Shop at Bashley, Hampshire the other day, it got me wondering what to do with it.  Naturally, "put it in a pitta" was right up there as a suggestion.

I was in two minds whether to go down the "devilled, mustardy" route with it, or the "redcurrant and rosemary" route.  They both seemed as enticing as one another, but I could tell from the way my mouth was watering at the idea of the mustardy version, that this was the one.

I love mint sauce with lamb and felt that just the mustard sauce wasn't going to be quite enough.  I didn't have any fresh mint (the awful weather has terminated our mint plant's delusions of grandeur) but suddenly remembered putting mint sauce onto cooked new potatoes and how good that is.  So, if I use Dijon mustard for its piquancy, then add a little mint sauce for the sweet/sour thing it brings with it, hmmmn.  What can I use to lengthen and de-intensify the sauce with?  Aha!  I've a teensy tiny bit of double cream in the fridge looking for a home.  Perfect!  And it was.  The cream - only a dessertspoonful at the most - was sufficient to just saucify (is that a word?  If not, it ought to be) all the lovely flavours.

My friend Suzy Bowler entitled her brilliant food blog "Sudden Lunch" and I had her in mind all the time I was making this lunch, as apart from a little thought, it came together in a twinkling.

MINTY MUSTARD LAMB'S LIVER PITTA BREAD    (serves 1)

Ingredients :

1 pitta bread
1 tbsp rapeseed or olive oil
sufficient lamb's liver for one person, trimmed and sliced
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp Dijon mustard
half tsp Mint sauce (the vinegary kind, not Mint jelly)
1 dessertsp of double cream
small handful of rocket leaves.

Method :

1.  First of all, put your pitta bread in the toaster - put it in diagonally (or as diagonally as you can muster) so that as much as possible of it sees the heat.  Once toasted, split down one side and turn your attention to the liver.

2.  Heat a little rapeseed oil in a frying pan and chuck in the liver pieces.  Fry hard and fast - I like mine to have completely stopped bleeding, but I know there are others who can cope with a little red stuff, so it's up to you how long to cook it for.  A few seconds before finishing and adding the sauce ingredients, throw on a little sea salt and a lot of black pepper.  Then turn off the heat and leaving the pan on the hot plate, add a teaspoonful of Dijon mustard, half a teaspoonful of mint sauce and a dessertspoonful of double cream.  Stir to combine.  Pack the rocket leaves into the pitta and pour in the liver mix.

I can recommend either something tangy to drink with it, or a nice big mug of tea or coffee.  Mmmmn, glorious!

Printable version 
 

Kibbeh meatballs in pitta bread

Jolly difficult thing to photograph!

I have found, in the last few years, that I really like most Middle Eastern food.  I love lamb - I suspect I'd probably like goat too, but haven't had the opportunity to try any yet - and the flavour combinations of sweet and savoury, plus fruit and meat, seem to be right up my street, too.

I'm not too familiar with this style of cooking yet though.  I'm getting more familiar with Indian, have been pretty familiar with Greek and Italian for some time and Mexican is increasingly featuring on our menu plans.  However, Middle Eastern cuisine is creeping into the menu plan quietly as my confidence grows with it.

Hence, when I saw the recipe for Middle Eastern Kibbeh (Lebanese meatballs) by Maggie Parnell on All Recipes UK, it struck a chord because a) it was a meatball dish and I seem to be tripping over meatball dishes every day, and b) it used all the spices that we were already familiar with.

The recipe for the meatball mixture I was happy enough with, but could see some potential problems with the salad ingredients as they were, so did a little bit of tweaking where that was concerned.

Now is it just me, or does anyone else find that the pitta bread you get from a Supermarket just isn't big enough to hold salad as well as meat?  It seems to me that as soon as you've got a little bit of shredded salad in there, you've no room to put your meatballs (or whatever).  I'm going to have to abandon Supermarket pittas and buy some from our local ethnic shop, I reckon.  Might have half a chance of being able to actually fill them instead of just using the bread as "grand garnish" which falls apart within seconds.

Anyway - that aside - I really liked these meatballs, but agree with hubby that the spicing could have been a lot more obvious in the overall flavour.  The allspice just disappeared, as did the chilli powder.  If a recipe is going to include spices, then I like to be able to taste them!

I really liked the combination of the Bulgar wheat with the lamb in the meatball - but found that the 175g of Bulgar wheat was way too much for the 500g of lamb mince.  Considering that the recipe stated to use 400g of mince, that amount of wheat would have been extraordinarily excessive.  As it was, a third of the Bulgar wheat went into the dogs' dinners (which they were happy about!), to prevent it flooding out the mince.

The original recipe recommended cooking the meatballs on skewers under the grill or on a griddle pan.  Now I could quite see what would happen if I used the griddle pan - we'd have bits of exploded meatball everywhere and no actual balls in sight.  I am always loath to use the grill pan on our cooker for things that are likely to take a long time to cook, as it really doesn't do my back any favours to have to keep bending down to it.  (It's at below worktop height, as opposed to one of those that are above worktop height, you see).  So after due consideration, I reckoned that if I baked the meatballs at around 180-200degC, they would char nicely on the edges and hold together perfectly - as indeed they did.


So, all these points have been reflected in the recipe below and I am quite sure that it will be all the better for it (if not exactly authentic).


The inclusion of some Tzatziki (cucumber yoghurt dip) with the recipe has served to remind me just how much I love that stuff.  It is so easy to make, too, that I shall have to devise some ways of using it along with lunch!  Perhaps a Bulgar wheat/griddled vegetable combo with Tzatziki - hmmn, that sounds ideal.


KIBBEH MEATBALLS IN PITTA BREAD   (serves 3)


Ingredients :


100g Bulgar wheat
350ml hot lamb stock
500g lean minced lamb
1 red onion, grated
50g pine nuts, toasted and roughly chopped
3 tbsp chopped fresh coriander
half a tsp ground allspice
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp chilli powder


To serve :
6 wholemeal pitta breads (if small - otherwise, sufficient to cope with the amount of meatballs)
shredded Little Gem or Iceberg lettuce
cherry tomatoes, sliced fine
mild red chilli pepper, chopped fine
Tzatziki (cucumber yoghurt dip).


Method :


1.  Put the Bulgar wheat into a saucepan and pour over the hot stock.  Cover and leave to stand for 15 minutes.


2.  Remove the lid from the pan and, if necessary, cook the wheat over a low heat to boil off any excess liquid - whilst rendering the grain still moist.  My Bulgar wheat was of the small gauge variety and didn't need this step.


3.  Tip out onto a plate, spread to even thickness and leave to cool.


4.  Once cool, tip the wheat into a bowl and add the lamb, onion, pine nuts, coriander and dry spices.  Season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.


5.  Then, using your hands, give the whole a good mix - or "squidge" - until every ingredient is evenly distributed.


6.  Divide the lamb mixture into golf-ball sized pieces and shape into balls.  Place each ball into a shallow sided non-stick baking tray.  (I found that the mixture made 18 meatballs which were divided three to a pitta bread).  If you're wanting it to go further, I'd suggest making the meatballs a little smaller.


7.  Bake the meatballs in a hot oven (200degC/400degF/Gas6) for some 35-40 minutes until slightly charred on the outside and very much cooked.  (I always break a meatball in half to check that the inside is cooked through).


8.  While the meatballs are cooking, you can get on with toasting the pitta bread and opening one side, ready to take the shredded salad.  You can also prepare the Tzatziki if you're making it yourself - or just take the lid off.  *chuckle*


9.  Once done, into each pitta bread place some shredded salad, a few slices of tomato and a sprinkling of chilli, then load up your meatballs and finally add a spoonful of Tzatziki.


10.  Serve with disposable napkins - because someone is bound to get it all down their front!


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Spicy Chicken in Pitta Bread

Now, I'd love to be able to tell you that we made our own pitta bread to go with this spicy chicken, but alas no.  Maybe one day!

This poor old meal was started - in that I put the chicken into its marinade - quite some time before we actually ate it.  This was because Son & heir decided to offer his services (quite rightly) to his school for an open evening aimed at the parents of the new intake for this year.  As a result, we suddenly became pushed for time that evening, as we had to have him back at school all washed, brushed and presentable in (pretty much) the time it took to turn around.  So, for speed reasons - and only for speed reasons - we dived into Macdonalds and the boys had a burger and I had a sweet chilli wrap.  Those wraps are a bit of a lifesaver for me, as I really don't like burgers!

Then, on the following evening, Son & heir was invited out for a sleepover and wasn't in for dinner.  It seemed daft to be making a whole Broccoli & Goat's Cheese tart just for the two of us (which was previously booked in for that night).   So, instead of eating the pitta breads for lunch (as was the mark 2 plan) we moved them on to dinner time instead (mark 3 plan).

So hence, the chicken had been marinating for some 32 hours by the time I got to cooking it.  I'm a bit scared that, when I decided to do this recipe again, if I marinate the chicken for any less time than 32 hours, it won't be anything like as nice.  I guess we'll have to wait and see!

As a "simple to make" dinner, you'd have to go a long way to beat this one.  Once marinated, the chicken goes into a frying pan to cook.  In the meantime, you warm up some pitta breads, split them and coat the insides with a mixture of hoummus and greek yoghurt.  Then stuff with lettuce and tomato and add the chicken once it's done.  Easy!

The surprising part about the entire recipe was how filling the pittas are!  I made us two each and neither of us could get through the entire second one.  In future, I reckon one each, stuffed to the brim with chicken, accompanied by some chips or a small jacket potato, would be ample.

SPICY CHICKEN in PITTA BREAD (serves 2 hungry people, 3 moderately hungry people or 4 people with accompanying chips or couscous)


Ingredients :


3 chicken breasts, diced into small pieces
2 limes, juiced
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp turmeric
a small bunch of fresh mint, chopped finely
1 tbsp olive oil
sufficient lettuce for the amount of pittas you'll be making
a vine-ripened round tomato, diced small, per pitta
3 tbsp hoummus
3 tbsp greek yoghurt
pitta breads, recommend 1 per person.

Method :

1.  To marinade the chicken, place the lime juice, cumin, coriander, turmeric and mint into a bowl and mix to combine.  Add the chicken pieces and stir to make sure each piece is liberally coated in the marinade.  Cover and place in the fridge until you are ready to proceed.


2.  Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan and add the chicken and marinade plus seasoning.  Cook on a high heat until the chicken has taken on some colour and is cooked through, with no evidence of any pinkness at all.


3.  In a small bowl, combine the hoummus with the greek yoghurt and season to taste.


4.  To assemble, lightly toast the pitta bread then split it down one side.  Coat the inside of each pitta with the hoummus mixture, then stuff with the chicken, lettuce and tomato.


5.  Serve.


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