Butter Chicken

There's this Indian restaurant at the Stadium Waterfront (near the Indoor Stadium), Vansh, which is a favourite of both me and my sister. They've got a array of absolutely delectable dishes, one of them being butter chicken, causing me to endeavour to emulate the dish.

There's a myriad of spices in the thing. Don't ask me what that spice is in that picture. It's probably masala, or cumin, or coriander. They all look the same! Yes, I'm hopeless at telling spices apart. But I could probably sniff them out. In addition to the aforementioned spices, there's also chilli powder and paprika.

The spices are mixed together with garlic cloves and yoghurt. The chicken is then marinated in the fusion of spices. I used Jamie Oliver's 'method' of dumping everything into a sandwich bag, sealing it and throwing it into the fridge for a few hours. The marinade's smell reminded me of some essential oil from The Body Shop.

Whilst the chicken was being marinated, I made the other tomato-y part of the dish. Didn't take any pictures though, as it was rather unsightly.

The verdict? Passable. Except that I should have used less cream, more yoghurt and perhaps puree my own tomatoes to give create a more sour taste.

Sticky Date Pudding

If you're the 'baby' sister of an aspiring foodie, what's the best thing you can do? Tag along when she goes out to eat as often as possible, of course! :) So beacuse of that, on Sunday night, my taste buds were subjected to the most pleasant experience in a few months. We ended up eating at Brussel Sprouts, this Belgian restaurant which specialises mussels (Which reminds me of Mandy's fascination with the Fish & Co. "We have mussels" shirt). Oddly, the place doesn't seem to offer any form of brussel sprouts.

WELL ANYWAY. We had syrup de liege pudding for dessert, which is kinda like sticky date pudding. And oh my goodness, the pudding warmed me all the way to my core. I'm not terribly fond of dates (the fruit), but the pudding was orgasmic, so much so that I told myself that I'll learn how to bake the stupid pudding.

After lunch today, I headed down to Cold Storage at Guthrie with Bransles to procure some dates. Being a n00b at picking dates, we spent a good 10 minutes in front of the shelf pondering about which brand I should get. I ended up getting the cheapest one. They look exactly like doppelgangers of those gross cacoons, with their brown shells glistening in the light, waiting for fissures to appear on their cases.

The pudding contains self-raising flour, baking powder, chopped dates, sugar, eggs, butter and water, and is supposed to be drizzled with a toffee sauce.

I think that 3 tablespoons of the sauce is enough to clog all of your coronary arteries for all it contains is cream, brown sugar and butter. Just hearing what I put in it makes me shudder. At least it'll be giving your intestinal and pancreatic lipases some work out. But I guess that's the best part of the pudding, and it puts sticky into sticky date pudding.

Excuse the huge, unsightly crater I created in my sleep-induced stupor. I crashed on the couch in the midst of baking the pudding due to sleep deprivation. I barely woke up in time to rescue it from the oven.

The pudding's not as nice as the one at the restaurant, but it's nice enough :).

In all it's fatty goodness...