glutenfreedirtcheap

Indian food can be expensive and time consuming for a home cook (me) that does not have a lot of experience with the cooking techniques and the spices. Not so with Biryanis.  Biryanis are like Indian rice casserole. They can be amazingly simple or very complex. They all follow the same cooking pattern, and require similar ingredients.  If you have rice, an onion, an egg, oil, half a stick of butter, and some spices, you can make a Biryani:

1.)  Make a paste of about a teaspoon each ginger and garlic, or garlic and peppers or just garlic. (I used chopped ginger, garlic and serrano peppers and a hand blender.)

2.)  Wash two cups of rice.

3.)  Chop an onion into large chunks.

4.)  Put some spices and oil in an oven safe pan that has a lid, and saute them for several minutes over medium heat. (You can just use garam masala, which is a combination of Indian spices, or you can use bay leaves, cardomom pods, and pepper.)

5.)  Put the onion in the pan with the spices, and saute until it starts to turn brown, for about twelve minutes.

6.)  Take half of the spice paste and add it to the spices and onion.  Saute for another two minutes.

7.)   Add three cups of water and the two cups of washed rice to the spice and onion pan; add the half stick of butter, as well. When the water boils, let it boil for another minute or two, put the lid on the pan, and put the pan in the oven for twenty minutes.

8.)  When the rice pan is in the oven, take your protein of choice and saute it in oil with the other half of the spice mixture.  (Cooking times may vary, depending on what you’re using–try to finish cooking the protein at about the same time your rice is due to come out of the oven.)

9.)  When the twenty minutes for rice cooking are up, take the pan out of the oven. Spoon sauteed protein on top of the rice.

This is one of the few recipes where I actually recommend using google as your cooking guide: according to Wikipedia, there are many, many different kinds of biryanis.  Just put whatever ingredients you have on hand, and the word, “biryani”, into the search engine bar, and you’ll have a show-stopper recipe for dinner. (Even if you can’t cook Indian.)