Cardamom Chicken
1 large boneless uncooked chicken breast sliced and diced.
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon turmeric
salt and black pepper to taste
½ tsp red chili flake
½ tsp cumin seed or ground cumin
1 large bell pepper, diced and sliced
large handful green beans (frozen is ok)
most any green vegetable that doesn’t cook fast.
1 heaping tablespoon diced garlic in oil, or equivalent raw garlic
combine all in skillet with lid. Cook with middling heat in olive oil, sesame oil or a combination. Using lid to help steam, cooking time under 15 minutes.
Cook last while without lid to reduce liquid.
Stir in 1 tablespoon crunchy peanut butter (you can skip this if you like: matter of taste)
Stir in 2 tablespoons Ma Ploi (brand) Thai sweet chili sauce.
This dish has very little pepper heat: you can adjust to taste, particularly the red chili flake: remember I’m from the American Southwest. The sweet chili has practically no heat at all. Test a little on your finger and adjust accordingly.
serves 2
Cardamom Christmas cookies in the Swedish tradition.
what an expensive spice whole buds cost me twenty-seven dollars in 1979 for a small can in Safeway. I usually can not find it on the shelf. I peeled the shell off and ground it in a pepper mill. Sharp taste and pungent aroma
Penzeys spices has affordable cardamom.
I paid under 10 at the local market for, I think, Spice Island brand
For many Mexican spices, look for El Guapo brand. They sell spices in small cellophane bags, 1/2 to 1 ounce at a time, very inexpensively.
That was for select white whole pods . Cardamom is the third most expensive spice by weight. saffron and vanilla are one and two. Like chocolate there is Hershey’s, nestle’s, dove and lindt. I mixed cinnamon, cardamon, clove and coffee drinking Spiced coffee as in Dune. No, I could not predict the future
I have cardamom (ground) because I was making chai spice mix.
Sour Cream Dumplings
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 t salt
1 1/4 t baking powder
2 t wheat gluten
1 egg
3/4 to 1 cup sour cream
Mix all dry ingredients thoroughly. Make a center well. Put the egg and about 1/2 cup of sour cream into the well. beat the egg into the sour cream and stir the mixture into the dry ingredients. Keep adding sour cream a little at a time until you have a smooth, even dough. Drop by spoonfuls into rapidly boiling fluid. When all of the dough is in, loosely lid the pan and maintain the boil for 10 minutes, then close the lid firmly and maintain the boil for a further 10 minutes.
I imagine that you could roll this out and make rolls very like biscuits, or drop the egg and add more sour cream and actually have biscuits. I added a bit of chopped green onion leaf and used it on chicken and dumplings. You can also sweeten it and boil the dumplings in fruit juice for a desert.
The best translation I know of from the German is ‘dump noodles’.
Comment Marinate the chicken in a little soy sauce and a tablespoon of cornstarch for 15 or 20 minutes (this is called velveting) and then sirfry the chicken separately for 3 or 4 minutes and take it out of the pan before you cook the vegetables. Add the chicken back in just long enough to reheat at the end. It will be the tenderist chicken you have ever eaten (I also use garlic powder and white pepper in my velveting, but the are not absolutely necessary for the effect)
On a complete side note, wish your next bren book would work its way through the Great Machine of Publishing faster, almost back to the most recent one 😀
One is in the works, and one is being written. And thank you!
No thank you for the awesome books! 😀