triumphant dinners

So since moving to Ireland we’ve learned the numminess of Indian food (Alaska, as it turns out, is not a place to get good Indian). But it’s expensive to order out, of course, and jarred sauces are, well, jarred sauce quality, so I’ve been kind of wanting to try some recipes at home. I found a curry cookbook at Chapters that looked like it had potential, and on Wednesday–well, I’d meant to do it on Tuesday, but the lead time was even longer than I remembered, so it ended up being Wednesday after a day of marinating–I made tandoori chicken.

Ted got home from work, seized a piece of not-actually-bright-red breast, pronounced it full of tandoori flavour, and praised my efforts. (Ted being a fully qualified chef, I always feel quite triumphant if I make something really praiseworthy. :)) So that went well.

But my actual purpose in making tandoori chicken was to then make homemade tikka masala, which uses tandoori chicken, so that was what I did Thursday night. Ted came home and looked in the pot of tikka masala sauce and said “Wow, that looks great,” and I went off to write and when I came home he said to me, “Did you MAKE that?!? It was PHENOMENAL!!! I was doing dishes and looking around for the tikka masala jar and there wasn’t one and I thought, did she MAKE that?!?” So he was very impressed and I’m very pleased with myself. :)

(I said Friday morning, “What’m I gonna make for dinner tonight?” “I dunno,” Ted said, “you’ve been batting a thousand the last two nights. Probably chicken fingers and chips.” “Probably,” I said, and we both laughed. He ended up making us omelets for dinner, for the record. :))