The smell of turmeric is in the air.

If you’ve ever been to an even half-way legit Indian food joint, you will have probably seen a large open oven in the back that’s red hot. Daredevil cooks will be sticking their arms into it — pushing in breads and meats and pulling out beautifully charred food.

It’s called a tandoor and I want one. It’s kind of like a pizza oven except roundish and the hole is in the top of it. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that you need to make them yourself which is possibly a project I’d be willing to undertake if I owned the place I was living.

I have a feeling though that my landlord wouldn’t be thrilled if I constructed a large clay pit in the backyard just so I could make na’an.

But have no fear. We can make really good tandoori chicken in the oven with a broiler, or on the grill.

Broiled Tandoori Chicken

Yield: Serves 4.

Prep Time: 30 minutes + marinade time

Total Time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

2 pounds chicken, bone-in. I like chicken thighs and legs.
2 Cups Greek yogurt
1 lemon, juice only
5 cloves garlic, minced
3 inches, fresh ginger, minced
3 Serrano peppers, minced
3 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon garam masala
1 Teaspoon cumin
1 Teaspoon coriander
1 Teaspoon turmeric
1/2 Teaspoon cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper

Directions:

1) Mince (or chop in a food processor) the garlic, ginger, and peppers until they are a rough paste.

2) Combine paste with yogurt, lemon, oil, and spices.

3) Marinate chicken in yogurt mixture for at least an hour but preferably 4-6 hours.

4) When ready to cook, wipe off excess marinade and lay chicken on a foil-lined baking sheet.

5) You can either grill the chicken on high heat until charred and then move to low/indirect heat or broil for 6-10 minutes on high until charred, then finish cooking in a 350 degree oven.

6) Serve chicken with steamed veggies and/or rice.

Prepping the Marinade

This dish is based around a yogurt marinade which a lot of Indian food uses. The yogurt keeps the meat really tender.

To start, you need a lot of garlic, ginger, and chilis.

Lotsa flavor here.

Mince these all up very finely. It actually works best if you have a small food processor that you can whiz them up in. You want to make sure that it’s almost a paste in consistency.

This is about perfect.

The paste.

Then you need some other very flavorful spices. If you can, try to use whole spices and grind them yourself. That’ll result in the best flavor, but using ground is just fine also.

You'll want these guys too.

Mix the yogurt, with the pepper-garlic-ginger paste along with all the other spices. Add in the lemon and oil and a pinch of salt and pepper. Then add your chicken to this mixture and make sure the chicken is really covered in the marinade.

Let this marinate for at least an hour, but preferably a few hours. I let mine sit in the fridge for about 5 hours and it was good.

All mixed up.

Cooking the chicken

You have some solid options for cooking the chicken. First, you could grill it. I just got a grill actually which I’m super-excited about. I would go the grilling route if you can.

Second, if you don’t have a grill, you can broil it. Turn your broiler on hi and then line a baking sheet with foil. Wipe off the marinade and set the chicken, skin side up, on the baking sheet. If you removed your chicken skin, then just throw it on there.

You should still have a pretty good coating of marinade on the chicken.

What? You don't have a tandoor oven?

Cook this under the broiler until the chicken is nicely charred, probably 6-10 minutes depending on how awesome your broiler is.

Then turn off the broiler and finish the chicken in a 350 degree oven until the chicken is done, probably another 15 minutes.

You’ll end up with some beautifully charred chicken.

Nice and charred.

I served the chicken with some steamed snap peas and brown rice that I cooked with a few Teaspoons of turmeric. The rice wasn’t quite as flavorful as I had hoped, but I just drowned it in chili garlic sauce anyway.

The chicken was very crispy and still really moist on the inside.

Finish with some colorful stuff.

I think this would be a great dish for someone who wants an intro to Indian flavors. The ingredients are pretty simple so you may just have to pick up a few extra spices.

Even though I can make this in the broiler or on the grill, I still want my own tandoor…

Oh well. All I know is that I read in a magazine (Body + Soul – Betsy subscribes) that you could make a Buddha bowl meal. The magazine presented it as more of a concept than a recipe though. If I had to, this is how I’d define it:

Buddha Bowl (n.) — Various flavorful veggies (and occasionally meats) packed into a bowl over grains or rice and normally accompanied with a sauce of some sort.

So that’s the idea and this is my take on it:

The name is a mystery to me.

You can probably spot most of the ingredients, but instead of rice, which is on the bottom of the bowl, I used a turmeric-spiced quinoa. Quinoa is the new hip grain that all the cool kids are cooking and with reason. The stuff is pretty tasty!

The Buddha Bowl

Yield: Serves 4.

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

2 cups quinoa, soaked
1 16 ounce block of extra-firm tofu
2 portabella mushrooms, sliced thick
1 red pepper, sliced
1 green pepper, sliced
2-3 inches turmeric root
Pinch of salt
3 Tablespoon canola oil

Sauce:
1/3 Cup soy sauce (I like Tamari.)
1-2 Tablespoons chili garlic sauce (optional)
1 Tablespoon sesame oil

Directions:

1) Cook quinoa according to package. Add a pinch of turmeric to simmering quinoa.

2) Prep the tofu by pressing with a paper towel to remove moisture and slice into 1/2 inch slices then lay slices out on a paper towel for more moisture removal.

3) Place tofu in a dish and add sauce. Turn pieces to make sure they are evenly covered.

4) Wash and chop veggies into thick slices.

5) Add a few tablespoons of neutral oil to a hot pan. Let the tofu cook for about 4 minutes a side.

6) Remove the tofu and cook the veggies in the same pan with a tablespoon of fresh oil for a few minutes.

7) Plate a serving of quinoa or rice in a bowl and add your veggies and tofu around the sides and place the sauce directly in the middle to serve!

Prepping the ingredients

The first thing you need to prep for this yummy and healthy bowl is the tofu. Extra firm is best for this dish because you want a firm final product. Even with extra-firm, I like to press out some of the moisture to make sure it browns nicely.

So slice your tofu into 1/2 inch slices and lay them out on a paper towel.

Preparing tofu is soy easy.

Then throw a few paper towels on top of the tofu and add a flat surface like a cutting board. Then put something heavy on top to slowly press out some of the moisture from the tofu.

Putting the pressure on.

What’s that very heavy thing on top of my tofu? Well, that’s my quinoa soaking. Here’s a close up:

An hour isn't really necessary...

Some instructions call for soaking quinoa for 2-3 hours in cold water. I was in a rush so I only soaked mine for about 20 minutes and I didn’t notice any odd effects.

Marinating the tofu

I think it adds some great flavor to the tofu (which needs it) to marinate it for even a few minutes before cooking. Just put it in a dish after you’ve pressed it and add your sauce to it. Kind of flip all the pieces around a bit to make sure they are evenly covered. This is the same sauce that I serve with the meal. No need to make more… it’s just tofu!

Flavor town.

Also, wash and chop your veggies. You can slice them into pretty thick slices.

Important subjects.

Cooking the quinoa

Quinoa cooks basically like rice (and you could substitute any kind of rice for this dish without a problem). Add your quinoa to a large saucepan with a lid and add 2 cups of water to every cup of quinoa. So for the recipe above, you’d add 4 cups of water. Plus a pinch of salt. Let it come to simmer and then cook it for about 15-18 minutes with the lid on.

I also added some grated turmeric to my quinoa right when I started it. The turmeric kind of cooked into the water and gave the final grain a fantastic color and almost earthy flavor. It was awesome. I was able to find some of the fresh stuff at Whole Foods. I’d never actually used it before. It’s bright orange and stains everything it touches. It like ginger root on the outside and beet on the inside. Weird stuff.

But, if you want, you can grate it up and add it to your rice or quinoa and it’ll kick up the final version a notch.

My first time with this stuff.

Cooking the tofu and veggies

To cook the tofu, add a few tablespoons of neutral oil to a hot pan. Let the tofu cook for about 4 minutes a side. It should brown really nicely. Watch out! The oil will splatter!

The browner the better.

Once the tofu is done, you can cook the veggies in the same pan. You might need to add a tablespoon of fresh oil. Cook the veggies for just a few minutes. You want them still to have a tiny bite.

Then plate up a bit serving of quinoa or rice in a bowl and add your veggies and tofu around the sides. If you want to get all fancy you can stick a tiny bowl of sauce right in the middle like I did in the first photo.

This dish also happens to make for an awesome lunch. Here’s my packed up version in an old Chinese take-out container.

Makes an awesome lunch.

The only thing I think I would change about this meal if I made it again is maybe make the sauce a little spicier. But that’s just my personal tastes. You could get very creative with toppings and other veggies also though. Just remember, it’s all got to fit in a bowl! It’s kind of a zen meal like that.

There are few dishes I find as comforting as fried chicken tenders and honey mustard. It’s a simple dish, quick to prepare and you really can’t mess it up. Fixing a proper batch of chicken fingers isn’t the most interesting thing to do though, so I’ve decided to change things up a bit… Namely, no more chicken tenders. I’m going to focus a little more on the mustards here. I’ll be preparing four small batches of mustard and to go with the mustard we’ll be frying up a plateful of dill pickle slices and putting together a couple of turkey sandwiches. Nothing too extravagant, just nice pairings for the mustard.

There are a lot of mustard recipes out there and they’re all pretty different. Understandably there is a wide range of flavor combinations ranging from spicy raspberry to champagne infused sparkling mustard. Not only that but some call for cooking your mustard on a stove top, others say you should let it sit in the fridge over night. Through a fair bit of trial and error I’ll share a couple of tips that I’ve come across as I’ve been making my own blends of mustards in the kitchen.

First off, don’t go trying to make a croc pot full of this stuff until you really find a good blend. Realistically, you probably aren’t going to be using more than 10 or 12 ounces within a month unless you’re a mustard fanatic. And besides, the homemade stuff really only keeps about a month.

So here’s what you’ll need to get started:

I rounded up five 1/2 oz containers of ground mustard, 1/2 oz of turmeric, a bag of flour and sugar, two bottles of vinegar – one is apple cider vinegar and the other is plain distilled vinegar, and a large honey bear. I also picked up a small container of mustard seeds and a Hefeweizen wheat beer.

My preferred method of preparing mustard is to use a small food processor to mix everything up in a timely manner and then I let the mustard sit for about an hour in the fridge to let all of the ingredients mingle a bit. I’m impatient so I haven’t tried cooking my mustards, I’m pretty happy with the outcome and I figure if it tastes good, don’t fix it.

The first batch of mustard I put together was a honey Hefeweizen mustard. Essentially it’s a tangy honey mustard with a wheat beer kick and a little extra heat. I start off with my dry ingredients, putting a whole container of ground mustard (just about one tablespoon) into the food processor with an equal amount of flour and two teaspoons of sugar. Next I add a generous squeeze of honey, about 1/3 cup.

Now for the beer. It’s really best to use flat beer if you’re going to be using a mixer or food processor like me, otherwise just be prepared to wait a few minutes for the head to die down after pouring… I add equal parts beer and cider vinegar to the mix, about 2-2.5 ounces. After that you can start mixing away. This recipe will give you a light tan, slightly yellow mustard that is going to be quite runny at first. Keep mixing until you see a consistent color and texture.

Take a taste and add more sugar or honey if that tail end of the mustard’s kick is too much for you. You can always add flour but if you end up with a mix of more than 60/40 flour to mustard powder you can start to taste the flour.

When you’re satisfied with the taste of the mustard just pour it in a bowl and throw it in the fridge for about an hour. This will allow the mustard to thicken up a little and the flavors will settle down a bit. After you pull the bowl out of the fridge you’ll notice the mustard will still be a little thinner than the store bought stuff, this is my personal taste – I think this works better for dipping and pouring. If you’d prefer a thicker mustard you can cut back on the beer and cider vinegar a bit. I happen to like the purportions right where they are, the beer gives the sweet mustard a little bit of bite and the cider vinegar delivers a kick right at the end.

If you like thicker, spicier or even sweeter mustards then I’ve got you covered there as well. The steps for preparing the next three batches will be exactly the same only the ingredients will be a bit different. The Balsamic and Primitivo mustard is really the only mustard that really needed to sit overnight to properly thicken up, all the others were good to go within an hour. Here’s what you need for each additional mustard batch:

Spicy Thick Yellow Mustard

1 1/2 tablespoon of mustard powder
1 1/2 tablespoon of sugar
6 tablespoons distilled vinegar
1 tablespoon of flour
1 teaspoon of turmeric
1/2 table spoon mustard seed

Mellow and Sweet Honey Mustard

3/4 cup of honey
3 tablespoons of vinegar
3 tablespoons of sugar
1/2 tablespoon of mustard powder
1 tablespoon of flour

Balsamic and Primitivo Mustard

1/2 tablespoon of mustard powder
2 1/2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons of Primitivo or Zinfandel wine
1 tablespoon of flour
3 tablespoons of sugar

The spicy mustard recipe will leave you with a very thick, very spicy, very yellow mustard that will go well with a burger and fries. The second recipe will give you a much more mellow, sweet honey mustard that is perfect for dipping without the heat or the kick of the Hefeweizen. The final recipe will need to sit over night for the flavors to blend and for the consistency to thicken up, don’t be alarmed if it’s really runny at first. The Balsamic and Primitivo mustard wouldn’t go too well with fried pickles so we put it on turkey sandwiches the next day.

The mustard ended up being a purple-maroon color, it went well with some turkey from the deli, lettuce, onions and a little mayo on whole grain bread. The flavor of the wine and Balsamic vinegar play nicely off of each other and really class up a turkey sandwich.

Prep time for each batch of mustard was about 10 minutes. It can be a little messy with all the ground mustard and flour moving around but by the time you’re done cleaning up and you’ve fixed something to dip in your mustard, it should be properly chilled.

Note from Nick: I found this all to be amazing. I’ve made homemade ketchup before, but it’s ridiculous I’ve never tried this given that mustard is my favorite. Once I get back state-side I’ll be experimenting with some of these. Thanks Corey!