Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Chicken as Baingan Bhartha

I have had countless disasters in my long cooking story but this one jumps out at me today.
We had twelve guests coming for dinner and bought three chickens for the main dish.
I had a little baby at this time and needed to run around quite a lot to do a hundred things which I have forgotten now.
After doing the basic tarka and roasting the chicken, I closed the cooker and asked the helper to shut the gas off 10 minutes after the first whistle.
I forgot all about the chicken and a good twenty-thirty minutes later went to the kitchen to see the gas still on under the cooker. the helper had forgotten too.
OHHHHH, disaster. When I opened the cooker, there were thin needle like bones and a brown, fibrous mess.
I cried..yes..real tears. Oh my god, what a disaster! How will I fix this mess? What will I lay out as the main dish for the chicken loving guests?
It was unthinkable to not serve a non-vegetarian dish even if you were a vegetarian yourself, as I was and still am.
Slowly, I gathered my wits, painstakingly picked out all the bones and made a heap of the chicken mass on the plate. I garnished it with hara dhaniya etc. and hoped for the best.
My humorous husband kept telling all the guests, "Eat up, it is not Baingan bhartha. It is chicken."
Most laughed, some sniggered but the chicken got eaten I think.
Moral of the story: Don't cook chicken in the cooker. Stay around to check and shut the gas off.

10 comments:

  1. hahaha!!! and another moral is .. ask the host if she/he cooked the chicken in a pressure cooker .. before dining :D
    nice post !!

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    1. The guests had no choice here, you see. They would have had to come even if they had known that I had made bhartha of the chicken. Fauji protocol.
      Thanks for visiting.

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  2. :) Well it wasn't that bad after all.

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    1. I hope so. :) No one complained out of their kindness I think.

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  3. Madhu, unfortunately I've developed the bad habit of cooking chicken in cooker only :-))
    Now, regarding your 'from everywhere No, no' phenomenon, yes it does happen at times to bring you down to soil, I think... and after that candle walk I realized how trivial my rejections were!... by the time I went to bed I was totally neutral :-)
    About, that bridge of snow, don't think much, just take it as a bizarre reminiscence......
    Cheers!

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  4. hmmm, thanks for all the answers and responses made in one go here. :) This is how you have become the top ranked contributor. waste not..want not. :)

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  5. You managed to convert a disaster into an innovation, you should be proud about it! I would rather not label this as disaster but some last minute creativity :)

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  6. Thanks Arti. You are right. See the name of my blog: Makethebest.., this is exactly what I do. Make the best of what I have. :)

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