Chicken Tagine

Thursday, May 26, 2011
We made the Chicken Tagine last night from the America's Kitchen Light & Healthy 2011 cookbook (page 49). It was truly delicious. The portions were large according to the recipe so I downsized it a bit which also made the calories fit into my daily plan.  One cup of Tagine (267) with 1/2 cup of rice (109) was plenty and totaled 376.

One of the distinctive ingredients the recipe used was 2 tsp. of garam masala. It is a reddish powder. Of course they had never heard of it at my local Safeway so I went to a small Indian grocery store where the store owner could not have been more helpful. I now have a nice big bag of garam masala spice. I think it is what made the dish so flavorful. I would prepare it again, gladly. It serves six so you can make it and have some friends over who can benefit from your hard work and praise you for its deliciousness.

What I am finding out about the recipes from the Light & Healthy cookbook is that they are time consuming. They are not hard to do but each recipe represents layers of process. That is why the recipes are so flavorful and memorable. Reading through the recipes before starting is also key. Since each recipe is multi-step, each step requires a certain amount of time to complete. The first night we used the cookbook I had naively chosen to make French Onion Soup, my daughter's favorite. In reading through the recipe I discovered it was going to take at least 3 hours! Unless you plan ahead, most people don't have that kind of time to make dinner. We delayed that meal for the next night. It was very good, but time consuming.

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