Red Dot, not Feather: Even white girls can make indian food raita way (haha)

I just got my Le Creuset Tagine (it's in the Lemongrass green that I adore! As you can tell by my blog, I loooove green. It's fresh and fun.) and had to get cooking. I have been eyeing the tagine for over a year and got it for christmas. But since I was flying from Virginia to California and then home to Austin, carrying the damned thing on my lap was not an option. So my mother kept it. No she actually kept it. I had to go to WS and buy myself one. I also picked up some of Williams and Sonoma's Tikki Malsala simmering stuff since I didn't feel like having to make anything from scratch.

What I did:
5 breasts of chicken cut into pieces
1/2 bag of frozen pees
1/2 bag of crinkle cut carrots
2 potatoes cut into pieces
2 tomatoes diced
1 onion sliced
Simmering Sauce
Garlic minced-- 2-3 cloves
Cinnamon
Cumin
olive oil
pita
kosher salt

Get oil nice and hot in a chili pot or stock pot add onions and garlic to get them going but not burnt, throw in chicken and get that cooked upadd potatoes and frozen veggies and let cook up for about 3 minutesadd tomatoes and tikki simmering sauce. I add salt, pepper, cinnamon, and cumin since I love to taste the flavors but it might be too much for others.bring down to a simmer and let go for about 45 minutes - 1 hour

Fried Pita...get a frying pan nice and hot. Oil up a pita and salt both sides with kosher salt and fry up, I flip them over from side to side every few minutes rather than let them just sit until done.

Gin's Raita-- cucumber salad1/4 cup of plain yogurt1/4 cucumber dicedcumin, pepper, half a lemon juice. mix all up and add it to pita or indian dish!

I love Indian food. It's so soulful and rich. It's also very easy. As my old boss use to say, "Indian food is just whatever you have thrown in a pot with curry and shit and thrown on the stove all day". He was a little indian man who cursed more than I did, which I respected right away. You don't need a tagine to do it, any stock pot will work wonders. It also is not going to make you sick or any thing like that. It has great flavor and tastes like heaven. It is also great to serve with rice.

I also love my Tagine. It's like art work that you can use and not from some guy you dated in college. Speaking of which, I think college is when I really learned how to cook. When you think about it, a tagine is a tiny bit scary.

It's odd, you've never used it-- unless you HAVE used it-- and outside of that Le Crueset makes it and it's pretty and matches your kitchen (or kitchen of the future) you don't really have a use for it. Sure it's like a dinosaurs Crockpot, but unless you read a reciped, you'd have no idea about that. And that's what cooking will always be like: some horrible new experience that is deathly terrorfying while also being very exciting. Much like those first meals you made...

We all have great tools in our kitchen and odd things we wonder WHY we have them (like how everyone I have ever lived with has complained about my egg whisk until they use it JUST to scramble an egg). But I realized in college that if i could survive off mac and cheese made in a hot pot and used my brand new iron to make grilled cheese (and then iron a suit...) I guess I can make anything and do anything I put my mind to.