Shami Kebabs: Lamb kebabs with mint onion stuffing

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Lamb Kebabs | The Novice Housewife

Out of all the kebabs, shami kebabs are one of my favorites. Invented for a toothless nawab of Lucknow during the reign of the Mughals in India, these kebabs were made so fine that no teeth would be required to eat them and they would just melt in the nawab’s mouth. Or so the story goes. Who knows what the truth is. But whatever be the origin, my taste buds are thankful for their existence.

The recipe for these shami kebabs differs slightly than the tunde ke kebabs I have posted earlier. While both of them are soft and silky smooth in the mouth, unlike the tunde ke kebabs, shami kebabs have a mint-onion stuffing in them. And while the original tunde kebab recipe claims to have 160 spices in it, the spices more or less in both the recipes I use are the similar with a slight variation in the quantities.

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Chettinad Chicken curry : GMT

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Chicken Chettinad | The Novice Housewife

Chicken Chettinad | The Novice Housewife

I am a Sikh and have grown up on north indian cuisine. For a long time my knowledge of cuisines of the southern states of India was limited to dosas and idlis. But it is now slowly growing and some of my favorite dishes come from down south. The use of coconut and curry leaves in a lot of their dishes is what particularly draws me to the cuisine of the south, though the cuisine is not just limited to these two ingredients. The food of the state of Kerala is one of my favorites. Appam and stew, iddiyapams, kerala fish fry is something I could eat any number of times as possible in a week.

I could also eat this chettinad chicken recipe that I am sharing today every week.

Chicken Chettinad | The Novice Housewife

The recipe is from my favorite book on Indian cuisine: India: The Cookbook by Pushpesh Pant.

If there is one Indian book you want in your collection it should be this book.

Pushpesh Pant has written an encyclopedia on Indian cuisine and you can find recipes from all different parts of India. While the steps may sometimes require a little knowledge of indian cooking, the recipes have never disappointed me.

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GMT : Chilla /Gram Flour Egg pancakes

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Besan Ka Chilla | The Novice Housewife
This besan chilla recipe was something that my grandfather made for us. Growing up, summer and winter vacations were always at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother was a great cook and almost all meals were cooked by her, but besan ka chilla and cold coffee were my grandfather’s forte.

Besan ka Chilla is kind of like a vegetarian omelet made from gram flour mixed with water (all those aquafaba stories you hear today- apparently something similar was being done by our grandparents long back and we had no clue).

Since nobody in our family, for religious purposes or because of allergies, had any problems with egg, my grandfather would make a variant of the besan ka chilla and would add egg to the whole mix. You can of course make it eggless, but then it wont be my grandfather’s recipe. I do have an eggless version with moong dal in the archives but today I am sharing the version that I have grown up on.

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