Dum Aloo & Chicken Too!

So one night I kinda wanted to make something different than the usually stir fry with soy sauce kinda thing I always make. So I was thinking of dum aloo. This is a caribbean side dish we used to make at the Mango House in New Orleans. It's potatoes with ginger and garlic and garam masala and yogurt. So what I ended up doing was I made this weird stew with the same general dum aloo ingredients, but I added chicken and other stuff. It was very strange - in a good way (I think)- and it was very filling. A little goes a long way.


Dum Aloo & Chicken Too!

3 small onions or 2 medium onions, or 1 really large onion
1/2 bulb garlic minced
1 inch ginger peeled and minced
1 t tumeric
1 t cloves
1 t allspice
1 t cumin
2 t coriander
2 t cardamom
1 T Tony Chachere's or salt and pepper
2 t poppy seeds
32 oz yogurt
1 chicken, cut up into 8 or 12 pieces
4# potatoes, peeled and diced (okay, this is what I used - but maybe you should only use 1 -2#s, unless you love starch as much as I do)
1 # carrot, peeled and diced
1 eggplant, diced

So, get a big pot and boil some water in it.

Then, take your onion, garlic and ginger. Saute them in a big pan with veg oil. Let them get nice and aromatic and the onion translucent. Then add the carrot and eggplant. Let them saute for a few minutes, until they start to turn tender. Aw, isn't that sweet. Anyway, add the chicken and let it sear on both sides. Then take all the spices and dump them in. Let them get toasty - fry them for about a minute. Add a little water to the pan, lower the heat and cover.

Go back to the big pot. Boil the potatoes in the pot, and drain them when they are forking tender, damnit! Then dump them into the pot with everything else. At this point, you want everything to be cooked. If the chicken needs a little more time, then toss everything in the pot around and add a little more water if needed and cover the pot. When everything is cooked, then add the yogurt. Let it mix all around. Make sure the heat is low, and let it cook for a few minutes. If you turn the heat up high, or you let it cook too long, the yogurt will break. Which is okay, it just doesn't look or taste nearly as good. But it happens. There. Now you're done. It's a 2 pot dinner. Actually, you could do it in one pot like the way I actually did it, but it became so starchy that it was ridiculous. I mean we ate it all, but we couldn't gorge on it the way we would have if the sauce wasn't 3/4potato starch.

So here's my picture. I garnished with cilantro and rice. Okay, the rice in this case was overkill, but usually, I'm all for double and triple starch!

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