Chicken Cafreal

Our course here in Padova is an international Masters program. So, we come across students from all over the world. One thing that brings us together is food, as we meet and cook something from our respective countries and make a party out of it.

My family is originally from Goa and I thought of cooking one of my favorite dishes for my friends. Of course, this isn't exactly authentic, it's more like my version of it. But it is tasty, I promise.

Now, being students, we didn't have a blender (first world problems), so we used a crappy mortar and pestle that we bought from a Euro shop, which didn't serve the purpose at all!

So, how do you make this?

- You take four chicken breasts, and clean them really good (if you live in Italy). Cut them into big-ish pieces.
- If you have a blender, put a bunch of coriander leaves, 3-4 clove buds and about 3/4th teaspoon of cinnamon, one clove of garlic and about an inch of ginger, chili powder (as per how spicy you want it, but i put around one teaspoon), a pinch of turmeric, black pepper and salt according to your taste. Blend it all with a little bit of water to make a puree.
- In a bowl, coat the pieces of chicken with the puree. Add about 4 large spoons of yogurt and 3 small squirts of tomato ketchup (secret ingredient) and mix it all together and set aside in the fridge for about 1 hour.
- Cut onion and green pepper (capsicum) in long thin strips.
- In a pan, add only a little bit of olive oil and put the onion and green pepper and fry on high heat. Add the chicken and cook it until the chicken is brown on both sides.

Serve it with a side of creamy mashed potatoes and a bottle of Desperado and you're ready to go! 

la rose de france

last month shruti and i went for a little tasty trip because we were getting our stuff from a friend's house are two bitches with money to spend our weekends dining and wining in paris.

now, we had lived in france for 8 months, but we never had french food during that time. not even once. don't ask me why, i have no answer.

so when we had the opportunity to spend one day in paris on a weekend, we decided that we would go for a full french meal, including our favorite creme brulee. therefore, we looked up french restaurants for lunch and we decided on la rose de france, located at a sympa square near pont neuf that is full of cafes.

on a cool but sunny saturday, we reached la rose de france around 1pm and we were told all seats inside were reserved and we had to wait for 20 minutes for a table outside. so we did. when we finally sat down to a cute little table, we kinda already knew what we wanted to order. shruti was sure she would have steak, and there was nothing more french to me than the onion soup. we ended up ordering onion soup, steak, roasted chicken and creme brulee. well, ya can't get mo' french than thaat (with a southern accent, if you will).

the onion soup was quite heavy for both of us as it tasted like the whole thing consisted of onion and oil. now, i haven't tasted french onion soup anywhere else (simply because the idea of a soup of onion is just weird) so i cannot say how good it was, but shruti and i agree that the cheese in the soup was quite good. but overall, heavy.

my roasted chicken was alright with the sauce and various herbs and shruti liked her steak very much. according to her, the steak was the perfect type of medium that she liked with just a little bit of pink with some chewy parts, but overall tender. what made it more delicious was the sauce - creamy and peppery.

after the main course we were so full that we only got one creme brulee to share - and it was quite delish. actually, the sugar crust was crunchy and thick enough to make it good, the cream part was alright. in fact, the best creme brulee we had was at this italian restaurant capri, located at place du marche notre dame of versailles. ironic.

Our First Risotto

Hi..

So halloween was a week ago and we thought we'd make a huge halloween themed feast. We would carve pumpkins and with the guts we would make a pumpkin risotto and spiced pumpkin cake. But, as soon as we cut open the caps from the pumpkins, we realized there wasn't  enough flesh to make both. We scrounged our fridge for a better substitute and found spinach. And thats what we made, spinach risotto.

We looked online at foodgawker our bible, and found a recipe we could try. Of course, we tweaked it to make it our own.

- We chopped one medium onion and sauteed it in a pot with olive oil on medium heat until it was soft. Then we added one cup of arborio rice and made sure the rice got coated with the oil and onion.
- We added one measure of chicken stock with one cup water to the pot and allowed the rice to absorb the water. Once it was absorbed, we added another cup of water and waited for the same, and then the third cup.
- By that time the rice was quite plump and almost done. To this we added one small pinch of saffron, to give it a nice color and flavor.
- In another pan, we added olive oil and sauteed some garlic. To this we added spinach and allowed it to wilt.
- The garlic-spinach mixture was then added to the risotto.
- We mixed about 3 tablespoons of marcarpone (cream cheese) with one cup of cream and added it to the rice, to make it cheezy, creamy and gooood!
- We added salt and pepper for seasoning. And it was done!!



In the end, it wasn't the halloween meal we were dreaming of, but it was pretty damn good!

bubble tea.

it all started when our thai classmate pointed out that there was a bubble tea place near our school in padova. i had no idea about what exactly a bubble tea was, but shruti was quite excited. she had tried the authentic bubble tea in singapore over the summer, and so we decided to visit this bubble tea place to see how it was.

the bubble tea shop was pretty small with random stuff placed in some glass cabinets. the inside of the shop was very colorful with pink and green decorations. but that's not our subject, shruti.

so, focusing back on the bubble tea.

bubble tea is a flavored tea specialty with added tapioca pearls to give a chewy effect. the tea is shaken before serving so that it forms some foam, and served with a big, wide straw.

apparently this version of the bubble tea included huge pearls filled with weird juice instead of the chewy tapioca. dissatisfied with this, we have decided to make our own bubble tea flavored with raspberry, which coincided with our desire to put off studying for a final exam. it is interesting that whenever we have an exam, we get the sudden urge to cook exotic and lavish meals for hours. talk about procrastination. 555.

so we visited the local organic shop to get tapioca that i had seen earlier and white tea. what we had in mind was to mix white tea with crushed raspberry to make raspberry tea, and then to add the tapioca pearls to give it the bubble tea texture. problem was, the only tapioca pearls available were the small white ones that are typically used for tapioca pudding. we bought the pearls anyway, because making that raspberry bubble tea became an obsession in a matter of hours.

how did we make it:
- we put 4-5 tea bags in boiled water in a pot and let it sit for a while, until it cooled down.
- we crushed fresh raspberries and added a little sugar to make a syrup
- we added the syrup to the cooled tea, then filtered out the raspberry flesh and seeds and placed in the fridge.
- we placed the tapioca pearls in boiling water, we removed the pot from the stove when it started boiling again, then we waited for the pearls to form.
- we added the tapioca pearls to the raspberry tea and served ourselves some bubble tea. oh yeah.

food trip... not.

hi there.

so shruti and i were in bologna one weekend in the past month. our goal for the trip was to have lasagna and tiramisu, then come back to padova - boy, were we naive.

getting to bologna wasn't hard, it was only 40 minutes away by train. finding a restaurant to have a dinner, on the contrary, was impossible. we didn't have a really heavy lunch because we wanted to save room in our bellies. yeah. bellies. al sangiovese was our first target on the list we got from the nice lady at the information center. we called the restaurant but no one answered so we walked all the way to the other end of the city only to find that it was closed, located in a creepy neighborhood and not even served food worthy of our tasting. having dreamed of this place all day, we returned to city center in despair, then started walking around in hopes of finding a decent restaurant to have decent lasagna bolognese.

boy, were we naive.

we found two trattorias. none of them wanted us. apparently to eat in bologna you have to reserve days before your arrival to guarantee proper food. so finally with our hopes of a good meal shattered and completely drenched from the thunderstorm that we were caught in, we walked to a local bar and sat in the cold with wet clothes to have our crappy lasagna.

it was a sad day. no one should feel that sad and hungry and wet. this, however was not the worst part of the day. fucking train conductors decided to strike right at the hour our return ticket was issued, so we had to pay 50 euros extra to take a different train to return to padova. to kill our time, we decided to try the italian mcdonalds to see if they had tiramisu, because we had been looking for tiramisu the whole night with no luck. bologna was out of tiramisu. you would think that in italy, even the mcdonalds would have authentic tiramisu.

boy, were we naive.

what we got was tiramisu topped and filled with dried fig, pineapple and raisins. having been disappointed too many times, shruti performed some kind of abortion on the tiramisu to get at least one thing her way. here's the proof:

so, that was our food trip that didn't really happen.

Top Ten Comfort Foods!

For warming up we decided to list our top ten favorite comfort foods as of October 2012. These are subject to change depending on mood, season, hormones, clothes size and demographics.

Numero Dix - Meggi Noodles

Numero Neuf - Pizza Margharita

Numero Huit - Creme Brulee

Numero Sept - Gelato

Numero Six - Cream of mushroom soup

Numero Cinq - Baked potato

Numero Quatre - Nutella straight out of the jar

Numero Trois - Lasagne Bolognese 

Numero Deux - Tiramisu

Numero Un - CHILI

So what's on your top ten list?

HI

What do you get when two internet obsessed foodies living in Italy come together? Well...THIS! A blog about what we eat, where we eat and how we eat.

Hope you enjoy our journey and our gluttonic relationship with food!