Had been dying to try something new in the kitchen. When it comes to meat - chicken and mutton, we have a trusted butcher whom we have been going to for the past 7 years. You just tell him what you plan to cook and he will have the meat cut in the right way. Occasionally I have picked up packaged meat from outlets like Spar and not once have I found the meat to be tender or cut in the right way.

It just so happened that I had half kg of curry cut chicken from one of these outlets and for the life of me, I did not want to make a gravy or something out of it. And so I tried my hand at a version of chicken kebabs which I teamed with tomato rice. You may raise your eyebrows when you look at the proportions of the ingredients, but trust me it just looks to be a lot but it will give a nice flavour to your meat.

For the chicken marinade you need - 10 green chillies chopped up nice, 8-9 pods of garlic chopped finely, 3/4th inch of ginger chopped up fine, 3 tbsps of soya sauce, 1 cup of maida (using cornflour will give you a much better crunch), 1 heaped tsp of pepper powder, 2 eggs beaten and salt to taste. Make a nice thick marinade paste of all of these ingredients and mix in the chicken pieces. Let it stick for a minimum of one hour. If you like a thicker coating on your chicken, then use more flour. Heat oil in a kadai for deep frying and drop in chicken, a few pieces at a time. Each round will need around 10 mins cooking time in the oil. When you drop in the pieces, let some of the garlic and green chilli come along too. They make for a real nice crunch.

For the tomato rice - 1 1/2 cups of raw rice, 4 big ripe tomatoes, 4-5 cloves of garlic, 1/4 inch piece of ginger, a few curry leaves, 3/4th tsp mustard, 1 tsp coriander powder, 1/2 tsp each of red chilli powder, garam masala powder, 2 medium onions sliced thin.

Puree together all the ingredients except for the mustard, onions and curry leaves. Heat some oil in your pressure cooker, splutter the mustard seeds. Add the curry leaves, and the onions. Saute the onions till they are light brown. Add the tomato puree and cook it for a while. Add the washed rice to this, mix well so that the rice is coated, add salt to taste and close the cooker. Make rice the way you normally do.

For an even better twist, use olive oil instead of regular oil and add tsp of vinegar to the rice before you cook it. You will get a fragrant, tangy rice. The meal turned out nice. It was a good change from all the regular dal-chaawal stuff