Briyani

The latest blog subject of my archive trawling is Fooderati. Of course, not living in Sydney means that I have to dream about visiting the exciting places Melissa blogs about but I can make her recipes. She posted her recipe Josh's Mum's Chicken Briyani and my interest was piqued. Mostly because I have been wanting to find something savoury I can take to work for lunch for my work colleagues, but also because I love briyani. I tagged it with the intention of coming back to it soon.

The other night D and I battled the Christmas Eve crowds at the bottle shop and at the market and realised that we hadn't planned anything for dinner. We are trying to be good with our money and not buy things unnecessarily so we decided to make do with what we had at home. We were considering halving our Christmas roasts and having half on Christmas Eve and the other half on Boxing Day, but I had a rotten headache (can wearing a santa hat all day give you a headache? I don't know where it came from) and didn't want to heat the house up with the oven. I told D that I wanted something with rice, so we thought we could borrow a little bit of the Christmas ham, dice it up and have fried rice. Then we got home and I noticed Melissa's recipe in my delicious toolbar.

We had to play with the briyani recipe to fit our available ingredients. Nothing Earth-shattering, we just had to use ham instead of chicken, sour cream instead of yoghurt etc. It was great fun to make, I love dishes that use lots and lots of spices. The smell is so refreshing. It was very tasty too, everything worked so well together. We'll definately make this again, maybe even with chicken next time.

Interestingly enough, I discovered that 8oz basmati rice equals one cup of rice for my rice cooker. Fun!

Ham Briyani
adapted from this recipe on Fooderati.

8oz basmati rice, rinsed
2 tbsp olive oil
2 onions, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 tsp finely chopped fresh ginger
150g diced ham pieces
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
½ tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
a pinch of nutmeg
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
¼ tsp turmeric
3/4 cup sour cream
1 tsp sugar
salt and black pepper

For garnishing:
1 tbsp fried onions
1 tbsp caramelised onions

Cook the rice in a rice cooker.

In a large saucepan or casserole with a tight fitting lid heat the oil and fry the ham, onion, ginger and garlic for 2 minutes, stirring constantly.

Add all the ground spices and stir again for a few seconds.

Add the sour cream and stir for one minute, then add the sugar and stir again. Check seasoning.
Put the rice on top then cover the saucepan with foil or a damp tea towel and put the lid on tightly.

Reduce the heat to low and cook undisturbed for 5 minutes.

Uncover, sprinkle with the garnishes and serve.


Thanks to a huge backlog of posts, the posting of this recipe has been a little delayed. It was originally made in December 2009.