Tandoori Chicken

Ingredients
• Chicken-2.5 lbs
• Chilli Paste-2 tbsp
• Tandoori Paste -3tbsp
• Vindaloo Paste-2 tbsp
• Curry Paste-2tbsp
• Red Chilli Powder -3 tbsp
• Plain Yogurt-4 tbsp
• Buttermil-1/2 cup.
• Salt to taste
Method

Prepare the chicken by removing the skin and extra fat. Make long slits in the chicken so that the spice mixture can penetrate the meat during marinating. Put all Pastes, Chilli powder and salt in a bowl. Mix all of the above to a paste. Add yogurt (or buttermilk) and mix all of the ingredients till you have a smooth paste. Make sure that you do not have any lumps, especially if you use yogurt. Add some water so that all of the chicken will get soaked - do not add too much water to dilute the paste. The paste should have a thick consistency. Soak the chicken in the marinade for 6-8 hours (preferably overnight) in the refrigerator. Heat the oven to 450F. Prepare a pan for the oven by lining with aluminium foil. Place chicken pieces on the pan and dribble half of the marinade on the pieces. Put the pan in the oven for 15 minutes - uncovered - middle or top rack. Remove the pan and turn over all of the chicken pieces - add remaining marinade on the pieces Put the pan in the oven for another 15-20 minutes - check to see not to overcook. Remove pan and serve while hot. Garnish with sliced half-rings of onions, green chilli slices and lemon wedges.

Microwave and Conventional Cooking

In microwave cooking, the radio waves penetrate the food and excite water and fat molecules pretty much evenly throughout the food. No heat has to migrate towards the interior by conduction. There is heat very all at once because the molecules are all excited together. The whole heating process is different because you are exciting atoms rather than conducting heat.

You often hear that microwave oven cook food “from the inside out”, what does that mean? Here’s an explanation to help make sense of microwave cooking.

Let’s say you want to bake a cake in a conventional oven. Normally you bake a cake at 350^oF or so, but let’s say you by mistake set the oven at 600^o inside of 350^oF. What is going to happen is that the outside of the cake will burn before the inside even gets warm. In a conventional oven the heat has to migrate the heat has to migrate from the outside of the food towards the middle you also have dry, hot air on the outside of the food evaporating moisture. So the outside can be crispy and brown, while the inside is moist.