January 8, 2011 – Smriti "Simmi" D. Isaac

So, if you’ve never heard the name of this dish, it is because it was invented today. For lunch. As the name suggests, it is a chicken dish. Picatta is Italian for thinly-sliced cutlet. Which also happens to be a popular Italian dish by the same name: Chicken Picatta.

Well, today, I decided I wasn’t content with the good old Italian recipe, and looked inside my kitchen pantry and saw an unopened jar of Ching’s Manchurian Stir-Fry sauce. This, I had picked up from our local Indian store, Bombay Grocers a while back. The recipe on the back of the bottle was one for Gobi Manchurian! This is the truth, people! Gobi Manchurian is a popular dish in India which is a spin-off of the Indochinese dish Chicken Manchurian, only you’ll find it made from gobi or cauliflower, not chicken.

So, manchurian sauce in hand, I thought why not make a type of chicken manchurian. Only I didn’t have the requisite cubed chicken pieces; instead, I had the cutlet-style pieces. So, I dredged them in cornflour, and you can see the rest in the slideshow below.

And voila, here was the Chicken Picatta Manchurian. A lovely union of Italian and Indochinese! If that’s not multi-ethnic, I don’t know what is!

Oh, and need I say that it was finger-lickin’ good? 🙂

Yes, that’s right, people! Sambar is associated with plenty of veggies, but I’m here to tell you that you can take any and all veggies you have or like and cook them with your favorite lentil, in my case it is the split yellow-pea, a.k.a, arhar dal, and make a fantabulous dal that can double as a hearty winter lentil soup.

Which is what I made for lunch today.

Again, you have a lovely slideshow to see for yourself what the ingredients are, and the order in which they were used and the technique of cooking. You’ll need no measures, although, you might want to get a pressure-cooker if you don’t have one. All the pictures are labeled for the details on what’s what and what’s happening!

Serve it as a stand-alone soup of the most gourmet kind, or the traditional way over white rice. Either way, enjoy! Slideshow follows:

Oh, and for all you foodies who must know the difference between a dal and a sambar: the latter has lots of veggies like the dal here, but it is also seasoned with tamarind, tomatoes and a number of other masalas.