How I Cooked Two New Recipes for a House Party

For a few months now, my friends & colleagues have been pushing me for a small house party. I declined every time till one morning when they managed to convince.

Priyanka, Rituparna, Seshna, Uddalak had a very specific ask – I had to cook Murgh Mussallam for them. A royal, Mughlai dish that involves cooking a whole chicken in a rich gravy.

Thanks to the complexity and hard work involved, murgh musallam is a very rare feature across most Indian homes.

You would however, find it across most restaurants in your city – where instead of the cooking the whole chicken and serving it to the customer, the chef would serve bigger cuts in gravy to the customer.

The restaurant-style of serving bigger chicken cuts over a whole chicken serves a couple of purpose –

• Reduces waste as a whole cooked chicken would be difficult to store if not sold
• Makes it affordable for the customer
• Makes it easy for the chef to cook and serve quick

Back to the topic – I keep on diverting, sigh!

The Menu

Cooking a murgh musallam is in itself a huge task, and I wanted to push myself by adding one more dish to the list.

How about something that I can serve as a starter? Something that I can serve when they have settled down!

I have long shied away from cooking Indo-chinese cuisine.

How about a honey-glazed chicken cooked in the usual sauce of the Indo-chinese cuisine, I decided!

And hence, a menu was finalized –

• Honey-glazed chicken for starters – a sweeter version of the chili chicken
• Murgh Musallam for main course
• Lachha Paratha to be ordered from a nearby eatery
• Cold drinks

The Planning

I had prepared Murgh musallam once before. It was a challenge ask by a senior colleague at office three years back. I had then prepared a no frills dish.

The planning involved a number of stages to ensure a proper execution.

Stage 1: Preparing a Shopping List

I knew that I had most of the ingredients, except a few. Like the sauces to be used in Indo-chinese cuisine, for example.

Spending a couple of hours looking up the dishes on Facebook, Google and Youtube helped get a general idea of the recipes

Most importantly, this step helped me to prepare a shopping list and plan out my shopping.

Stage 2: Shopping

A quick visit to the local departmental store me get all the ingredients required.

For the perishables, a morning visit to the local vegetable market and butcher helped source the meat for the evening – a whole chicken, a pound each of minced chicken (which the local butcher failed to mince properly) and chicken breasts.

The following were outsourced to the guests – why should they have only the fun? LOL!

• One time usable plates, bowls and glasses
• Cotton thread to tie up and bind the chicken
• Buying lachha paratha

Stage 3: Read, Understand, Note, Revise, Schedule

The last part of the planning involved a check of the ingredients that were required for the evening. More importantly, I had to understand the nuances behind each dish, make notes, and confirm on the process.

Also I made a mind map of the schedule.

Did you think, it was easy cooking two new dishes for your guests – a murgh musallam that I cooked once in 2017 and an Indo-chinese dish of honey-glazed chili chicken that I never tried till date?

The Preparation

The morning had to start early. A lot of work was required to pull this off!

I ensured that I was up by 7 AM in the morning and was off to the market in the next 40-45 minutes. With no time to waste, I returned with the veggies and the meat by 9 AM and a slew of preparation followed –

• Clean the chicken – whole, minced, and breasts
• Clean the veggies
• Brine the chicken for 3-4 hours in refrigerator
• Refrigerate minced chicken with turmeric and red chili paste
• Prepare a paste of Byadgi red chilies, ginger and garlic
• Make gashes on the whole chicken to be used for murgh musallam
• Cut chicken breasts in stripes
• Prepare a marinade for the honey-glazed chili chicken
• Refrigerate marinaded chicken
• Boil eggs for the murg musallam
• Roast separately sesame seeds, peanuts (because almonds are expensive), cashew nuts, poppy seeds
• Prepare a paste of poppy seeds, half of sesame seeds, half of peanuts, half of cashew nuts and poppy seeds
• Prepare the sauce for chili chicken gravy using vinegar, soya sauce, chili sauce, ketchup, salt
• Chop onions – cubed ones for the starter and slices for the murgh musallam
• Chop tomatoes
• Chop capsicum in cubes
• Finely chopped green chilies for the murgh musallam, and cut at an angle for the chili chicken
• Thaw all chicken form the refrigerator
• Prepare chicken mince by using a grinder
• Finely chop ginger and garlic for the chili chicken

The Execution

While preparation started in the morning and was completed only around 6 PM in the evening, the cooking started only then.

The execution involved the following steps –

For honey glazed chili chicken

• Deep fry the marinaded chicken stripes in 3 batches
• On a high flame, cook the finely chopped garlic, ginger and cubed onions, capsicum, green chilies
• Pour in the sauce prepared earlier, bring it to a boil and check seasonings
• Add in sugar and honey and stir in the fried chicken
• Sprinkle toasted sesame seeds on top
• Serve hot

Murgh Musallam

• Cook the chicken keema with onions, red-chili-ginger-garlic paste till 90% done
• Allow the cooked chicken keema to cool
• Stuff the whole chicken with the keema along with nuts, cashews, raisins and boiled eggs
• Carefully and properly tie the whole chicken to ensure that the stuffing do not spill out during the cooking
• Cook a gravy of onions, red-chili-ginger-garlic paste, tomatoes, sesame-poppy-seeds-nuts-cashews paste. Add water if needed
• Carefully place the chicken, breasts down into the gravy
• Using a spoon, drop in gravy from the wok on top of the chicken. Repeat this process after every few minutes
• Using a spoon rotate the chicken slowly to ensure that the gravy beneath the chicken does not stick and burn in the wok
• After 20-25 minutes, carefully turn over the chicken using a spatula and spoon. Now the breast part would be on the top
• Using a spoon, drop in gravy from the wok on top of the chicken. Repeat this process after every few minutes
• Using a spoon rotate the chicken slowly to ensure that the gravy beneath the chicken does not stick and burn in the wok
• Using a fork or toothpick, check if the chicken has been cooked after another 20-25 minutes
• Carefully serve the chicken

The most uninteresting, painful and inevitable part of this entire operation is the cleaning of the dishes and kitchen slabs.

But then the feedback from my friends and colleagues make the cleaning part a very minuscule part of it and the hard work a success.

The Feedback

Early today morning, I reached out and asked for their honest feedback.

The honey glazed chili chicken was rated ‘Excellent’ and the murgh musallam got an equal number of ‘Good’ and ‘Excellent’ ratings.

Majority of the guests liked honey glazed chili chicken more than the murgh musallam.

Seshna stated that the honey glazed chicken was ‘appropriate in taste and the garnishing made her ‘mouth watery’. ‘Exact proportion of honey, salt, sugar’, opined Priyanka.

Uddalak liked it but would have preferred it to be more ‘spicy’.

For the murgh musallam, Rituparna found it good but a tad ‘more salty’. Priyanka agreed with her. Seshna liked the gravy and Uddalak found it ‘awesome’.

And this is me after all the hard work.

Until the next house party…adieu!