Chicken Biryani p101

We love chicken biryani. It's one of our favorite dishes when we go out to eat Indian food, so I was horribly disappointed when I saw this recipe with a complicated cooking style and 3/4 cup oil. Well, I made some changes and here we are:

This dish turned out great and we would definitely make it again. It's different from restaurants, where we often crunched on coriander seeds and had a hot/spicy battle to fight, but it was still good.

Here is what I did to make it "makeable" for me:

1. No oil. None. Okay, so I used 2 tsp (or maybe 1 Tb) when I cooked all the onions in the pot.

2. No skillet-to-oven-make-weird-dough-to-seal method. Nope, I cooked the onions and used a crockpot to assemble everything, one that has a latchable lid. I layered exactly as stated and then cooked on high for 1.5 hours. That was more than enough.

3. Cooked the rice a little more because I was scared it wouldn't cook in the crockpot, but I didn't do the multiple rinse thing it mentioned. Just once and threw it in the pan.

4. Added more than 2 Tb of water to final product since I had no oil. More like 1/4-1/3 cup water.

So there you have it. A nice healthy chicken biryani, served with mint-cucumber raita. Mmm. Next time I would change the rice/chicken ratio. A little too light on the chicken (like by another 1-1.5 pounds) for all the rice it made.