You’re very welcome 😊

Pictured is not chicken breast. It’s 2 pieces of chicken thigh.

Edit: You can definitely cube your chicken before cooking it. I was just in the mood for some full chicken pieces.

Indian style Chicken Curry

Ingredients

Marinade

• 2lb (~1kg) skinless, boneless chicken thigh (or chicken breast)
• 2 teaspoons salt (+ more to taste)
• 1 cup greek yogurt (or regular yogurt)

Spice mix

• 1 tablespoon curry powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 2 teaspoon kashmiri chili powder (or paprika and adjust heat with cayenne pepper)
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 cinnamon stick

Rest

• 1 tablespoon ghee/oil
• 1 ½ cups chopped onion (2 medium onions or 1 large)
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 thumb of ginger
• ⅓ cup tomato paste (buy the ones in the tube, the canned stuff usually suck) (or 1 cup pureed tomatoes)
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro
• ½ cup water
• 2 teaspoon sugar

Finish

• 1 teaspoon garam masala (roughly)
• 3 tablespoon unsalted butter
• ½ cup Whipping cream
• 1 lemon (optional)
• More cilantro as garnish
• More salt & sugar to taste

Greek yogurt + tomato paste will make the sauce thicker so these are recommended.

Directions

1. Cube chicken breast if using otherwise use the chicken pieces whole. Marinade in yogurt and 2 teaspoons of salt for 2 hours or overnight.
2. Bring the pan to medium-high heat and add oil (or ghee). Add onion, garlic, ginger and a pinch of salt. Cook and stir until the onion turns soft and translucent, about 8 to 10 minutes.
3. Stir in curry powder, cumin, turmeric, coriander, cayenne, paprika, bay leaves, and cinnamon. Cook for about 1 minute while stirring.
4. Reduce to medium heat. Add chicken to the pan. Cook until the chicken is opaque. Chicken does not need to be cooked through at this point.
5. Add water into your marinade bowl (so it’s easier to empty it) and empty the rest of the marinade into the pan along with the water. Add tomato paste, cilantro, sugar to the pan. Stir to combine.
6. Bring to a boil. Taste and add salt, sugar as needed.
7. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Uncover and continue to cook to reduce the sauce until the desired consistency if necessary.
8. Discard ginger, bay leaves, and cinnamon. Add butter, drizzle whipped cream, lemon juice (if using) and sprinkle on some garam masala. Serve over rice with fresh cilantro. (Chicken tastes even better after a day because it marinates in the sauce.)

Oh. No, it didn’t curdle.

Yeah for authenticity ghee is probably preferred.

The main reason why I don’t use ghee is because I don’t cook enough indian food to buy it regularly and I didn’t want to commit to an entire jar of it just to make a couple of dishes.

I would say another thing I saw again and again during my research was the insistence of using bone-in chicken. I’m certain it would taste better but I’m too lazy for it 😅

As for the marinading, I would say half the recipes I found marinaded and the other half didn’t. From a food science perspective it made sense to me to marinade the chicken. You could experiment with and without and see if there is a significant difference. I didn’t feel like it was that much more work for me which is why I marinaded.

From my research it is a North indian vs south indian thing.

I chose to build the recipe around the north indian style. I also liked that lactic acid from the yogurt tenderizes the meat from a food science perspective.

You add yogurt before boiling, and it didn’t break?

Not sure what this question means. Could you please clarify?

Also thank you for the affirmation 😃

Chicken Korma

Ingredients

For marinade

• 1 kg chicken thigh
• ⅓ cup full-fat greek yogurt
• ½ tsp turmeric
• 1 tbsp minced garlic (~2 cloves)
• 1 tbsp minced ginger
• 1 - 2 tsp kashmiri red chili powder (less for less spicy)
• 1 tsp salt

Rest

• 4 medium onions or 2 really large ones
• ½ cup full-fat greek yogurt
• 20 cashews (raw is preferred) (can also substitute some cashews for almonds)
• 1 - 2 tbsp oil
• ½ - 1 tsp garam masala
• 3 tsp coriander powder
• Water as needed.
• Salt to taste
• Cilantro (chopped)

Aromatics (optional) (add as many or as few)

• 2 cassia bark (cinnamon) sticks
• 2 bay leaves
• 8 cloves
• 5 green cardamom
• 2 black cardamom

Instructions

1. Marinate chicken with yogurt, turmeric, garlic, ginger, chili power and salt for 30 minutes to 2 hours max. Over 2 hours, chicken can get rubbery.
2. In a pot over medium high heat, add oil, green cardamoms, onions and salt. Caramelize onions (~10 - 15 minutes). Onions should be brown but not burnt.
3. Take pot off stove and allow onions to cool to room temperature.
4. Using a blender, blend the onions, green cardamom and cashews into a paste. Add water as needed.
5. Add oil to pan, along with aromatics (cinnamon, bay leaves, cloves, black cardamom). Then turn heat to medium - high. Cook until cloves puffs up (~30 seconds).
6. Add chicken and cook for another 5 - 6 minutes until the marinade has broken up and chicken is opaque on the outside (doesn’t need to be cooked through yet).
7. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add onion paste, yogurt, coriander powder. Add water as needed to achieve preferred thickness. 1 cup of water is a good average.
8. Bring to boil. Add salt/pepper to taste. Simmer for ~20 - 30 minutes.
9. Turn heat off, add garam masala.
10. Top with cilantro and serve with rice.

“I’m excited for winter”

Winter arc is likely taken from anime. In a lot of long running anime, the story is organized into multiple sub stories called “arcs”.

These arcs are typically given names that reference what happens in them or the setting where it takes place.

Marinading raw meat in the fridge overnight is a pretty common practice.

In this case though, I meant cooking the curry and then letting the cooked chicken marinade in the curry gravy in the fridge.

Here’s what I wrote down for this recipe:

Chicken Madras Curry

Ingredients

• 3 tablespoons neutral oil
• 1.2 kilograms chicken thigh, diced
• 1 teaspoons whole cumin seeds
• 3 bay leaves (dried or fresh)
• 5 grams cilantro root & stem, chopped
• 2 onion (medium sized), thinly sliced
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 35 grams ginger, peeled and minced
• 1.5 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 teaspoons ground coriander
• 2.5 teaspoons ground garam masala
• 0.8 teaspoons ground turmeric
• 0.5 teaspoons Kashmiri chilli powder
• 9 fresh curry leaves (optional, 8-10 leaves)
• 800ml canned whole tomatoes (or passatta if you want a less chunky curry)
• 400ml coconut milk
• salt & pepper, to taste
• cilantro, to serve

Instructions

1. Place a large, high-rimmed pan or pot over high heat. Add oil and sear chicken thigh for 3-4 minutes or until golden. Season the chicken with salt and pepper. Remove chicken and set aside (it’s ok if chicken is not cooked through at this stage).
2. Reduce heat to medium. Add whole cumin seeds and bay leaves, chopped cilantro, and cook for 1½-2 minutes until fragrant. Add onion, garlic, ginger, salt and pepper and sauté for 12 minutes.
3. Increase heat to medium-high. Add cumin, coriander, garam masala, turmeric, and Kashmiri chilli powder, mix well, and toast for 1 minute. Stir in curry leaves (if using), tomatoes, and coconut milk, season with more salt & pepper, and bring to a simmer. Once simmering, return the seared chicken to the pot, mix, reduce heat to low, cover, and cook for 30 minutes.
4. Taste and add more salt/pepper as needed.
5. Serve with rice/naan. Garnish with fresh cilantro.

Look at the synopsis of all of the isekais and then tell me. A large portion of them feature harems, slavery, glorifying slavery, incest and more.

I have unattended upgrades configured

I ssh into it twice a year to perform updates but otherwise i leave it alone. Server’s been chugging along for like a decade now.

There are two things to be aware of to understand this comic:

1. Surgeons are usually discouraged from operate on their family members due to conflicts of interest (eg. they may make judgement calls not in the patient’s best interest due to emotional conflicts).

2. There is a popular riddle that goes something like this: a father and son get into a car accident. The father dies and the son is in critical condition. The son is sent to the hospital and goes in for an operation. The surgeon walks in, sees the patient and goes " I can’t operate on him, he is my son!" How is this possible? The intended solution is that the surgeon is the boy’s mother and it’s supposed to show our unconscious bias. (Yes I know the other solution is a father in a same sex relationship but that’s not relevant here).

So this comic plays on the readers assumptions by introducing a familiar premise (the riddle with the surgeon) but the subverts expectations in a humurous way (she’s adopting her patients to get out of work).

I’m surprised multiple people have immersion blender in their top 10. I wonder if I’m missing something. I don’t deny it’s a very nice tool to have but I feel like it’s not essential for most meals. For some things, the dish might taste worse though. I’ve definitely made pasta sauce and indian curry without one and you will end up with a chunkier pasta sauce or curry but it’s still totally edible and tasty.

My must haves:

1. Some sort of wok/pan (carbon steel works).
2. Cooking chop sticks.
3. Spatula
4. Chef knife
5. Cutting board
6. Some sort of bowl.
7. Lids
8. Measuring cup
9. Measuring spoon
10. Scale

Nice to haves:

11. Knife sharpening set (I’d choose a diamond sharpening stone + leather strop)
12. Pot
13. Sauce pan.
14. Can opener.
15. Peeler.
16. Scraper.
17. Tongs
18. Rice cooker.

Explanation: A wok/pan (which ever is more comfortable to you) is most important tool because you can make plenty of things without a knife (eg. Instant meals) so it’s probably a no brainer. You don’t even need anything to toss things in the wok.

Next you really want cooking chopsticks to use with it or a spatula. I think the chopsticks is just a hair more versatile so I put it ahead.

I think 1 to 5 should be obvious.

Next you need a bowl to either hold the finished food or for intermediate ingredients or even marinading so it’s pretty important.

Lids are actually something I forgot about. These things are pretty critical to a good portion of dishes. The most important things they let you do is to simmer and steam foods. A lot of recipes are basically impossible or much much harder if you cannot steam things. The most obvious recipe they enable is rice.

8, 9 and 10 are actually kind of “very nice to have” cooking items. None of them are needed if you have a lot of experience and can just eye ball everything but they do make everything so much easier and makes your meals a lot more reproducible.

I put measuring cup first because those quantities are probably the hardest to eyeball. I can probably eye ball a tablespoon but I doubt I can eye ball a cup.

Measuring spoons are just plain useful. Not just as measuring tools but to get stuff out of containers.

The scale is probably the least used for me of the three.

I think with 1 to 10 you can probably make most things, although some things might be annoying to make.

The next thing you probably want is some way to sharpen your knife. Unless you are just going to buy a new knife every year I find a knife sharpener pretty crucial, probably more than the average person.

Sauce pan and pot are interchangeable. I put pot first because I like soups. Woks are also not great at replacing a pot.

Beyond 12. These are the “nice to have” items. You basically don’t even need these at all.

Can opener is first of the nice to haves. I put it this low because I thought about what I even use them for and these days almost everything that comes in a can can be found in other form factors or the can has an opener integrated which is why this tool is so low. However, having one does unlock certain foods, the most obvious to me are canned mexican foods and campbell things.

Next, peeler, scraper and tongs are all very interchangeable for me. Of the three I definitely use the scraper the most, even more than a lot of things higher in the list. The reason why it’s so low on the list is because no one needs a scraper. It just makes transporting things like minced garlic so much easier.

Peeler and tongs are very useful but I wouldnt consider either of them necessary. You can peel with a knife and you can use chop sticks instead of tongs although tongs are a lot safer if the thing is big.

Next is the rice cooker. So if we were to go by price to utility ratio, the rice cooker would probably shoot up to a spot in the top 10. However I’m ranking based on necessity of the item and no one really needs a rice cooker. You just need a container (eg. A wok or sauce pan) to hold rice and water and a lid to steam it. Realistically though, it would be one of the first things I buy because rice cookers are ridiculously cheap and they save so much time.

One person’s escapism is another person’s reality 😔