Kabuli Pulao

...And so it begins. I suppose a little bit of back story is necessary here. Some time last year I started cooking one dish a week from another country (the list I've been using is here ). After starting though, a bunch of people (read: three or four) said it would be pretty cool to start a blog to follow all of the recipes that I've used.

So. I'm doing that! Fun story! 

Anyways--I decided to start all over again so I can try to use a national dish of sorts from each country. 

This week I made Kabuli Pulao from Afghanistan. The original recipe I based this on was here. They recommended that I take the time to boil the chicken and onion separately with several quarts of chicken broth. That, of course, would take forever. So, I cooked the rice separately and cooked the other components in a pan. Also, just as a general rule, I use brown rice so I can pretend there is some semblance of healthiness to this.

So, I speeded things up--below is my revised ingredients:

1 cup of rice

2.5 cups of water or broth

2 lbs chicken, cut up
1 large onion, sliced

1 large carrot, cut into match sticks

3 tablespoons of olive oil
sea salt, to taste

1/2 tablespoon ground cardamom
1/2 tablespoon ground cumin
fresh ground black pepper, to taste
1/4 cup raisin
1/8 cup chopped pistachios

On to the directions!

1)  Put your rice and 2.5 cups of water on--either in a rice cooker or a medium-sized sauce pan.

2) Toss your olive oil, chicken, and onion into a frying pan and cook for 5 min. (note: you don't have to use olive oil here--in fact, it may be better to use something with a higher smoke point)

3) Sprinkle with salt and then add your cardamom, cumin, and black pepper (mine was ground, but it doesn't have to be)

4) At the end, add your raisins and pistachios and let them warm and then kill the heat.

And that's it!

This is what it looked like when it came out on the other end:

Next up is Algeria and their national dish, Couscous. Which...really? It seems kind of lame to say that an individual ingredient is their national dish. Anywho...more to come!