Butter chicken was the second Indian dish I ever ordered, right after chicken tikka masala. I ordered it expecting something similar and was immediately confused – the sauce was softer, more buttery, less spicy, somehow both simpler and more complex at the same time. I finished the whole bowl and ordered naan for the leftover…
Chicken caesar salad is the dish I have ordered at more restaurants than anything else. It is also the dish that has disappointed me more than anything else dry chicken, soggy croutons, dressing from a bottle that tastes like nothing in particular. For something so simple, most restaurants get it consistently wrong. I started making…
Homemade chicken soup is the one recipe I make every single time someone in my house gets sick. Not because I think it has magical healing properties though there is some actual science behind why it helps but because it is the only thing that consistently makes people feel better and want to eat when…
Air fryer chicken wings were the reason I finally bought an air fryer. I had been making oven wings for a while and they were good – genuinely good but a friend made air fryer wings at a Super Bowl party and I stood at the counter eating them trying to figure out what was…
Chicken tikka masala was the first curry I ever ordered at a restaurant. I was fourteen, had no idea what I was doing, and pointed at it because the description said creamy and the color in the photo looked incredible. It arrived and I sat there eating it in complete silence because nothing had prepared…
Grilled chicken breast has a worse reputation than it deserves. I spent years either undercooking it and nervously cutting into it every thirty seconds, or overcooking it into something that needed an entire bottle of hot sauce to get through. Neither version was something I would voluntarily make again. The problem was not the chicken….
The restaurant versions I had eaten as a kid were almost always slightly soggy under the sauce. The coating would be crisp when it came out of the fryer but by the time it reached the table with marinara and melted mozzarella on top, the bottom half of the breading had absorbed the sauce and…
Stuffed chicken breast was the recipe I made the first time I cooked dinner for people I actually wanted to impress. I was nervous, had practiced it twice that week, and still somehow managed to overfill the pocket so that half the filling melted out into the pan during baking. The result was still good…
The first chicken stir fry I made at home tasted nothing like what I ordered from our local Chinese restaurant. The chicken was chewy, the vegetables were either raw or soggy, and the sauce was thin and watery. I figured the difference was the restaurant equipment a proper commercial wok running at temperatures a home…
I bought my first slow cooker because a coworker would not stop talking about hers. She described coming home after a full day to a kitchen that smelled like dinner had been cooking for hours because it had. I figured anything that could produce slow cooker chicken that good was worth twenty dollars at a…