Who says you have to go out to an Indian restaurant to have an Indian meal. Last night we ate homemade tandoori chicken with jasmine rice. Was it authentic Indian and as good as you would find in a restaurant or as we had in Morocco? Nope, but it did do the trick with a colorful array of delightful flavors playing off one another. The biggest difference is that we don’t have a tandoor oven at home, or in fact anywhere for that matter. (I tried pricing them online a while ago and it seems you can only get industrial grade, restaurant style tandoors, none for the home.)

I found a little bottle of Punjab Red Tandoori spices at the World Market on Sunday (see UrbanAccents.com) and, after looking at the recipe on the side of the bottle, decided that this was something I could try making. The chicken marinated overnight Sunday to be ready for last night’s meal. The marinate consisted of the tandoori spices (which includes red pepper, paprika, turmeric, nutmeg, coriander, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, mace, anise, cloves, fenugreek, and fennel seed), lemon juice, plain yogurt, vinegar and oil. You can see judging by the ingredients in the tandoori spice that this is one instance where its best to just buy the spice already together instead of trying to collect each individually, even though I had many of these already.

Since we don’t have the best of grills (and I’m out of gas) we didn’t grill as recommended but baked for about 20ish minutes, turning once. This was just enough time for our rice maker to cook up a perfect batch of rice for two. We’ve been experimenting as of late with spicing rice while its cooking. Last night I sprinkled some of the tandoori spices and some garlic powder which in the end didn’t give a powerful flavor but added a little touch. Once coupled with the tandoori chicken the rice was overshadowed by its dominating spice and heat. We had no trouble scarfing this down and would definitely make it again for something less typical. Fantastic flavor, the right amount of heat, and the perfect portion size with the rice (no side dishes).

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Have you made anything daring lately? Tell us about it. We might just try it out if you pass us the recipe.