Seafood Biryani + Homemade Naan #FoodieReads

This was inspired by reading Sorry for the Inconvenience: A Memoir by Farah Naz Rishi.

On the Page

Sorry for the Inconvenience: A Memoir by Farah Naz Rishi was surprisingly heavy. It begins during her freshman year in college and spans about a decade and a half after that. A Pakistani American Muslim, Rishi addresses how her mother's view of an early arranged marriage is dashed by her leaving home to get a college education. This decade is punctuated by the deaths of her family (spoiler alert!): her father's unexpected death, her brother's untimely death, and her mother's prolonged health battles and subsequent death.

But she is not alone. She has a stalwart companion in Stephen, a friend she met during a freshman seminar in college. Despite him not being Pakistani - he's Jamaican - he shows up for her and is accepted into her family. Finally he becomes family at her mother's urging.

This was definitely not a light or quick read. I found myself going back over passages just to savor her prose. But there were subjects that were not easy to stomach; if date rape and suicide are triggers for you, stay away.

On the Page

I considered making meatloaf from this passage:

"Without asking my mom, Dad invited [his sister] to live with them, and the three of them—Mom and Dad, newly married, and my Fouzia phuppo—were crammed into a two-bedroom apartment, sharing a single bathroom. 'Your mom made us a lot of meat loaf,' Fouzia phuppo told me years later. 'She didn’t know how to cook anything else. She was so young, after all'."

Or banana bread that brings tears to your eyes...

"'Eat something, meri jaan,' said Nyla, greeting me in the morning. 'You’ve had a long night.' She handed me a small package wrapped in aluminum foil: it was homemade banana bread. My eyes watered. I couldn’t eat—I couldn’t stomach anything—but the gesture was so unexpectedly kind in such a chaotic maelstrom, I wanted to cry right then and there."

But I landed on biryani from her texts with Stephen. "Stephen’s texts, whenever I visited home, were a welcome distraction. A reminder that even though things might be bad there, there were people at school who cared about me. Who were waiting for me. We’d also gotten closer since we played Mario Kart, and we were talking every day. Sometimes for hours."

Farah Naz Rishi: food’s solid

Farah Naz Rishi: my dad made seafood biryani

Stephen Griffiths: that sounds amazing Stephen Griffiths: but the company . . . not so much?

Seafood Biryani comes up again as something her father wants to teach her.

"On weekends he would drag me into the kitchen. 'You should learn how to make biryani. Do you know how to make biryani?' 'Follow the instructions on the Shan masala box?' I offered. He clicked his tongue. 'I’ll show you.' Dad walked me through the steps to making seafood biryani—the frying of oil and onions called tadka, the careful layering of basmati rice and shrimp and scallops as the familiar smell of cloves and cumin permeated the kitchen. Smells of home that I’d missed."

I didn't have scallops the night I made this. I had shrimp, local lingcod, and some octopus.

Ingredients

Spice Blend

• 1 teaspoon cloves

• 1 Tablespoon black cumin

• 1 Tablespoon coriander seeds

• 3 teaspoons peppercorns (we used a mix of white, black, pink, and green peppercorns)

• 1 teaspoon fennel seeds

• 6 white cardamom, seeds removed and pods discarded

• ¼ teaspoon ground turmeric

• 1 teaspoon paprika

• 1/2 teaspoon red chili pepper flakes

• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

• 2-inch cinnamon stick

Curry

• 7 garlic cloves

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1-inch knob fresh ginger, grated

• 1 Tablespoons butter

• splash of olive oil

• 1 to 2 pounds seafood (I used shrimp; local lingcod, cubed; and some precooked octopus tentacles)

• 1 onion, peeled and chopped

• 2 cups tomato sauce

• 2 Tablespoons vinegar

• 2 heaping Tablespoons plain yogurt

• 2 Tablespoons ground almonds

Biriyani

• 2 cups basmati rice cooked with a pinch of saffron threads

• fresh cilantro for garnishing

• Also needed: a large bowl for molding the biriyani

Procedure

Curry

Prepare the spice mix by placing all the whole spices - except for the cinnamon - in a pestle. Grind with the mortar. Grate the cinnamon and stir in the cinnamon, turmeric, paprika, ground ginger, and nutmeg. Put to one side. In the same pestle grind the garlic and ginger with one teaspoon of salt until you have a rough paste. Set aside.

Place your seafood, except for the octopus, in a large mixing bowl. Add in the dry spices, ginger, and garlic. Massage the spices into the fish and shrimp.

In a large pan, melt butter in a splash of oil and stir in the onions. Stir well. When the onions begin to soften, add the tomatoes, vinegar, yogurt and ground almonds. Simmer until the sauce has thickened, approximately 20 to 30 minutes.

Fold the shrimp and cubed fish into the sauce and simmer until they turn opaque, approximately 3 minutes. Fold in the precooked octopus. And let stand while you prepare the rest of the dish.

Biryani

Layer some of the rice into the bottom of the bowl you are using as a mold. Press saffron rice into a layer. Then repeat: curry, rice, curry, rice until the bowl is full. Press firmly to compress the mixture before inverting onto a serving platter. Sprinkle with fresh cilantro and serve with a bowl of the remaining curry and a batch of Homemade Naan.

Homemade Naan

I made two batches of naan for this dinner - one gluten-free for Jake and one regular for the boys. I have gotten used to the gluten-free ones, but the regular ones are extra delicious!

Ingredients

makes 8

• 2 cups flour plus more for rolling (for the gluten-free ones I use Bob's Red Mill 1-to-1 Baking Flour)

• 1 Tablespoon organic granulated sugar

• 2 teaspoons active dry yeast

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 3 Tablespoons plain yogurt (whole milk is preferred)

• 2 Tablespoons olive oil

• 3/4 cup warm water

• 2 Tablespoons butter, melted, for brushing on finished naans

Procedure

In a large mixing bowl, stir together the flour, sugar, yeast, and salt. Set aside.

In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together yogurt, olive oil, and 3/4 cup warm water. Stir the yogurt mixture into the dry ingredients with a fork. When a shaggy dough forms, dust your hands with flour and knead gently into a soft, slightly sticky dough. If the dough is too wet, add in a little bit of flour. As soon as all of the dry ingredients are incorporated, stop kneading.

Lightly oil a clean bowl and transfer the dough to the oiled bowl. Cover with a damp kitchen towel. Place in a warm spot for 60 to 90 minutes, or until about doubled in size. This will depend on how warm your kitchen is.

Once the dough has risen, dust a work space with flour and roll the dough into a cylinder. Slice the dough into eight equal portions, then roll each piece in flour to keep them from sticking.

Warm a large cast iron pan - I used a griddle - over medium-high heat until very hot. Using a rolling pin, roll one of the dough balls into an oval shape about 1/8-inch thick. Mine were approximately 4" x 7". Brush the pan with a thin layer of butter.

Gently lay the dough in the pan and cook until the top is bursting with air bubbles and the bottom has darkened in spots, approximately 2 to 3 minutes. Flip the naan over and cook for another 1 to 2 minutes more until the the bottom is lightly browned and blistered in spots.

Remove the naan from the skillet and brush with melted butter. Place the naan in a tea towel-lined dish to keep warm. Repeat with the remaining naans, adjusting the heat lower if necessary as you go. Like pancakes, I usually find it necessary to lower the heat after the first naan.

I am adding this to the August #FoodieReads link-up.