Mushroom Pulao With Roasted Garlic (Handi Dhingri Ka Pulao)

So you probably all know about my friend, one Addie Raghavan, cheesemaking maestro, judgey... ahem, discerning food critic and all around amazing friend and moral support. Addie is currently judging, ahem... eating his way through Mumbai, though ostensibly he's there for work :) Every so often he posts some amazing looking picture on Instagram of his mom's (and his) cooking, at which point I drool, then curse his arse :)

The two pictures below that got me messaging him frantically for the recipe... he duly obliged and once I made this recipe, I totally knew why he was raving about it. This is an Addie's own recipe, just tweaked very little by yours truly. I actually have a traditional clay pot that my grandma used to cook curries in, and its got a rounded bottom, so I have a wok ring that worked as my diffuser. The clay pot worked perfectly as the perfect heat conductor and I covered it with foil which allowed the pulao to steam, like traditional pulaos should.

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Pizza Bianca with Grilled Rosemary Rubbed Turkey Fillet, Shiitake Mushrooms and Truffle Oil

Ever since I discovered pizza on the barbeque, I've been hooked. The smoky taste and the crisp base never fails to delight me and I love being able to make a simple dough in the morning and head back home in the anticipation of crisp pizza topped with anything my imagination fancied in the evening. 

When Mushrooms Canada and Turkey Farmers of Canada asked me to come up with a summer recipe featuring both turkey and mushrooms on the grill, I pretty much knew that one of my recipes had to feature pizza while the other one had to be tandoori. 

I threw around ideas with a few friends and one of them suggested a white pizza. I love white pizzas and one of my favourite combinations is a potato and prosciutto with picked rosemary and parmesan shavings. It was only a very quick jump from there to the final ideas brewing up in my head.

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Barbequed Tandoori Turkey Drumsticks with Mushroom Medley Pilaf

Yay!! Grilling season is here. And what better way to start it off by making these delicious barbequed tandoori turkey drumsticks? And to make it even better, I also added a fragrant, earth spiced mushroom pilaf, to make it a complete meal.

I've been addicted to the smoky flavours of the barbeque and grill, ever since as a clueless ten year old I ate grilled sausages off a backyard pit in the coffee estates of the Nilgiri hills. OK, I also just realised that the above statement would make zero sense to anyone else reading it, other than me :) Please, allow me to explain. I didn't grow up with barbeque, in the sense that its used in North America. We had our tandoors, of course, but they were used more in restaurants rather than in homes. This didn't mean we didn't cook over open fires, in my grandparents' place, we still have a room with a fireplace stove that we cook staples on. My grandma maintains that you can't really get the true taste of a curry and rice without cooking it in a clay pot on an open fire, which infuses dishes with a smoky, deeply intense flavour. But barbeques were a Western concept, and some of my relatives learnt this when they lived in the States, Canada or Australia.

Some of these friends and relatives were coffee estate owners and spent their summers on the cool slopes of the Nilgiri Hills and in their estates. It was usually a treat to be invited to spend summers with them and I loved being able to romp around the estate, hanging out in the cool, ranch style houses, swimming in crystal clear watering holes and 'hiking'... usually walking a distance a teeny bit further than the nearest cane sofa :) And eating, of course. My uncle would rig up a crude grille over an open fire pit and we would then 'barbeque' 'exotic' Western food items like sausages and bacon and salami. It was the beginning of my addiction to all things barbeque. 

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