Beef bourguignon? Deviled duck legs? Dazzling halibut? There's still time to pull together a festive NYE dinner

We couldn’t be happier to say goodbye to 2020. Why not ring in the new year with something delicious?

Don’t worry — even you’re not thinking about it till this afternoon, there’s still time to pull together a great dinner. Small gathering? If you’re two or three or four, a delicious braised dish like beef bourguignon will fill your living space with wonderful, warm aromas, and even probably leave you with fabulous leftovers.

Though it’s luxurious, the ingredients are not terribly expensive (chuck roast, mushrooms, pearl onions, bacon). If you’re a meat-lover, it’s one of the most glorious dishes you can make.

RECIPE: Beef Bourguignon

Prefer something super-easy? Deviled Duck Legs Provençal is another French dish that will delight.

Of course it depends whether you can get duck legs; they did have them at my local Whole Foods yesterday). Once you have them in your hot little kitchen, the rest is easy. All that’s required to prep them is a dusting of herbs, a smear of Dijon mustard and a coat of panko bread crumbs — shove them in the oven, and 90 minutes to an hour 45 minutes later, you’ve got these beauties.

Deviled Duck Legs Provençal with braised lentils

RECIPE: Deviled Duck Legs Provençal

In our photo, the duck leg is served with saucy braised French green lentils. To make the lentils, chop half an onion (or a shallot or two), a carrot and two stalks of celery, cook them in olive oil or duck fat until tender (about 7 minutes), add a pound of French green lentils and enough water or red wine to cover by an inch or so, plus maybe a bay leaf and/or a branch of thyme and simmer until the lentils are tender, about 20 or 25 minutes. Add more liquid if necessary to keep them very saucy.

Like the Beef Bourguignon, the duck and the lentils are also excellent the next day.

Seared halibut on ginger vinaigrette: a 10-minute dazzler!

Finally, here’s a light, quick and easy ginger vinaigrette that turns any piece of fish — or shrimp, or a grilled or sautéed chicken breast — into a 10-minute dazzler.

Here’s the vinaigrette recipe, sized for two portions (you can double or triple it for more servings):

RECIPE: Ginger Vinaigrette

And here’s the recipe including instructions for halibut:

RECIPE: Seared Halibut in Ginger Vinaigrette

Wishing you and yours a wonderful New Year’s Eve, and a happy, healthy and prosperous 2021! May we all enjoy better times ahead!

Obsessed with butter chicken: Our recipe follows the world’s favorite Indian dish faithfully back to its origin

The ultimate murgh makhani — also known as butter chicken

Several months before The Great Confinement, I became obsessed with butter chicken.  

It began with a problem I needed to solve for a client, for which an Instant Pot seemed like a possible solution. Never having used one, I Googled — and found a nearly two-year-old New Yorker profile of one Urvashi Pitre, “The ‘Butter Chicken Lady’ Who Made Indian Cooks Love the Instant Pot.”

Butter chicken? I’d never given the dish much thought — always assumed it was an Indian dish concocted for American tastes, as chicken tikka masala is for the Brits.

How wrong I was. And how silly I felt, and still feel — mostly because of the missed opportunities to indulge in murgh makhani (butter chicken’s proper name) during a lifetime enjoying Indian food. 

Meanwhile, if exemplary butter chicken could be easily achieved at home in less than a half hour using an Instant Pot, well, then, I had to get an Instant Pot.

My young-adult son Wylie was living with us at the time. Though suspicious of the plug-in-pot contraption, he’d always been partial to the charms of butter chicken, so he was keen to give the recipe a whirl for dinner one weeknight. It was remarkably easy: You put nearly all the ingredients — chicken pieces, a can of diced tomatoes, spices and salt — in the Instant Pot and turn it on. Then you pull out the chicken, use a stick blender to blitz the sauce, swirl in butter, cream, more spice and cilantro, put the chicken back in, and that’s it. Wylie started prepping everything just as I was leaving my office to head home; when I walked in 20 minutes later, he was swirling in the cream.

Wylie’s first (Instant Pot!) butter chicken. Delicious — and so easy!

The Instant Pot butter chicken was astonishingly good: rich, nicely spiced, altogether satisfying. And in so little time, with so little effort. Bravo Urvashi Pitre! 

Urvashi Pitre, a.k.a. the Butter Chicken Lady, with her instant pot murgh makhani in Southlake, Texas

Now I wanted to meet the famous Butter Chicken Lady — who happens to live not 25 minutes from me. I had the perfect opportunity. Another one of my clients, in process of opening a new store and cafe in Southlake, Texas, asked me to recommend a local cooking personality for the store’s inaugural Supper Club series. The Butter Chicken Lady! The event was an instant sell-out, and the guests (some of whom flew in from other states) loved it. What a kick to dine on delicious murgh makhani seated literally next to the extremely delightful Butter Chicken Lady. (Check out her excellent blog, Two Sleevers, where you’ll find hundreds of quick-and-easy recipes.) 

Meanwhile, I was getting curiouser and curiouser about murgh makhani. What were the origins of the dish? Were they knowable, or, like most dishes, something with hazy beginnings, a dish that evolved over eons? Would other versions include onions, which were conspicuously absent from Urvashi’s version?

The simplicity of the answer to the origin question threw me for a loop: Butter chicken — murgh makhani — was created, according to a 2018 Washington Post story, in the late 1920’s or early ‘30s in Peshawar (then India, now Pakistan) by a chef named Kundan Lal Gujral. It’s exceedingly rare that a dish has origins so precisely knowable, but butter chicken’s origin story is uncontested, the smart story by Andreas Viestad asserted.

I found the piece just as I was headed to Massachussetts to visit Juliet, a brilliant web designer (and gifted cook) who is now my partner in Cooks Without Borders. As we drove from the airport to her house, I told her about the Post piece, which profiles Monish Gujral, the grandson of Kundan Lal — who also created (incredibly!) tandoori chicken. His grandfather had wanted to create a dish for his mentor that was lighter than the usual dishes of the region, so he had the wacky idea of roasting a chicken in a tandoor oven, which at the time had normally only been used for baking bread. Tandoori chicken was a hit that put the restaurant — Moti Mahal — on the map, and later Kundan Lal created butter chicken as a way to use leftover tandoori chickens. Bathed in a rich, tomatoey, buttery, beautifully spiced sauce, murgh makhani made Moti Mahal famous throughout India. After partition in 1947 (when Pakistan and India were separated), Kundan Lal moved to Delhi, where he opened his own Moti Mahal. His grandson Monish apprenticed with him, becoming a chef at Moti Mahal after graduating university, and eventually taking over the family business — now an empire of some 250 restaurants.

Having eyeballed the WaPo adaptation of Gujral’s recipe, I thought it looked remarkably quick and easy — maybe even as quick to put together as Urvashi’s Instant Pot version. “Let’s make it!” said Juliet. Leave it to my friend to have all the ingredients already on hand.

The WaPo adaptation had us quick-roast pseudo-tandoori chicken pieces in the oven, having slathered on a yogurt-and-spice coating, but not leaving it to marinate before roasting. The sauce came together quickly on the stovetop.

The butter chicken Juliet and I made from the Washington Post story.

Again, this was delicious — perfect for a flavor-happy weeknight dinner.

But I couldn’t help but wonder how close this was to the original; the tandoori-approximation seemed a bit quick and clipped, and did the dish maybe want a little more depth?

Monish Gujral’s book, On the Butter Chicken Trail, offers a recipe slightly different than the adaptation in the WaPo piece. It calls for making an actual tandoori chicken first, marinating a skinless chicken first in lime juice, chile powder and salt, and then in a yogurt-spice blend — for at least four hours altogether, so all those flavors soaked in — then skewering the soaked bird and roasting it in a tandoor oven or grill.

Most cooks I know do not have a tandoor, and grilling isn’t always an option, but those two marinades seemed very worthwhile, and I wanted to do something a bit closer to the original than the WaPo recipe. Chicken thighs strike me as more practical for most American cooks, always flavorful, of course, and easier to cook evenly in high oven heat than a skinless whole chicken. Our recipe calls for roasting the thighs on a rack over a baking sheet so the pieces don’t braise in all the juices that collect otherwise.

[EDITOR’S NOTE Oct. 19, 2020: In honor of the first-ever World Butter Chicken Day, October 20, 2020, commemorating the 100-year anniversary of Moti Mahal, we have published a new story and created a new, streamlined version of our recipe. The new version is called World Butter Chicken.]

I also adapted the wonderful garam masala Gujral uses, which gives the dish a gorgeous aromatic underpinning. (The recipe for garam masala in Gurjal’s book yields nearly a pound of spice mix — more than most cooks I know would use in a lifetime; I scaled it down to a twelfth of that.)

Kundan Lal Gujral, the creator of murgh makhani — a.k.a. butter chicken. Gujral also is credited with with creating tandoori chicken. Photo courtesy of Monish Gujral.

Finally, while Gurjal’s recipe calls for 14 medium-sized ripe red tomatoes, that is an awful lot of tomato for one chicken; one 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes seemed and tasted like the right amount, and canned tomatoes are more practical outside of tomato season.

That left me with one question: While the WaPo recipe called for Kashmiri chili powder, with 2/3 paprika and 1/3 cayenne offered as a sub, the recipe in the book called for “red chilli powder” without specifying a type. I tested it with the paprika and cayenne combo, and that seemed perfect. But what was ideal — and how much does it matter?

I went straight to the source, and asked Gurjal, whom I had no trouble finding through Facebook.

Now I was just beside myself — first I got to meet the Butter Chicken Lady, and now I was corresponding with the Butter Chicken King himself! Juliet pointed out that he was really more like the Butter Chicken Prince, as he was descended from the dish’s creator, but to me the fact of his world-wide murgh makhani empire makes him the Butter Chicken King.

Gurjal clarified the red chile powder question: Kashmiri chile powder, or a commercial blend called Deggi Mirch (a powder of Kashmiri chiles and red bell peppers), or the paprika-cayenne alternative work well. I sent him my adaptation of his recipe pre-publication, we discussed the switch to canned diced tomatoes and my adaptation of his garam masala, and he approved of the whole package. He was careful to add that you don’t want to blend the sauce too fine; you want it to have a bit of nice texture.

When we chatted later on the phone, he told me about his two grown children (his daughter is a lawyer at the High Court in Delhi; his son is in law school in London). “When they’ve been away and they come home,” he said, “right away, they always want butter chicken.”

Of course they do. It may well be the world’s most beguiling comfort food.

RECIPE: The Ultimate Butter Chicken

Our first guest cook: Yasmin Halima whips up her family's wonderful thummi letho – Burmese chicken curry

The table is set for thummi letho, Burmese chicken curry, with all its garnishes.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story about Yasmin Halima, her daughter Seema Yasmin and their family was originally published back in January 2016. We are republishing it now because it has been one of our most popular stories over the years, and it feels particularly relevant at this moment.

Yasmin Halima, the mother of my young and brilliant colleague Dr. Seema Yasmin, was eager to get back into the kitchen. During the holidays, she and her family lost their house in one of the tornados that tore through the Dallas area – so devastating. When they came to dinner on New Year's Eve, I told Yasmin she was welcome to come cook in mine whenever she liked, and Seema emailed me a couple days later: Her mom really missed the kitchen and would love to come — and she’d share a recipe as a guest cook here at Cooks Without Borders.

Yasmin sent me a list of ingredients to pick up. She would be preparing (and teaching me how to make) her family's favorite comfort dish, thummi letho – Burmese chicken curry.

Yasmin and Seema respect Muslim dietary restrictions and only eat halal meat, which poses no problem at all, as there' s a halal butcher in a wonderful Asian grocery, Indo Pak Market, not far from our house. It's super fun doing the shopping there, hunting down chick pea flour (labeled as besan) and coconut milk and tamarind purée, which comes in a plastic-wrapped block. 

Yasmin arrives, and we chat for a while. Though her daughter is my colleague, Yasmin is a year younger than I! Then we head into the kitchen. Once we start chopping peanuts and slicing garlic and stirring and sautéing, she relaxes and tells me her story – a remarkable one. 

Born on India's west coast, near Surat in the state of Gujarat, Yasmin moved with her family to England when she was six. She grew up there, in a tiny industrial town near Coventry, in the Midlands, with a conservative Indian Muslim upbringing. (Her grandparents and father were born in Rangoon, Burma, where they had textile factories.) Yasmin had an arranged marriage, and when she was only 19, gave birth to Seema. 

Yasmin lightly sears cubes of chicken coated with chopped garlic.

The marriage was not a happy one, and when she was 26, she made an unfathomable decision: She would leave not only her husband, but her community. "I wanted an education, and I wanted my daughter to have an education," she tells me, as she stirs a pot of chicken, lightly searing the pieces, which she's tossed with chopped garlic. Such a thing – leaving, or even making any kind of life decision – was unheard of for a young woman of her upbringing. Yasmin did it anyway.

Her family supported her as she left for university and then moved to London as a researcher for the national department of health. She raised Seema on her own, but credits her sister with ensuring her daughter was educated about her faith and culture. None of it was easy.

Yasmin tells me she succeeded in getting her undergraduate degree in educational research and psychology and Seema – a star pupil (who by the way met her husband Emmanuel when they were both 17) – managed to achieve her own dream, gaining admittance to Cambridge University to study medicine. While Seema was at Cambridge, Yasmin – who was working for a non-profit aid organization – realized a dream of her own, to study at an Ivy League university. Admittance to a graduate program at Columbia brought her – and later Seema and Emmanuel – to the United States. Yasmin spent three years in New York, then seven years in Washington, D.C., running an international non-profit organization called Global Campaign for Microbicides followed by a few years working in public relations, before moving with Seema and Emmanuel to Texas. 

Amazing how you can get a know a person when you're cooking together. Before the evening is through, I learn that she'd like to start catering – on a small scale: cooking Indian and Burmese dishes for private dinner parties. 

So. It was Yasmin's sister who taught her how make thummi letho, the dish we're putting together. "Part of what we do to heal is we cook," she says. "And we feed. We make this dish that makes you feel good. We have emotions attached not just to food, but to dishes." Thummi letho, Yasmin tells me, "is such a basic, homely dish. We eat it to make us feel warm and safe." She sees food as a connection back to her family, too, along with observing certain Muslim traditions – praying and eating halal. "It's my umbilical cord back to my family and community." Neither she nor Seema wear the veil.

Seema, Emmanuel and Lily will be here in a bit, along with Yasmin's sister's son, Luqman, who just flew in last night from his home in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to help the family through their crisis. "They're very close," Yasmin says about Luqman and Seema. "Like brother and sister." 

Yasmin Halima

When she makes thummi at home, Yasmin takes her time. "In the morning I might do a couple of things" – preparing some of the garnishes, say, and making the Basmati rice – "and in the afternoon I might do a couple of things." 

The dish has several parts: what she calls the "base dish" – rice, cellophane (mung bean) noodles and linguini, all tossed together and garnished with sliced potatoes and eggs and chopped peanuts; a coconut milk-based chicken curry; and a variety of garnishes, to be passed at the table. 

It's a lot of elements, but the curry itself is very simple, taking less than a half hour to make. If you want to simplify it, you can serve the curry on plain Basmati, or on plain cellophane noodles, and serve it with just a garnish or two – maybe lime wedges and chopped cilantro. 

Yasmin sprinkles a couple teaspoons of chile powder onto the chicken, then thinks again and adds another. "You don't want it bland and boring!" A can and a half of coconut milk goes in, then it simmers till the chicken is just cooked through. While it bubbles, she toasts the chickpea flour in a dry pan till it's fragrant and it changes color slightly to pinky-gold. ("Can you see how it changed?" she says. It's pretty subtle.) That gets stirred into the curry, along with a couple spoonfuls of peanut butter, and voilå. 

Thummi letho

The garnishes have been prepared and put in small bowls: crushed, roasted peanuts; the limes and cilantro; fried garlic chips; fried chile flakes; tamarind paste. 

Seema, Emmanuel and Luqman arrive, followed by Thierry and our friend Habib: thummi letho party! Seema has brought a galette des rois for dessert, given to her by Marina, another colleague. I'm glad Thierry and Habib will be handy to explain that tradition (they're both French). 

Seema's excited about the thummi. "When else can you eat noodles and rice in the same dish?" she says. "It's not fancy food; it's comfort food, and it tastes so good. There are so many ingredients!"

Yasmin puts the plates together for us, as if she hasn't done enough. First the noodles and rice, then she spoons some curry over, topping it with a slice of potato and one of egg. Then the garnishes: limes, cilantro, a drizzle of sweet-sour tamarind paste, some chopped peanuts. It's wonderful: coconutty and tangy and hot and rich with peanuts. I can see why it's a family addiction. 

Naturally we all go for another round.

Later, Thierry and I take the galette to the kitchen to insert the small ceramic king figurine inside, then bring it back to the dining room and explain the game: Whoever gets the piece with the king inside wins the crown – and chooses a queen. I slice it, happy that my knife doesn't hit the ceramic piece. It's much more fun if you don't know where it is. We taste the cake – puff pastry filled with almond frangipane (thank you, Marina!). Bingo – Luqman gets the king! 

He places the glittery paper crown on his head, and we ask, "Who's your queen"?

"Emmanuel!" he cries. How lovely: Burma meets France to bring a little sweetness, a little spice, into the new year. 

RECIPE: Yasmin’s Thummi Letho (Burmese Chicken Curry)

Emmanuel Farrugia (left) and Luqman Vorajee, le roi.