I am starting a Lunch Menu Series from today and hopefully, I will be posting the lunch ideas every Friday. Also, I will share both the veg and non-veg dishes as a part of this series. To start with, I am sharing a complete non-veg lunch that I prepared for Jany's Birthday last November. The menu has his favourite mutton, chicken and fish items that I make at home. However, you can tweak the items according to your personal preference. I have explained the steps I followed in preparing this elaborate meal. Making many dishes at the same time is a little hard work for me since I am not exposed in preparing an elaborate meal more often. With a lot of preparations, I achieved this end result and Jany was very much impressed😆💕 with this lunch on his birthday. Let us see the preparations involved in this menu:
Items in the Menu:(Please click the links for recipes)
Boiled Egg
1. For the Fish Fry: I cleaned, washed the fish to fry and marinated it with the required masala. Stored it in an airtight container and refrigerated it.(Not in the freezer). I used a small variety fish called as red spot whitening. You can use any fish of your choice.Check this recipe too for Fish Fry.
2. For the Chicken Biryani: Peeled the shallots and prepared the biryani masala. Store the ground paste and the shallots in the refrigerator.
3. For the Mutton Chukka Varuval: Peeled and chopped the Shallots(small onion).
4. For the Chicken Ghee Roast: Prepared the masala and marinated the chicken. Placed it in the refrigerator overnight.
5. For the Chettinad Chicken Kuzhambu: I prepared the Chettinad masala and also marinated the chicken. Chopped and stored the required onion and tomato too.
6. I used store brought Boondhi for making the raita. Also, for fruit custard, I used store brought Custard. If you are making the custard and boondhi from scratch at home, then follow the below recipes and prepare it a day before. Store the boondhi in an airtight container and custard in the refrigerator until we use the next day.
On the day of cooking:
1. As soon as I woke up in the morning, I started to make Chettinad Chicken Kuzhambu since I paired it with Idiyappam for morning breakfast. The leftover after the breakfast was included in the lunch menu.
2. After breakfast, I started to cook the other items around 10.30 am. I started by soaking the rice for biryani and boiling the egg. Then pressure cooked the items for mutton chukka varuval.
3. In one burner, I sauteed and cooked the Chicken for Chicken Ghee roast. In another burner, I tempered the items for mutton chukka varuval and cooked it until the water is absorbed completely.
4. While the above two items are cooking, I started with the making of biryani and after the required whistles, I kept it undisturbed until serving.
5. Finally, I deep fried the fishes and drained the excess oil in tissue paper.
6. Just 15 minutes before serving the lunch, I made the Boondhi Raita and Fruit Custard since it involves just assembling. I used store brought Boondhi for making the raita. Also, for fruit custard, I used store brought Custard. For the fruit custard, you can chop and store the fruits in the fridge if you prefer.
Since I was not be able to make everything at a stretch, I started the preparations a day before. If you are confident, you can do everything on the same day. I just made the dishes that my husband likes since it was his birthday. You can use this menu as the guidance and choose any of your favourite items from my Non-Veg collection.
I served the simple fruit custard as the dessert since Jany don't prefer Payasams or Sweets. You can choose any payasam, sweet from my Collection of Payasam and Sweets.
- The preparations before cooking takes around 1 to 1.5 hours. And on the day of cooking, it takes around 2 to 2.5 hours.
- I prepared everything in less quantity(just for 3 of us). We had many left overs which we used it later.
- I made Thalapakatti style chicken biryani in the same way as that of mutton biryani. Hence linked that recipe. The chicken will not take much time(whistles) to cook like mutton.
Happy's Cook - Divya
What a lovely spread! Looks delicious!
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