ayonecan-cook

A biryani requires saffron. A spice I hardly use but had the pleasure of using when I made this.  In using saffron i realized that crushing the saffron threads to a powder before soaking them in some hot water is a must if you want the intense crimson liquid to bloom to its fullest and to speckle the rice as if it had caught bits and pieces of golden sunlight here and there making the biryani rice quite attractive.  The second time I made biryani I had not crushed the saffron to a powder and all I got was a yellow hue that made the biryani rice look as if i had cooked the rice in tumeric tinted water. Which is ok if I was making tumeric rice of course....but not if it was a biryani.  Ghee or clarified butter adds so much flavour as well giving it the distinctive biryani taste. This too I had discovered when I had omitted using ghee the second time around. Now I know why rules are meant to be broken. It convinces you that they shouldn't be. Unlike the true India...

                                                                 Mom, dad, my brother and I at age 10 I pretty much grew up with little memory of comfort food. As a child I don't remember food being used as a means to appease, to cajole or to numb. But if I close my eyes and think hard enough, the nearest thing to comfort food would probably be a thick, dark and sweet soy sauce . The Indonesian kind. And that was not even a dish. It was a condiment.  Nevertheless that is what brings me back to my childhood, the foodie way. Mom mixed it into white rice with filleted fried fish. I savoured every grain of rice and the pieces of fish that clung to it.  That and Wood'...