Asparagus, salad, leftover macaroni and cheese, and blackened salmon!

I had to write this down before I forgot. ;D I want you all to be anticipating the recipe-post eagerly! I’ll tell you how /I/ cook asparagus, how to make my favorite mac’n’cheese, how to craft an elegant salad that doesn’t take a long time to make, and the blackened salmon…well, it’s store bought. ;) Sorry.

The Otaku is out for now! See you soon!

I took a break for the holiday weekend, but normal posting will resume tomorrow. :)

I hope you have a great Easter! I’m going to be spending it with family!

Tomorrow’s posting will be about homemade pizza - yum!

The Otaku is out! See you next time! :)

So tonight for dinner, I’ve prepared a delicious chicken curry~! The recipe is kind of hard to decipher in parts (it’s in Engrish), but I will work to translate it for you!

Also, this is the first post to include pictures! I didn’t think of taking them until I’d started, but one of these days, you’ll get a direct step-by-step picture directions from me! :) So I’ve included the pictures below, for your enjoyment! Click on them to see them in a bigger size~!

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You can find a good recipe for it here. That is not the recipe I used, but it looks a LOT easier to make than the one I used. You can also add things like mushrooms, onions, and peppers to make it more tasty~!

Something I learned from my adventures with Baked Spaghetti is to follow the recipe! If you don’t, it ends badly.

And garlic bread is really easy to make! You crush a couple of cloves of garlic, and mix it with a bit of olive oil, then spread it over your favorite store-bought bread (I use French bread)! You pop it into the oven for a bit (until the bread is toasty), and voila! It’s very yummy and everyone here likes it when I make it that way. :D

The Otaku is out! See you next time!

So this was what I made one night for dinner, and everyone really loved it!

This was the recipe I used, and I had a pretty easy time with it.

I followed the directions step-by-step, and everything was pretty straightforward, EXCEPT…that the rice. I couldn’t get it cooked in the way it suggested, so I believe that the next time I make this, I may do something about the rice beforehand, so it’s ready on time.

And the Spanish wine I picked out for this was a 2007 Marques de Arienzo Rioja. It goes well with the paella. :)

Sorry this post is short! The next one will be longer, I promise.

The Otaku is out! See you next time!

Well, folks, just finished dinner, and it was really good! I just have a minor thought about the Chicken Tikka Masala recipe: I think I would only use a teaspoon of salt. I added the amount called for in the recipe, and it was too salty.

And the Saag Paneer - be careful with the cheese. If it didn’t stick to the pan, it crumbled a bit on me. But it turned out pretty good, and I would recommend it.

Our fridge is so full right now that we need to eat it up before we can cook more, but I have a couple of posts queued until I cook again!

The Otaku is out! See you later!

And welcome to “Cooking with an Otaku”. As the title suggests, I’m an anime/manga/video game-obsessed person who also enjoys spending their time cooking. :) And as I was stirring the chicken into the sauce to marinate for a wonderful Chicken Tikka Masala, I realized that I really had no one with whom to share my adventures in branching into ethnic foods! So here I am!

So far in my adventures, I’ve made a delicious chicken paella (and can recommend a good Spanish wine to go with it!), baked spaghetti, and chicken curry.

Today’s adventure includes multiple dishes, since I was feeling a little more bold. ;) Naan, chicken tikka masala, saag paneer, and rice.

We started cooking at 11:30 this morning, and we’re still not done! We started by mixing together the ingredients for the naan bread.

When it was done, we left it alone for the time that recipe instructed us to leave it. After it had risen for an hour, the recipe said to pinch off bits of it and roll them into golf ball-sized balls of dough. Of course, the dough is incredibly sticky (if you haven’t realized it by now), so I recommend putting some flour on your hands first. I figured this out the hard way.

After thirty more minutes of rising, it was ready to roll into thin circles of dough, and grill it. I had a lot of fun doing this part - you just lightly oil the grill (I used olive oil), and place the thin circles down. When it looks puffy on the uncooked side, smear a little butter on the uncooked side, and flip it over, repeating the butter on the cooked side. After the first one, it’s pretty much lather, rinse, repeat.

I decided to get the bread done first because it was a lot of waiting and working. After the bread was done, I started on the chicken tikka masala. The recipe is pretty straightforward, and I usually gather all of my ingredients in the appropriate measurements into one place before I start cooking. Currently, it’s still on its hour of refrigerated marinating, but I’ll post about the taste when dinner is fully over, and I’m done cooking. :)

Now earlier, I mentioned paneer, and I’m pretty sure that at least 95% of you have never heard of paneer. (And 86% of you are telling me to stop making up figures~!) Well, I’m going to introduce you to paneer, the cheese you need if you want to make saag paneer.

Well, it’s really easy to make paneer, as you might see if you check the link provided above. You boil one gallon of milk, and when it’s boiling, you stir in a quart of buttermilk and just WATCH it separate into curds. You strain the curds through a cheesecloth resting in a colander, and leave it for about two hours, or until it stops dripping water. SAVE THE WATER THAT DRIPS OUT. I failed to read that part clearly when following the recipe. After those two hours or so are up, chuck what’s in the cheesecloth into a food processor, and add the strained water as needed to make it somewhat creamy. You can do what I did and put that in a plastic box and stuff into the fridge until you need it. The box might make it easier to cube it for saag paneer. I used half of this recipe, since I don’t eat saag paneer - that would be my mother’s favorite Indian dish! (In case you’re lazy and don’t want to do the math yourself - it’s like, 8 cups of milk and 2 cups of buttermilk.)

I haven’t even started on turning the paneer into saag paneer yet, so that bit will come when I update later about the chicken tikka masala~ But I would say to follow the recipe as closely as you can. If you’re anything like me, this is your first time making it, and you don’t want to screw it up.

And rice…well, follow the directions. We have a rice cooker, so I can’t really tell you how to cook rice. xD It’s pretty straight-forward, I think.

That’s it for this post! I’ll be posting soon about saag paneer and chicken tikka masala, along with a post about the delicious chicken paella I made (and where you can find the Spanish wine that accompanies it), and the adventure I had trying to learn to bake spaghetti.

The Otaku is out! See you next time!