Rajasthani Kebabs

This is a different Indian kebab recipe, claiming to hail from the Northern Indian state of Rajasthan and certainly pretty typical of the cuisine of Northern India. I've grilled this, but it makes an equally good barbecue marinade and if you decide to use it for a barbecue, I'd use legs, poke them a bit with a knife beforehand to let the marinade get right in there (give 'em a slash, even) and marinate them for longer.

You can make double the onion/yoghurt marinade mixture and then freeze half, BTW: it freezes like a dream and means a virtually prep-free dish next time around!


Ingredients

• 1kg chicken breast in 2 cm cube
• 2 tbsp lime juice
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion, halved and finely sliced
• 8 cloves garlic, sliced
• 3 tbsp nibbed almonds
• 4 cm fresh ginger, chopped
• 4 tbsp yoghurt
• 1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder
• 2 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp salt

Put the chicken, salt and lime juice in a bowl and thoroughly mix them up. Marinate for at least an hour.

Heat the oil in a large frying pan and fry off the onion over a medium heat until it starts to brown. Add the garlic and almonds and carry on frying until everything’s quite browned off. Remove from the heat. Put some 5 tbsp water into a small blender bowl and add the cooled onion and garlic mixture, the garam masala, the salt, the yoghurt and the red chilli powder. Give it all a good whizz, then pour this marinade mixture over the chicken and leave it steep for at least a few hours and, ideally, overnight.

Thread onto skewers and grill over a medium heat for a good 7-10 minutes either side, until the chicken whitens and then the marinade browns off in patches.