I suppose people who don't cook very often can follow cookbook instructions to the letter, but I'm always tempted to make substitutions or additions to the ingredients list and have my own special way of timing everything. I'm now mature enough to know that all that stuff is there for a reason, and who the hell do I think I am to try and improve it?
Anyway, so here is the first fairly cautious experiment. It's from the Middle Eastern Cookbook by Maria Khalife, I've Googled her and she is now a life coach in Bahrain, so she must know what she's talking about. The dish is Saliq Dajaj from Saudi Arabia. I doubt whether I will ever have the opportunity to visit the region personally, what a shame! But at least this should be a fairly authentic sample of the kinds of delights that await if I finally decide to run off with a genuine Mills & Boon sheik.
This looks pretty simple, everything is cooked in one pot and there are only 10 ingredients (I forgot to buy butter). Because I'm not sure anyone will join me for the forthcoming gastronomic treat I've decided to substitute the chicken for a small poussin and halved all the other ingredients. 
Everything goes in the pot and we play the waiting game. It smells quite nice, I guess, but I'm a little worried that I've used too much water and the stock will not have enough flavour, especially since I'm drowning the whole thing in milk later on too. Well whatever happens I will have to take it with me to work for lunch tomorrow, and if it really doesn't taste of anything I can always put buttloads of Tabasco on it...I tried the stock and it would be fair to call the taste MILD! If I was cooking for someone else at this point I would be tempted to throw a bunch of salt and other condiments in, but that would be cheating and just so arrogant! Lets see how it turns out.
Result: Soupy kind of rice pudding with chicken. Next time I would definitely not halve the spices and add a lot less liquid, but the poussin has a lot of flavour and overall it's not as bland as I thought it would be. Maybe a better word is 'delicate' and I only have reservations because I'm so used to burning the roof of my mouth off with very heavily flavoured food. My bother called it very nice, like Thai Green curry diluted in a pan of water. The boyfriend is a muy caliente Spaniard so this is pretty far from the kind of thing he would choose to eat. It's so frustrating when you have to prick and prod a prude to eat something that looks not even that bad! Anyway, he finished a bowl, and when I went to pack some up for lunch the next morning there was barely a portion left. The rice had soaked more of the liquid up overnight and it was more of a risotto than a soup, the taste was also intensified, I guess that's the benifit of leaving the bits of seed and bark floating around instead of fishing them out at the end of cooking. I also don't get the point of pouring melted butter on top to serve, the dish was already greasy enough thanks to all the schmaltz that came out of the poussin during cooking. So yeah, the punchline is that I would make this again, it's super easy and now that I have a half a kilo bag of cardamom seeds, should be a pretty cheap midweek meal. And nobody got sick!
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