Until Now!

A month ago I found a recipe for Low Fat Butter Chicken in Real Living Magazine. The recipe replaced the cream with crushed tomatoes. I found that the end result was too tomato-tasting and it was not a decent replacement for the real thing. So, I made a couple of alterations to the recipe and here is the end result. It tastes absolutely fantastic!

MissEm’s Low Fat Butter Chicken Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 Onion, roughly chopped
• 3 tsp minced garlic (3 cloves)
• 2 tsp minced ginger
• 1 tbsp cold water
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 3 cardamon pods
• 6 whole cloves
• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
• 4 dried curry leaves
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 whole chicken breast, skin off, cut into chunks
• 375 ml tin skim evaporated milk
• 4 tsp tomato paste
• 1/2 cup chicken stock
• 1 tbsp stevia sugar

1. Place the onion, garlic, ginger and water in food processor and mix till a smooth paste.
2. Grind spices and salt with pestle and mortar till a fine powder.
3. Heat oil in a fry pan and cook off chicken for 2 minutes, remove from pan and set aside.
4. Add paste and spice mix into the pan and cook over low heat for 5 minutes.
5. Stir in skim evaporated milk, tomato paste, chicken stock and sugar. Blend well. Bring to the boil and then simmer gently, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Stir occasionally.
6. Add chicken back to the pan. Stir well. Simmer uncovered for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. The mixture will thicken due to not being covered.
7. Serve with rice.

If you are looking for a good spice shop on the net, and live in Australia, I highly recommend that you visit Herbie’s. Excellent service and quality products.

Rather than share this year with myself and my closest friends and family, I thought I would share my journey with the world. Whether anyone finds my journey interesting is another story, so if it ends up being a self-indulgent activity….. then so be it!

I don’t want to look back on things I have done and achieved and not remember how they came about.

So this is the first post of the year.

It’s not meant to be deep or full of wisdom about my goals and what I want to achieve. It’s just a start.

Chris Brogan writes about having three words to focus on for the year.

My three words for this year are:

Involve – I want to be involved with people that are going to be good influences on me and help me achieve my goals. I also want to be involved with, and get to know, the people who will eventually become my customers for my online business. Being involved will allow me to understand what problems people are having, it will help me communicate my solutions better and it will allow me to engage and connect with more people to influence and inspire me.

Grow -I am a very guarded person, despite my silliness. For me grow means getting out of my comfort zone and challenging myself to do the things I would not normally do. If I succeed or fail at least I can say that I have tried and learnt from my actions. As much as I know myself, I have become comfortable with myself and I have placed a glass ceiling on what I think I am capable of doing. So ‘grow’ means that I will push my limits and see what kind of stuff I’m really made of

Commit – I know that I sit around elbow deep in ‘analysis paralysis’. I have so many ideas and goals, but I don’t need a calender full of goals and mind maps full of ideas; I need commitment to carry out what I plan for myself. So ‘commit’ means doing what needs to be done, showing up when I have to (no matter what time of the day or night), doing what I say I am going to do, keep my mind on the one job. This can probably be tied in with accountability and discipline but I think ‘commit’ is a better word because it leads to accountability and discipline.

Chris has gone granular, as he always does, and added some challenges to the three words so that you work on them everyday.

Here’s the challenge from Mr Brogan himself…..

Monthly Challenge – I’m going to push myself to one, two, or three challenges a month, wherein which I’ll tackle something important that matches with those challenges. I know, for instance, that Jacqueline and I will be doing a month of yoga starting January 1. So, every single day in January, no matter what else I’ll do, I’ll do yoga daily. Come February, I probably will switch to another challenge, and again, one per every three words.

Daily Recipes- With that in mind, then I know how to align my days by putting together “daily recipes.” So now, if I have a fitness goal, a development goal, and a business goal, I’ll slot this into each day with this recipe action. For January, I know that I’ll be doing yoga daily. That’ll be listed into my fitness recipe slots for daily consideration. I’ll have my business goals broken down to recipes, so I won’t have to wonder, “How will I add value today?” It’ll just be there. See how that works?

So, you go from 3 Words, to a Monthly Challenge that hopefully is your 3 Words in action, and from that into Daily Recipes, which are your way to keep those goals top of mind.

So that is my first post for the year.

Do you have three words that you are going to focus on? If you are brave enough, share them in the comments below

Best of luck for 2012 whatever your resolutions or goals are.