Easy-to-cook Chicken Tikka Kebabs to elevate your Ramadan table

Cooking chicken can flummox even the more confident home cooks among us. What s the best way to keep it from drying out? What internal temperature sho...

Cooking chicken can flummox even the more confident home cooks among us. What’s the best way to keep it from drying out? What internal temperature should I aim for? How do I avoid spreading bacteria all over the kitchen?

Practice is more than half the battle, but picking the right recipe to boost your confidence is just as important. These Chicken Tikka Kebabs from Madhur Jaffrey are a great example, bringing together accessibility, affordability and hard-to-mess-up results. And they’re incredibly tasty, too.

I first came across this recipe as part of a personal quest to re-create the chicken kebabs at Food Factory, a hole-in-the-wall eatery in Arlington, Virginia, that my husband grew up going to. He took me there a few times after I moved to the area, and as I feasted on juicy, charred chunks of meat scooped up with torn pieces of pillowy naan and doused with a spicy green chutney, I quickly understood his enthusiasm. Then, the restaurant was no more.

Determined to bring a little Food Factory spirit home, I started perusing the cookbook shelf at the library and came across Jaffrey’s "From Curries to Kebabs.” (Her chickpea curry from the same book also became a family favorite.) While Indian in origin, as opposed to Food Factory’s largely Pakistani or Afghan fare, the recipe looked not only promising, but also doable for a novice cook like I was at the time.

Sure enough, as is always the case with Jaffrey’s recipes, the kebabs were a triumph. So much time has now passed since our last Food Factory meal that I can’t tell you today how much they replicated the dish, but I remember being won over with the very first bite. For whatever reason, the recipe dropped out of my rotation until relatively recently, when I dusted it back off for my son. I’d almost forgotten how delectable the kebabs were - tender, juicy and just the right amount of spicy.