Easy Mango Lassi

I love Indian food, I have learned to make and freeze some of my favorite Indian meals.  Many grocery stores have also started carrying naan and I find myself going out for Indian food less often.  After all, I have delicious homemade Indian in my freezer.  This is a wonderful thing as I get to have my favorite Indian dishes regularly without having to spend a lot of money.  The downside was that I wasn't getting to have a mango lassi with my Indian dinner.  The obvious solution was to learn to make that as well. 

I tried a few different recipes I found online and wasn't really happy with any of them.  Many called for fresh mango, which while delicious, it is sometimes hard to find ripe ones.  Plus having to peel, pit and cut up mangoes kind of defeats the purpose of having convenient freezer meals.  Then I tried frozen mango chunks from the grocery store.  That did not make a good lassi.  For some reason mango gets really chalky when frozen.  Finally I discovered canned mango and created a tasty and convenient lassi that makes it so I can have the full Indian restaurant dining experience at home.  I'm going to give you the recipe, but it is really flexible.  Don't be afraid to change things around to fit your tastes.

Serves 4

1 15 oz can mango in syrup
2 cups plain yogurt ( I use Greek yogurt, but regular should be fine)
3 cups ice
honey to taste

1. Pour the mango, including the syrup into a blender.  Add the yogurt and blend until smooth.
2. My blender wasn't large enough to handle the full recipe, so I poured out half the mango-yogurt mixture into another container.
3. Add half the ice and blend until smooth.  Add honey to taste.
4. Pour the lassi into cups to serves.  Repeat step 3 with the rest of the mango-yogurt and the ice.

Roasted Chicken Tikka

Life has been crazy busy for us lately.  In October my husband learned that his company would be closing down in December and began job hunting.  A new job for him meant a move would be likely for our family.  We started packing, and I stopped adding freezer meals to our freezer.  He received a job offer and left for New York shortly before Christmas.  We already had plans to go on a cruise for Christmas, so he flew back to join us for that.  After the cruise we drove back to Mississippi to get the rest of our stuff and then drove on to New York.  We had a month of relaxed packing followed by a month of frantic packing followed by an awesome and relaxing cruise and ended it all with 4 days of driving through 9 different states.

As soon as I learned about his company closing I stopped adding meals to my freezer and switched to a focus on eating what we had.  It was great to not need to cook on top of everything else we had going on.  We didn't quite make it through all the meals we had in the freezer, and I gave the last of them to a woman I knew who had just had a baby.  Now we are in temporary housing while we wait to move into the house we are in the process of buying.  That means no freezer meals for us right now.  I miss them.  Life is much simpler when dinner is ready and in the freezer every day.  I do have a couple recipes that I made in my last batch of freezer cooking that I haven't gotten around to posting yet what with all the frantic packing. So I have something to post while I wait to get back to my freezer cooking.

This isn't a chicken tikka like you might be thinking about with chunks of chicken in a creamy tomato sauce that is served over rice, although I do have a freezer version of chicken tikka masala if that is what you are looking for.  No, this is chicken marinated in a yogurt marinade and roasted with potatoes and cauliflower.  It is delicious.  I served this to guests a few months ago and one in particular raved about it continually.