These doughnuts are fried, not baked, and made with yeast. Cake donuts may be everywhere these days, but they will never compare to a fluffy, doughy, yeasty fried doughnut. The kind of doughnut that has just a little crisp to its edges. The kind of doughnut that melts in your mouth. Light, airy, and totally, deliciously bad for you.

Make sure to use a kitchen scale for best results. They can be found fairly cheaply at a variety of sources. If you are familiar with making yeast-raised dough, feel free to estimate. I make this in a stand mixer, but you can absolutely make it without one. It will just take a bit longer and require a little more work.

I’m making doughnut holes, but you can make any shape you like. I prefer making the holes because it’s quick and easy, and I don’t have to bother with a rolling pin and cookie cutters! Plus the holes are so easy to flip when they’re frying – some of them actually flip themselves.

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I am quite a big fan of Skinnytaste. Many of those recipes have found their way into my tummy. It was from there where I first found a recipe for chicken with dijon mustard. Until recently, I hated mustard with a passion. It was ketchup’s foul tasting enemy. Within the past couple of years, I have noticed my opinion change. This recipe likely bears many similarities with the one I had originally found on Skinnytaste. I have not made her recipe in quite a while, but I’m sure I have the basics of it stuck in my head, and they likely bled into this recipe.

This is the second time I’ve made this sauce. The first time, the fiancé about died from how much he loved it. I was quite pleased, and proceeded to write down the ingredients I had used so I could make it again. This time around, I made it just for myself, with plenty leftovers, and added some mayonnaise and mushrooms. I have to say, this is waaay better with the mushrooms. It was so good. With some roasted asparagus and salad, it was a pretty damn awesome meal. There are enough leftovers to last me today and probably tomorrow as well. I’m pretty excited about that. I’ve already had leftovers once!

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Indian food is my favourite food. I absolutely love it. When I was in grades six and seven, I attended a school with a very large population of Middle Eastern students, and along with the customary pizza days, we also had samosa days. That was my very first introduction to foods from that part of the world, and I loved it. I don’t know why I never pursued it further until almost ten years later when I was working at a pizza place in the same plaza as an Indian restaurant. I used to go there to get samosas when I was hungry, since I was sick of the cheap pizzas we made. They had awesome beef samosas. I ended up branching out and trying a few actual meals, including butter chicken and, my favourite, vindaloo, and actually worked there briefly as a bartender a year later. Ever since then, I have been a fiend for Indian cuisine.

My fiancé loves butter chicken. It’s one of his favourite foods. I decided to be the Best Fiancée Ever and combine butter chicken with one of his other favourite foods, pizza. I have a regular pizza dough recipe, but it wasn’t quite right. It’s wasn’t “authentic” enough. So I decided to use naan as the crust. I wanted the texture to be more like a regular pizza crust, but I wanted it to taste like naan. I looked at a few naan recipes, noted the typical ingredients, and began experimenting. I would say that this was a total success. It was crispy and fluffy and had that distinct naan taste. With butter chicken sauce instead of tomato sauce, and cooked chicken breast on top, it was amazingly delicious. So good. I made two 14″ pizzas, expecting to have leftovers, but they were both gone in minutes. It was just me, the boy, and two of my friends.

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Growing up, my siblings and I spent a lot of time at our grandparents’ homes, and I’m not going to lie, I was not happy about that as a kid. Partially. My dad’s parents’ house was fine, because my cousins used to leave their N64 there all the time, and I didn’t have one and damn did I love that thing. But my mom’s? I love them, really, but there was nothing to play with at that house but old toys from my other cousin. They didn’t even have cable TV, and this was the 90s and early 00s. I spent a lot of time reading there (and watching Maury, but they can never know that), with which I suppose I was fine since I absolutely loved to read then (I still like to read but not as much for some reason). The real redeeming thing about going there (besides quality time with my grandparents, but I didn’t understand that as a little kid!) was my avó’s chicken and rice. All of us, my siblings and my cousins, love that chicken. We also happen to love her pizza, but that’s another story.

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My mom doesn’t really cook. I’m not saying that she can’t cook, just that she doesn’t. She’s a big fan of take-out. Which is funny, because she went through this cooking phase. Except it wasn’t really a cooking phase, but more of a buying kitchen stuff phase. She got a deep fryer, a bunch of chopping blocks and cutting boards, fancy knives, this cool vegetable peeler that makes peeling potatoes approximately 100% easier, and a whole bunch of other crap that I just don’t remember. This phase was a few years ago now. I inherited a bunch of the stuff when she finally admitted that she was never going to use any of it.

When I was a kid, she cooked more often. One of the things she made the most was chicken fajitas. I loved those fajitas, and when I started cooking for myself, they were what I made pretty much all the time. I hated raw meat back then. It was so gross to me; I couldn’t touch it. I remember one time, I think I was sixteen, I was house- and dog-sitting for her while she was having surgery. I had to make dinner for myself. I was still fairly new to that back then (I don’t know if that was a bit old to just start cooking for myself?), and was actually using precooked chicken breast strips I had gotten from the grocery store. It worked out well enough if I remember correctly. I used that precooked chicken for quite a while before my avó finally chastised me and gave me a raw chicken breast. I did not like touching it. So slimy and gross. But I got over it.

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