Saada (Simple) Pulao

Mandatory Items:

• Rice (Scale: for 1 person, use 1 cup; for 2-3 people, use 2 cups; for 4 people, use 3 cups ...)
• Onions (Chop them up and keep around 1/2 onion separate from the others)
• Tomatoes (Slice them very thinly)
• Cloves (According to taste)
• Garam Masala (According to taste)
• Salt (According to taste)
• Meat: Preferably Beef ... but Lamb also tastes good.
• Clean but cold water
• Some Heavy Weight (Brick or something like that)
• Clean newspapers (or any absorbing paper material)

Optional Items:

• Raisins (According to taste)
• If you don't want to use bricks and newspapers, than arrange for some dough.

Procedure:

• Wash the rice thoroughly to remove any starch away from it. (This prevents the rice from clumping up when it becomes cold)
• Also wash the meat thoroughly. If the meat is in big chunks, it is preferable to cut them to small pieces for easy cooking.
• Take a big pan, put some oil in it (Put little more than you put for ordinary rice) and fry onions, cloves, and Garam Masala in it.
• Put the meat into the fried onions and fry the meat as well. Keep on frying for at least 10 minutes on medium fire. Stir in between as well occasionally but not too much. The meat will have enough water in it to prevent it from sticking to the pan.
• Put Tomatoes (that you have cut thinly) into the pan and keep on cooking for at least 10 more minutes on the same medium fire.
• Put the washed rice into the pan and also put some water as well. (Note about Water: With rice .. especially Pulao rice, you have to be very sure how much water you put in it. If you put more water, your Pulao will become Kichrhi and you dont want that to happen. So the Golden rule is to put less water and once it is dried up, taste the rice to see if it is properly cooked or not. If it is cooked, then leave it. If it is not cooked, then keep on adding water until it is cooked. Normally, I measure my water by putting my finger into the pan. If the water level from the surface of the rice is "2-Finger-Band's", then it is okay. Just in case you didn't know, each of our finger has 3 "Band's")
• After this stage, just make sure that you never stir the rice in the pan until it is cooked. I can't stress on this point enough.
• Add some salt to taste ... Again, there is no need to stir the salt in.
• In a separate frying pan, you fry the remaining bit of onions until they are dark brown in colour.
• Put the washed raisins into this dark-brown fried onions. Remember, the raisins will become "DAD" (Dont know English word for it) very quickly. Once this is done, put everything in the frying pan into the rice-pan. Again, there is no need to stir it in.
• Keep on heating on medium fire until you see that all of the water has been dried up. At this stage, put the flame at the very lowest possible such that it is near to being put off. Take a little bit of rice to make sure the taste is okay. Don't worry about the meat because it would be cooked and will be very tender by now. If you feel that there is not enough salt, then take a gulp of water in a glass and add salt to it according to the required amount and put that water into the pan. Again heat it until this water is dry as well.
• Once everything is okay, put some newspaper on the pan and then place the lid on top of it. Place a very heavy item (like a Brick) on top of this lid as well to prevent the steam from going out of the pan. Alternatively, if you have arranged for dough, then paste the dough on the pan such that all open spaces are blocked. Remember ... we are doing this only to make it air-tight so that the steam does not go out and at the same time absorb all the moisture from the rice using the newspaper.
• Keep the air-tight pan on the lowest possible flame for at least 20 minutes.
• After 20 minutes, remove the newspaper and shake the rice while in the pan (not stir it)

That's it ... Enjoy your Simple Pulao ... We loved it ... But forgot to shake the rice once it was cooked. Also apologies for the wooden spoon that was in the way.