I looked for ground chicken at the high-end grocery where I usually shop - Walmart - and no luck. So I picked up a 1.5 lb package of boneless skinless chicken breasts and took them home to try my luck with the food processor. Wow! I'll never buy ground chicken again. This "chicken mince" as some of my friends would call it is so much nicer and fresher, and the processor reduced it to goo, which is what I wanted anyway.
I'm aiming towards another chicken soup with rice, this one in a Central Asian direction. I've had some good teachers, the Punjabi ladies, along with an interest in various ways to make pilaf that started with a collection of Afghan recipes that I came across decades ago, from which I learned the typical seasonings.
Garam Masala is ubiquitous in Punjabi cooking. You can find it easily but, like the spice we call "curry powder", no actual Indian ever uses it. They buy their spices as seeds, roast them in proportions normal for their region, and grind them, just enough for a few meals. Everything fresh! My friends sadly saw that I was not up to all that and offered this saving advice: mix the store-bought garam masala with about that much again of mixed cumin and coriander - until it tastes right...
Years ago I did something similar with the curry powder. I discovered that members of my family (naming no names) disliked, specifically, fenugreek. So reading the ingredients on the spice bottle, I mixed up a batch of everything but the fenugreek, and it was a great success! (Except it didn't taste like curry. Fenugreek is the sine qua non.)
Update: meatballs have good flavor but too-dense texture. I am considering.
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