Creamy chicken recipes should be in your weekend indulgence menu or during a particularly taxing weekday dinner. To that menu, add this delicious Japan chicken, which has nothing to do with the island country, and instead is a special chicken dish from Tamil Nadu. This dish starts with fried chicken that is coated in a rich, garlicky cashew-milk sauce that first made its name at Erode's Amman Mess, before spreading to restaurant menus across the state once word got around about how good it was. It is a part of the creamy chicken recipes, but a stretch to call it a creamy chicken recipe from Japan, as it's really a South Indian invention that just happened to pick up an evocative name along the way. There are two stages to this dish – the first is the frying, where the chicken pieces are seasoned, coated in a mix of plain flour and cornstarch, then deep-fried, and the second stage is the sauce, which is buttery, garlicky and has slit green chillies, sautéed just until fragrant, then milk goes in along with ground cashews (or almonds), white pepper and some sugar, then it simmers. As is the norm with any creamy chicken recipes, this Japan chicken is best eaten hot, straight off the stove, while the fried coating is still at its crispest. It's flexible about what it's served alongside: from plain steamed rice, which lets the chicken dish be the star, or, going fancy, you can eat it with fried rice or noodles, or serve it on its own as a starter with the sauce doing double duty as a dip.

Perfect for Parsi New Year celebrations, along with an assortment of Parsi food, Russian pattice has nothing to do with Russia, and everything to do with chicken and patties. The chicken is boiled first in a unique combination of salt, pepper, and ginger-garlic paste, then the chicken and stock are separated, with the stock going toward making the patties and giving them that juiciness. The bones are discarded, and the chicken meat is kept, which gets cooked into a rich filling perfect for shaping into patties. This Parsi food is your chicken cutlet or tikkis, whichever you might want to call them and perfect for a crowd that loves their meatballs. They are crispy on the outside and soft and almost melt-in-the-mouth, courtesy of the chicken stock and the cooked filling. It’s a great party appetiser for Parsi New Year, and something to munch on that's filling and gives you the protein you need. The best cut of chicken for maximum flavour is the chicken thighs, with the bone and skin on. You can go for boneless as well, but the stock gets that extra flavour from the chicken bones. What’s unique about this Parsi food is that the patties are coated in semolina, something this community is terribly fond of, with an egg dip that fries to a golden-brown, delicious meat dish.

Gatari Amavasya 2026 falls on 12 August, the last day of the Ashadha month before Shravan begins, and with it fasting. Across Maharashtra, it's the day households go all-in on non-vegetarian food before roughly a month of abstinence. Pandhra rassa is one of these non-vegetarian dishes that might be a Kolhapuri dish, but is not fiery hot and red like the typical dishes which use Kolhapuri masala. This dish is white courtesy of the cashews and thin because of the rich mutton broth it is cooked in. The colour of pandhra rassa is in the name itself, with ‘pandhra’ meaning white and ‘rassa’ meaning gravy in Marathi. It's traditionally served as the first dish of a Kolhapuri mutton thali, not the main dish, with the broth-like consistency meant to be sipped or spooned before the heavier dishes arrive. The hot tambda rassa is served right alongside this white dish, and the red-and-white pairing is such a fixture at legendary Kolhapur eateries like Padma that ordering a thali without both feels incomplete to a local. Roasted dried coconut, cashews and a ginger-garlic-chilli paste build the masala base of pandhra rassa, which is nutty and milky. Locally, it's often reached for as a comforting, restorative bowl, the kind of thing that is prepared when someone in the family has a cold or a sore throat, valued as much for how soothing it feels as for its taste. Legend has it that the city's famous wrestlers, after a hard bout, would ask for a bowl of rassa to recover, which is part of why the dish carries a reputation as something restorative rather than purely indulgent.