Buck-buck-BUCKAAA

The theme for this post is chicken.  That ubiquitous white meat that is almost a by-word for bland.

In the defence of chicken, it’s not so much bland as overly familiar.  The UK consumes a massive 1.2 billion birds a year.

Which is probably why our butchers had 5kg of chicken breasts on offer at £25.  Which we bought.  And carried home.  On foot.

5kg is surprisingly heavy after 1.3 miles of traipsing.

So now armed with our bounty of chicken boobs we went a little chicken crazy.

First we made a simple moroccan chicken dish.  We’ve done this a few times, including for guests, because it is both very simple and very tasty.

We chunked up about 500g of breast meat into 2cm dice, tossed it in seasoned flour and fried it in olive oil until golden.

We set the chicken to one side, turned the heat down, added some more oil, and fried two sliced onions until softened and slightly coloured.  Then the chicken went back in along with 2 tsp of cinnamon, 2 tsp of sumac, a quarter of a tsp of ground cloves, a handful of sultanas and 250ml of chicken stock.

We love sumac.  We add it to pretty much anything we think we can get away with.  Our original pot had to be ordered online, but we think our current pot came from Waitrose.  Yes, we liked it before it was cool, but we love the fact it has become cool.  Half hipster?

Sorry, we were in the middle of a recipe weren’t we?

Simmer the resultant mass on a low heat for about 5 minutes.  Enough for it to heat through and thicken slightly.  Then stir in 50g of pine nuts and the juice of a lemon.  We sometimes add chopped fresh coriander at this point, but our plant is looking a little sad, so we didn’t.

We usually serve this with couscous, although if we’re being fancy/showing off we add some yoghurt and a flatbread.

After this we trundled across the Atlantic to Jamaica.

This dish was from Caribbean Food Made Easy with Levi Roots.  It was originally Spatchcocked Poussins with Rum Barbecue Sauce.  However, our notes from the last time we did it say, “lovely sauce. poussin bit fiddly. try on chicken breast”

So we did.

The recipe also asks for the poussins to be cooked on a griddle pan.  To which we responded with a huge eye roll and did our chicken in the oven with a little sauce.  Then poured the rest of the sauce over it at the end.

It ain’t pretty.  But it is tasty.

Whilst we had the oven on for the Jamaican chicken, we also roasted two nude breasts for lunches.  Cooled and chopped they made a nice hearty chicken noodle salad for six.

This was quite a good dish for us as it was mostly store cupboard staples and home-grown produce.  Both the green beans on the allotment and the cucumbers in the greenhouse have gone berserk.  Homegrown cucumbers seem to have much larger seeds than commercial ones, so we usually deseed them (unless adding to a G&T).

We cooked 300g of medium dried egg noodles and mixed them with two sticks of celery, chopped into batons, a cucumber, peeled, sliced and deseeded, 200g of blanched french beans, chopped up a little, a bunch of sliced spring onions (also home grown) and a tbsp of sesame seeds.

This got topped with the chopped chicken and dressed with a pretty powerful dressing.

We mixed 2 tsp of sesame oil, 4 tbsp of light soy, 2 tbsp each of balsamic vinegar and sugar, and the juice of a lime.

We think this might be a reoccurring summer salad.  It is particularly good as a packed lunch for work.

We have to admit that, despite chicken breast being the main chicken portion sold in the UK, we much prefer chicken thighs.  It’s both a texture thing and a flavour thing.

We are also massive Wagamama fans (as we may have mentioned), and one of the standard items on our order is the Tori Kara Age.  This is deep fried herbed chicken thigh  pieces served with a dip.

On one of our recent (numourous) trips to Wags we wondered if we could make them ourselves. The adventure was slightly removed from the equation by the realisation we actually had the recipe in the Wagamama cookbook, but we perserved.

The recipe suffered from all the usualy Wagamama issues.  It only asked for 3 tbsp of the marinade, but referenced out to a sperate recipe that made 750ml of the damn stuff.  We made a third of the quantity and used it all.

Why on earth would you be mean with the marinade?

The dipping sauce suffered from a similar issue.  The Tori Kara Age recipe only wanted 2 tbsp, but the sauce recipe made 350ml.  Some significant quantity reduction required.

We served it as a main with a little sushi rice.  And poured the dipping sauce all over the rice.

It was nice.  But Wags did it better.

Finally we used a chicken carcass and some pigs’ trotters to make a beautiful stock.  This was for the last Chinese recipe in Allegra McEvedy’s Around The World In 120 Recipes. A really tasty Busy Noodle Broth.

All the effort goes into the stock.  Then you heat some noodles in it and tip a load of veg in.  Things like cabbage, cucumber, edamame beans and thinly sliced radishes.

We finished it off with soy sauce and chilli oil, and it made a fantastic weekend lunch.

 

Post script:  We’ve been watching Nadia’s British Food Adventure, and she continues to be an utter delight.  Dan liked the look of her Crisp, Chocolate, and Salted Peanut Tart.

So we made it.

The chocolate bit itself was lovely. But, considering it was a show off for the crisps, it would have been better without the crisps.

Bit disappointing really.

 

Orange, White & Purple

‘Tis the season for glutting.

The allotment has gone into root vegetable overdrive, which is a tad unfortunate since the majority of good root vegetable recipes are distinctly more autumnal.

There have been many incidences lately where we’ve found a perfectly lovely looking recipe, only to have to cast it aside as it mentions parsnips.  It is definitely not parsnip season. Or squash season.  We might have to substitute with sweet potatoes instead…

Basically we have too many carrots, new potatoes, and beetroot.

Yes, yes, I know potatoes aren’t technically a root vegetable.  They are indeed a tuber. But then again tomatoes are a fruit, bananas are a berry, coconuts aren’t really nuts, raspberries aren’t really berries, and culinary and botanical definitions are frequently different things.

Happy now?

Good.

Back to the carrots.  Those are definitely root vegetables no matter which hat you wear.

We started out by trying a new recipe from a modern way to eat, which was “Spiced Carrot and Cashew Salad, with Fresh Coconut and Coriander”.  This caught our eye for its use of carrots, lots of spices and the need for half a cucumber.

We also have too many cucumbers.

We weren’t blown away by this recipe if we’re honest.  The carrots got lost in the dressing and the cashews were kinda soft and insipid.

So we reverted back to good old River Cottage Veg and made Carrot Hummus.  We served it with some flatbreads we’d sprinkled a little sumac on.

In fact the Carrot Hummus recipe is so good (and we can’t find it on the River Cottage website), that we’re going to include it here.

Preheat the oven to 200°C.  In a large bowl whisk 4 tbsp pf olive/rapeseed oil with 1 tsp honey and 1 tsp each of toasted and roughly ground cumin and coriander seeds.

Cut 500g of peeled carrots into 4-5cm chunks and add to the bowl with 3 large, bashed, garlic cloves.  Tip into a small roasting tin and cook for about 35 minutes, turning once, until the carrots are tender and starting to char.

Allow to cool slightly, then tip into a food processor, slipping the garlic cloves out of their skins as you do.  Add the juice of half a lemon, the juice of a whole orange, 3 tbsp of tahini, and 2 more tbsp of oil.  Pulse to puree and you are done.

Much better than the salad.

Moving on to the potatoes, again we got a bit of a mixed bag.

We started with a vegan recipe for Swedish Potato Salad…which we served with left over roast pork and the very end of last year’s Pepper Pickle.

It was okay.  It mostly made us want to make mayonnaise again.

As with the carrots, the second recipe we tried was apparently more of a sucess.  I say apprently because I was away on business the entire time, but Daniel raved about it.

We returned to the very hit and miss a modern way to cook and made the Sweet and Sticky Tomato and Onion Bake.  It should be noted that the book differs from the web version it that it uses 750g of cherry tomatoes, and replaces the lemon and feta with a tin of cannellini beans.

Finally we move onto the beetroots and yet another sucess for a modern way to cook.  The Lentils and Beets with Salsa Verde was so incredibly good we were willing to forgive the anchovy free salsa verde (not mandatory, but massively prefered).

Everything just worked in this recipe.  The lentils cooked perfectly and the sweetness of the beets woked wonderfully with the full punch of the salasa verde.

We shall almostly certainly do this again this summer.

Finally we move to our last beetroot recipe.  It is, again, a wonderful recipe, but much less likely to be repeated as it is a Nopi recipe.

We made Baked Blue-cheese Cake with Pickled Beetroot and Honey.

We started a week ahead, by making the pickled beetroot.  Now usually I can’t stand pickled beetroot.  I’m fine with roasted or raw, but the pickled I actively dislike.

The Nopi recipe is a bit different.  Because it uses red wine vinegar, rather than malt, the resulting pickle is much softer, less aggressive than the usual stuff.  It tastes more like beetroot, and I actually quite liked it.

The rest of the dish was actually quite easy.  It can proably best be described as a blue cheese and leek quiche with a pumpkin seed and parmesan biscuit base.

It was really quite a nice, chilled, cook.  Especially by Nopi standards.  Admittedly we didn’t eat until gone 10pm, but it was worth it.

We served it with basil, beetroot, hazelnuts and a drizzle of honey.

You’re a tart

So my Dad is re-learning how to cook.

I have very strong memories of my Dad making certain food stuffs, mostly bread, sardines, and an exciting afternoon when he attempted pasta.  But most of these are from the distant past.

But times change, and now my Dad is relearning how to cook.

This has involved several email chains and phone calls as I point him in the direction of certain recipes.  And several emails and phone calls when he’s shown off things he’s cooked.  One of which was a very lovely looking tuna tart.

Which in turn inspired us to make a tart.

A cheese and bacon tart.  With a little green thrown into make it borderline healthy.  We used peas because frozen peas are the most easily accessible greens in the universe and, currently, the work life balance thing has become a trifle not balanced.

Obviously there is mint with the peas.  Because that is the natural order of things.

This will be a recipe of shortcuts.

Currently having both of us in the house at the same time is a bit of a luxury, so not even we want to spend all our time together cooking.

Also a Wagamamas has opened in town.

We are doomed.

But enough of our various excuses and on to a delicious and easy tart.

Cheat number one is using ready made short crust pastry.  We used Jus-rol and it is surprisingly good!

We greased a 24cm springform cake tin and lined it with a circle of pastry a good inch bigger than the tin.  We pricked it with a fork and then we stuck it in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Whilst the pastry was chilling, we heated up the oven to 200°C and put a heavy baking tray in to get hot as well.  The heaviness is important – a lighter tray, such as a crisping tray, will lead to the ever dreaded soggy bottom.

In fact the heavy tray is proably cheat number two.  It means we don’t have to blind bake the pastry.

Whilst everything was either heating up or cooling down, we started on the tart filling.

We fried 200g of bacon lardons until golden and slightly crispy.  Then we added 2 finely chopped shallots and 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, and cooked until slightly softened.  Finally we stirred in 350g of thawed peas and set the lot aside to cool slightly.

In a large jug we combined 6 large eggs, 300ml of double cream, 100g of grated mature Cheddar  and a good handful of chopped mint.  Once the eggs so longer looked, well, eggy, we added the pea mixture, stirred, and poured it all into the chilled pastry.

Very quickly we put the tart on the hot tray and into the hot oven for 45 minutes.  About half way through we covered it with foil to stop it from catching.

Then we let it stand for at least half an hour before releaseing it from the tin.

We think it’s actually nicer cold than hot and it defiently made a lovely packed lunch.