Category Archives: savoury

Authentic Chicken Satay

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This is a recipe I learned while in Singapore.  I attended a fabulous cooking class at the Cookery Magic school.  If you find yourself in Singapore and love cooking, I highly recommend booking in and taking a cab out to Ruqxana’s for a class.  It’s about 15-20 minutes out of the city.  The cab ride only cost about the equivalent of ten Australian dollars each way.  Ruqxana was able to fit me in with little notice and I’m glad, because it was a great experience.

I’ve remade this Chicken Satay – just to make sure I could perfect it at home.  And I’m happy to say I can!  So, now you can too.

Don’t be put off by the long (and unusual) ingredient list.  Authentic Asian cooking does mean a trip to an Asian grocer, if, like me, you don’t cook Asian often at home.  But, that is part of the fun of it.

Ingredients
500 grams chicken thigh, thinly sliced
bamboo or metal skewers
2 tablespoons oil
a pinch of caster sugar (optional)
salad and rice to serve

For the marinade:
2 stalks lemongrass, white part only
1 small onion
4 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder
2 teaspoons coriander powder
1 teaspoon cumin powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon palm sugar (gula melaka), grated

For peanut sauce:
10-20 dried chillis, soaked in hot water for 20 minutes to soften
1 inch long, thin slice of galangal
4  shallots
2 tablespoons oil
1 tablespoon coriander powder
1 tablespoon tamarind, soaked in 3/4 a cup of water to extract tamarind juice
1/2-1 tablespoon palm sugar (gula melaka), grated
salt, to taste
1/2 cup roasted crushed peanuts

Start by making the marinade for the chicken.  You are essentially making a paste with the lemongrass, onion and garlic, and a basic curry powder with the remaining marinade ingredients.  Chop the lemongrass as fine as as possible, and then blitz the paste ingredients in a blender or food processor.  Then put this mix into a mortar and use a pestle to pound all the flavour out of the ingredients.  Ruqxana was insistent that pounding made all the difference in releasing the flavours.  And I agree – something different does happen when you pound the ingredients – something which can’t be achieved with electricity alone.

Add the remaining curry powder ingredients: chilli powder, turmeric powder, coriander powder, cumin powder, salt and palm sugar to the mortar and pound and mix some more.

Rub the marinade into the chicken and leave for at least 3-4 hours in the fridge (overnight is best).  When the chicken is ready, thread the chicken pieces onto the skewers in a way which maximizes the surface area to the grill (i.e. thread the slices on, folding them back over each other, rather than pushing on big chunks of chicken, as this will help it cook more evenly).

Once the chicken skewers are ready, use a mix of oil (such as rice bran oil), with a little bit of additional caster sugar to brush over the skewers.  You can just spray them with oil, but brushing over the sugar oil will help them caramelize nicely on the barbeque.

Heat the barbeque on a medium to high heat and grill the chicken, turning frequently, until cooked through.  This will take about 8-10 minutes depending how thick your chicken is.

Meanwhile, prepare your peanut sauce.

Begin by soaking your dried chillis to soften, and preparing your tamarind water.  Tamarind water is an odd ingredient in cooking.  You buy a block of tamarind, which is dark and sticky and incredibly sour, take a tablespoon of it and soak this in 3/4 of a cup of water.  Squish the tamarind around in the water a bit, until the water goes muddy.  You use the water, or tamarind juice, but not the solid tamarind in cooking.

Make a paste from the galangal (which is like ginger, but more potent), shallots (the french ones, not the mis-named Australian ones), and dried chillis, by blitzing it up in a food processor or blender first and then pounding it in a mortar with a pestle until all the flavour has been released.

Bring all of your prepared ingredients around your stove top.  Crush your roasted peanuts, if you’re doing that yourself, grate your palm sugar and have your chilli paste, tamarind juice, coriander powder, salt and oil at hand.

Season your pan or wok (unfortunately, I live in the electric world, so my pan has better surface heat area than my wok) with a large pinch of salt as it heats to a medium temperature.  Add your oil, and wait till that reaches temperature.  If you stand a wooden spoon in the oil, it’s reached temperature when it bubbles around the spoon.

Fry the chilli paste in the oil until it is fragrant, and quite frankly, you can’t stand there any longer for your coughing up a storm.  Cooking this recipe is great for the sinuses.  This will take between 10 and 20 minutes.

Then add the coriander powder and fry for another minute.  Add the strained tamarind juice  (as much or as little as you like it sour), palm sugar (as much or as little as you like it sweet), and salt to taste.  Then, finally, add the peanuts and stir for 2 minutes.

Taste and adjust the flavours so it hits the right balance of hot, sour, sweet and salty for you.  If it’s too hot, add sugar.  If it feel just like it’s missing something, it’s missing salt.

Serve the sauce at room temperature, over the hot chicken.

The sauce is quite hot (though not as hot as I expected it to be with all that chilli), so it’s very refreshing served with a little cut salad and rice to soak up all the yummy sauce.

 

Cooking Asian food from first principles at home does take a bit more effort for me, because it doesn’t come naturally with all of the unusual ingredients… but it tasted good!  and it was fun to explore the Asian grocers for exciting ingredients.  So I encourage you to give first principles Asian cooking a go.

Middle Eastern Dinner Party – Part 1 – Ratatouille-Style Briouats

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Middle Eastern filo rolls

We recently had a Middle Eastern themed dinner party.  For entrée, I served these tasty Ratatouille-Style Briouats (I understand it to be pronounced bree-wat).

This was a recipe I gleaned from Jamie Does.  I was very taken by the episode where Jamie Oliver went to Marrakesh.  It made my feet itchy.

One of the great things about cooking, is that you can travel from your dining room table.  We’re so fortunate to be able to get amazing spices and interesting international foods now days at the local deli.  This dish is described as Moroccan street food.

I’ve heard stories of my Opa going to Morocco in his younger years.  It would have been years before the movie Casablanca came out.  Whilst making this entrée I wondered to myself whether my Opa would have ever eaten something like this in a market place in those days.  It must have been a very adventurous time to be in Morocco.

Ingredients
2 tomatoes, halved
2 zucchinis, halved length-ways and sliced
1 onion, peeled and cut into 8 wedges
1 red capsicum, deseeded and roughly chopped
1 eggplant, halved length-ways and sliced
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
2-4 teaspoons of ras el hanout spice mix
a good glug of olive oil
salt and pepper
2 handfuls of breadcrumbs 
2 lemons, one juiced and one cut in quarters
8-16 sheets of filo pastry
2 teaspoons sesame seeds (optional)
100g melted butter
150g greek yoghurt
2 teaspoons harissa
coriander or parsley to serve

Serves 4-6

Preheat oven to 180°C (or 160°C fan forced).  Toss the prepared veg, garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper and spices together in a large roasting tray and bung that in the oven for 45 minutes or so, until everything is cooked through and deliciously golden.  You may want to visit the vegetables half way through that cooking time to give them another little toss, so they colour and cook evenly.

When the vegetables are ready, pull them out and let them cool until they are cool enough to handle and roughly chop them until they are well mixed but not mush.  In a bowl, combine the chopped, roasted vegetables and the juice of one of the lemons.  Taste for seasoning.

At this point, turn your oven up to 220°C (or 200°C fan forced).  

To roll the Briouats, wet and wring out a clean tea-towel to lay your filo pastry on, so it won’t become dry and brittle.  Next, take your filo pastry and lay 2-4 sheets on top of each other, brushing in-between each layer with melted butter (yum) or oil.

I then sprinkled a half a handful of breadcrumbs along one long side of the filo (leaving a 3cm border) and spooned the vegetable mixture along that line too.  Breadcrumbs weren’t in the original recipe, but I wanted to make sure the pastry remained crispy and breadcrumbs are great at absorbing any extra liquid in the filling.  It may sound odd, but I do the same for apple strudel as well (you don’t taste it and it works a treat).

Use the tea-towel to assist you in rolling the pastry into a cigar shape, tucking in the short sides as you go to seal it up.  Use more melted butter as glue.  Mine came out looking more like sausage rolls.  I was running a little late and I didn’t take as much time or care as perhaps I should have… but it tasted good!  However, you could roll them to be much smaller, and more delicate cigars.

Placing the rolls in a baking dish, I then brushed them liberally with the melted butter (is there any other way to brush butter onto pastry?!), and sprinkled with some sesame seeds and a bit of left over spice mix and put it in the oven for about 20 minutes, until all crispy and golden.  Keep an eye on them intermittently.

Serve with wedges of lemon, fresh herbs, and a pot of yoghurt swirled with hot harissa - delicious!

The genius thing about this for an entrée, is that you can par-cook the rolls and pop them back in the oven for final browning when your guests are having a welcome drink with nibbles.

Stay tuned for Middle Eastern Dinner Party – Part 2 – Chicken, Olive and Preserved Lemon Tagine (without a tagine)… and the grand finale of Part 3 – Almond Honey Spice Syrup Cake with Fig, Date and Apricot Compote.

Quick ragout – Jamie’s Jools’ Pasta

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This is a mid-week staple in our house nowadays.  I love pasta and I love rich tomato-based ragouts.  But, the time it takes to make flavours really something special in a ragout, is often a luxury a mid-week cook can’t afford.

The Jamie Oliver 30 Minute Meals series and cookbook has revolutionised my cooking.  The method for this recipe, which produces rich ragout flavours which pack a punch super quickly, comes from a recipe in this book which Jamie calls Jools’ Pregnancy Pasta.  It’s quick, easy and heart warming.  What more could one want after a hard day at work?

You will need a food processor for this recipe.  And indeed for most recipes in the Jamie Oliver 30 Minute Meals collection.  I really do find this to be an indispensable piece for kitchen equipment.

Ingredients
flavour base veg (such as: onions, leeks, carrots, celery, spring onions, zucchini, capsicum – what ever is lurking around in your crisper)
flavour bomb ingredients (such as: tomato paste, garlic, anchovies, dried chilli, fennel seeds, dried mixed herbs, thyme, parsley and any other herbs you have in the garden)
good quality and flavorsome raw pork sausages (or chicken, or beef sausages)
deglazing ingredients (such as: a splash of red wine and a glug of balsamic vinegar)
a handful of cherry tomatoes
1-2 400g can/s of chopped tomatoes, or pasata, (depending how saucy you like your sauce)
soft herbs/greens (such as: basil, baby spinach)
parmesan cheese
double O
salt and pepper 

I’m not going to give you exact quantities for this recipe, because it is the kind of recipe which works with what ever you have and what ever you like best.  By sight, you can work out if you need a bit of extra sauce.  By smell, you can work out if it needs more flavour bomb ingredients.  And, by taste, you can work out if it needs more seasoning.

First things first.  Put a large, deep, fry pan on a medium-high heat with a swig of double O.  Then blitz all of your flavour base veg in your food processor until finely chopped.

Fry the chopped veg in the fry pan for a few minutes.  Then add your flavour bomb ingredients and fry those for a few minutes, whilst stirring too.

Now, squeeze the mince filling from your sausages into the fry pan. Alternatively, you can throw your sausages into the food processor and blitz them, cases and all, and put this mixture into the fry pan.  I normally do it this way, but this time I forgot and put the food processor in the dishwasher before I remembered the sausages.  It didn’t really matter.  I just had to use a bit more elbow grease to break the sausage mince up and make sure it evenly fried.

Then, once the sausage mince is all evenly browned, add the deglazing ingredients.  I add a splash of red wine (because it legitimises drinking a glass while cooking) and a glug of balsamic vinegar.  The vinegar may seem odd, and it will clear out your sinuses if you breathe it in when it first hits the pan, but trust me.  I thought it would be weird too.  But it reduces and becomes sweet and sticky and fabulous in this recipe.

Once the vinegar smell has cooked off, throw in your cherry tomatoes.

Finally, add your canned tomatoes and a little water and let this bubble away with a lid ajar on the fry pan while you cook the pasta.

Boil a jug of water and add to a pre-heated large saucepan.  Season the water (you may need 2 jugs of boiling water).  Then cook your pasta as per the packet directions.

If you have any soft herbs lying around (such as parsley, basil, or even baby spinach) stir these into the sauce at the last moment to wilt.  Taste and season as desired.

Serve drained pasta topped with sauce and cheese and devour!  Quick and easy….but it tasted good!

Pumpkin Soup with Savoury Pumpkin Scones

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Today, was Pumpkin Day!  A small nearby village, called Collector, hosts an annual Pumpkin Festival and it’s a right hoot.  The festival has pumpkin rolling competitions and prizes for best scarecrow, to name but two of the fabulous things which happen at the Pumpkin Festival.

Needless to say, I bought up big on big pumpkins.  I know – big pumpkins is a relative term.  Compared to the size of pumpkin I normally buy, these were massive.  Compared to the pumpkin which won the heaviest pumpkin ribbon – these are tiny!

collector pumpkin festival

After much consideration, I decided to make a pumpkin soup and some savoury pumpkin scones for dinner.  Both were delicious and because they both freeze well, will make great lunches in the week.

Ingredients – Soup
1 large pumpkin, deseeded and cut into chunks
1 tablespoon sumac
olive oil
1 litre vegetable stock
400ml coconut milk
1 large red onion, diced
2 teaspoons hot smoked paprika
thumb sized piece of ginger, grated
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 a nutmeg, grated
coriander, roots and stalks finely chopped, leaves whole
salt & pepper
yoghurt (or sour cream) to serve

Preheat oven to 200°C (fan forced).  Coat the pumpkin in olive oil and sprinkle sumac, salt & pepper over.  Roast in the oven for 30-40 minutes.

Meanwhile, gently sweat down the onions in the olive oil and add the coriander roots and stalks, paprika, ginger, garlic, cinnamon and nutmeg.

When your pumpkin is soft after roasting, remove from oven and let cool slightly.  Then, carefully peal away the pumpkin skin and add the flesh to your onions.  Add the vegetable stock and stir.  Let the stock some to the simmer and simmer for 10 minutes.  Then, take a stick blender and blend the pumpkin.  Finally, add the coconut milk to warm through.  Serve soup with a dollop of yoghurt or sour cream and top with coriander leaves.

Ingredients – Scones
500g pumpkin, peeled and chopped
3 1/2 cups self-raising flour
salt & pepper
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup shaved parmesan
1/2 cup grated tasty cheese
3 slices of prosciutto, sliced

Recipe inspired by Donna Hay

Preheat oven to 180°C (fan forced).  Roast pumpkin for 30-40 minutes.  Place pumpkin flesh in a large bowl with the flour, salt and pepper and mash until smooth.  I used disposable latex gloves to mix this.

Make a well in the centre and gradually add the milk, mixing until combined.  Press out onto a baking tray, lined with baking paper, to form a 20cm x 30cm rectangle.  Top with the parmesan, cheddar and prosciutto.  Score into 12 squares and place on a baking tray. Bake for 20 minutes.

Tips Tuesday (on a Wise Wednesday?) – how to score perfect pork crackling

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Good morning to those who are in Wednesday morning land,

I might just be squeezing in a Tips Tuesday for those followers in a different time zone.  For the rest of us, I’m sorry, I was slack yesterday and didn’t get around to a Tips Tuesday post (Wise Wednesday, perhaps?).

In any case, my wise tip for today is on how to score perfect pork crackling.  Or, more to the truth – how to perfectly score pork crackling.

Run out to the hardware shop and buy yourself a retractable utility knife (often referred to as a Stanley knife or a box cutter here).  Set it to the depth of your pork skin.  The important thing here is to make sure you don’t cut through to the meat.  Ideally you should be cutting the skin to expose the fat, so that the fat can render (and become deliciously crispy and crunchy).  A retractable utility knife will make sure you don’t slip (making it safer) and will see your crackling perfectly even in depth.  If you’re after perfectly even slices of crackling at the end, your best bet is to also pull out a ruler and start the process by making nicks in the pork skin at 1 cm intervals on the diagonal or horizontal and then using that as a guide.

My other pork crackling tip is to only do it in your oven, if your oven is already ready for a clean.  Roasting pork with crackling in a clean oven is just silly, because it will surely need another clean once your done!  Otherwise, if you have a BBQ with a lid, set it up so that your pork is roasting by indirect heat there (i.e. not directly over a burner).

Today is a beautiful public holiday here in Australia – ANZAC Day.  To all my Australian and New Zealand readers, Lest We Forget.

I expect to spend the rest of the day in the kitchen.  So hopefully I can post some more interesting and exciting treats soon.

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