Roast Lamb

Tags

christmas, dinner, festive, herbs, mains, roast lamb

I love my oven, its so useful for cooking. Leave the food to cook, wander about your business and come back to a meal. I don’t know how I would have lived without it back in university… we microwaved/oven baked our way through loads of frozen food 🙂

This Roast lamb recipe was taught to us by our housemate’s mom, who’s an amazing cook and fed the house whenever she visited. I particularly loved her roast lamb and scones. The most fiddlesome thing in this recipe is probably separating the leaves and the stems of the herbs, but other than that it’s relatively doable. And I love the way I feel like the Flintstones, brandishing a large hunk of meat on bone, like the true carnivore that I am.

Ingredients (Serves 6)

1. 1 leg of lamb at room temperature
2. 1-2 Carrots
3. 1 Large Onion
4. 1 whole Garlic bulb
5. 1 stick of butter at room temperature, it should be soft and malleable
6. Herbs – Thyme (I used the normal thyme as well as lemon thyme), Rosemary, Parsley (I used English Parsley), Mint
7. Mint Jelly (I love Mint Jelly!!!) to serve alongside the lamb
8. 1 cup Chicken stock
9. 1/2 tbsp flour for thickening (or more if you like it thicker)
10. Salt
11. Black Pepper

Cooking instructions

1) Please wash the herbs thoroughly, do not use them directly from the packet. A lot of these herbs have residual mud hiding in the leaves so give them a good rinse.

2) Pat the herbs dry with a paper towel. Then here’s the troublesome bit… strip the leaves off the stems. Of course if you’re lazy you could just chop them all up into bits, but do this at least for the thyme. Remember to leave some rosemary sprigs, we will use that later on as well.

Garden of herbs

Dry the herbs

Strip the leaves off their stems and chop them up finely.

Mince the garlic 

3) Mix the garlic into the butter in a bowl. Add in the herbs and incorporate further to form a garlic butter paste like below:

4) Prepare your leg of lamb. It should be at room temperature and this is very important for a tender chunk of lamb. Rub the lamb leg with some salt and black pepper and make random slits in the meat

5) Slather the garlic butter mixture all over the lamb. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 220 degrees celsius.

6) Remember the slits you made? Stick in some rosemary sprigs like so.

7) Chop the carrots and onions into chunks and large slices and place into a large baking tray. Place the lamb on top and cover with aluminum foil. Pop it into the oven for about 20 minutes.

8) After 20 minutes, remove the aluminum foil and use it to wrap around the bone end of the lamb. This area burns the quickest, so to avoid smoking up your oven, best to cover up the bone end.

9) The lamb will brown once the foil is removed, it is important to keep basting the lamb every 10 minutes or so (I don’t know, but it seems to work?). So every 10-15 minutes, scoop the melted herb butter out of the tray and onto the lamb. Your total cooking time will be around 1.5 hours. You could use a meat thermometer to check whether the meat is rare, medium or well done however my thermometer lied to me and told me that my meat was overdone when it was still rare. I improvised without it.

10) Remove the lamb from the oven and transfer to a warm plate before covering with aluminum foil. Let the meat rest for at least half an hour before carving.

11) Scoop out the carrots and onions and place in a serving plate. Pour out the herb/butter into a bowl, and scrape out the brown bits (brown, not burnt!) from the tray as well. This will be used to make the gravy.

12) Skim the excess oil off the herb butter, there’ll probably be a lot, and strain the herb sediments out. I was lazy so the gravy had bits of herbs everywhere.

13) Heat up a small saucepan and pour in the chicken stock. Bring to a simmer. Mix the flour with 1-2 tbsps room temperature water before slowly adding it into the chicken stock. Season with salt and pepper, continuously stirring until the mixture thickens.

Serve your lamb with the gravy and mint sauce. Of course, no roast dinner is complete without other side dishes so I’ll do another blog post on that in the future. What I used to accompany the roast lamb this time is some new potatoes.

New potatoes

1) Boil about 8 new potatoes

2) Quarter them

3) Add 30g of butter into a skillet to melt on medium-high heat

4) Add potatoes to the pan and toss in the butter

5) Add in some chopped parsley, a generous sprinkle of salt and black pepper and if you like, some garlic powder. Toss to coat well. Try not to use a spatula to mix the herbs and potatoes together. It is a messy process and you may break the potatoes into many little pieces along the way. Just use your wrist and toss the ingredients using the movements of the pan. Yes I know, I find it difficult as well since my wrist doesn’t seem to have enough strength for it. But believe me this is the way to do it.

There you have it, a juicy joint of meat (look at the picture below! all those delicious juices gleaming on the meat), potatoes as well as the carrots and onions that were in the pan. Feels very festive doesn’t it?

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Shredded Chicken and Mushroom Hor Fan

Tags

Chinese, healthy, Home Cooking, Noodles, South East Asian

Shredded Chicken and Mushroom Hor Fan

This was one of my favourite dishes back in secondary school when I was studying in Queensway (Singapore, not KL where I wouldn’t have so much freedom to buy food like this 🙂 ). I’d walk over to the hawker center across the road and buy a packet of chicken hor fan in dark sauce with plenty of green chillis and the special chilli sauce they had at the store. Then I’d bring it home and eat it comfortably in my air conditioned room. Bliss~

It’s been a while since I had it, since I don’t know where the Hor Fan uncle has moved to now. So I looked up recipes for chicken Hor Fan online and I must say there weren’t very many recipes on chicken hor fan. Mostly Ipoh Hor Fan. I did manage to find one that I adapted and used. The ingredients are pretty simple and doesn’t need a lot of work to make. I’m only lacking the special chilli sauce from Uncle’s stall =( I can’t remember what it tastes like anymore, only that it was very good.

500g of kuay teow

Ingredients (for 1 pax)

1. 1 Chicken breast (or half if you’re not a big eater)
2. 250 gm fresh or packaged Kuay teow/hor fan/flat rice noodles (the thinner ones are preferable)
3. A couple stalks of chye sim washed and chopped into two equal lengths

For the sauce

1. 1 dried Chinese mushroom (I used Japanese mushroom since I didn’t have the Chinese type), soaked in hot water until soft and slice. Remove the stem
2. 1 cup chicken stock
3. 1 tsp light soy sauce
4. 1 tsp dark soy sauce
5. 1 tsp oyster sauce
6. 2 tsp corn flour
7. 1/2 tsp sesame oil
8. Pinch of salt
9. 1 tsp sugar

Cooking Instructions

1. Prepare the Kuay teow according to the packet instructions. For the packet that I used, I slid the semi fresh noodles into some hot water (put some salt into the water to flavour the noodles) and let it soften a little before separating the noodles with chopsticks. Shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes, otherwise you’d have soggy mush on your hands. Drain water and arrange kuay teow in the serving plate. Just so you know, the picture below shows 500g of cooked kuay teow … you need half of this for one serving.

2. Season the chicken with salt and pepper and boil it. Once it is cooked, shred the chicken and top the kuay teow with the chicken pieces.

3. Blanche the vegetables in boiling water for about 1 minute, stems first as they take longer to cook. Don’t overcook them as you’d want to keep the vegetables crunchy.

4. Combine all the sauce ingredients, bring to a boil then simmer until the sauce thickens. Taste as you go along and adjust to your liking. The sauce should have a heavy enough taste to flavour the noodles.

Pardon the random bits of corn floating around, I had used some corn and carrot chicken broth as the base.

5. Once the sauce has thickened, pour over the chicken and noodles.

Serve with a spicy sauce and garlic oil. It was good, but one of these days I will try to create a chilli sauce to go with this dish. Perhaps something spicy, sour and sweet would be nice I think. 

Kimchi Jiggae

Tags

dinner, egg tofu, healthy, kimchi, Korean, mains, pork, Soup, stew

A spicy sour soup, kimchi jiggae goes well with rice or can be eaten on its own

This is where my love for korean dramas and food ties in well. Every time I watch one of my many korean dramas, there’s always a scene where someone’s eating and having a good time with all that delicious looking korean food. Kimchi fried pancakes, kimchi soup, bulgogi, Korean barbeque and the list is endless. After watching so much of it, I crave the food featured in the shows even if I’ve never tried it.

One of my favourite Korean dishes is Kimchi jiggae, a sort of soup or stew made with kimchi. Kimchi is essentially a fermented vegetable, most commonly made from napfa cabbage, and is loaded with vitamins as well as a healthy bacteria called lactobacilli which helps your digestion system. It has long been known to be a “health food” thus said.

Unfortunately I like the taste of it much more than I like the health benefits so I eat lots of this fermented cabbage. I throw it into kimchi stews and add meat to it and it comes out deliciously spicy and sour with plenty of umami.

Kimchi jiggae ingredients: Onions and garlic, tofu, pork slices, spring onions, enoki mushrooms, kimchi, tomatoes and milk

Ingredients (Serves 3-4 pax)

1. 400g of kimchi
2. 1 packet of pressed tofu or you could substitute this with egg tofu, sliced into manageable pieces
3. 1/2 a large green onion, diced
4. 1 stalk spring onion, chopped
5. 3-4 cloves of garlic, sliced
6. A handful of enoki mushrooms, bottom chopped off and mushrooms cleaned
7. 1 tomato, quartered
8. A packet of your favorite slice of meat, could be that shabu shabu meat or chunks, whichever you prefer just make sure it is room temperature. I use sliced pork meant for shabu shabu.
9. 1/2 cup of full cream milk
10. 5-6 cups of chicken//beef stock or water (I use water, but to get a richer taste you could use stock), enough to cook the ingredients in
11. Chilli padi if you like your stew spicy

Cooking Instructions

1. Heat up a tablespoon of oil in a sauce pan to fry your garlic and onions
2. Once your onions are slightly translucent, add the tomatoes and stir fry
3. Add the kimchi, milk and stock/water to the pan and let this simmer for about 3-5 few minutes.
4. Slowly add your meat to the pot, then your mushrooms. If you opted for a chilli padi then add to the pot here. Let this simmer for 3-5 minutes.
5. Slide your tofu into the mix and let this cook for a couple of minutes more.
6. Scatter spring onions over the top and serve in its pot. If you have a nice stone/earthenware pot you could use that instead to make it all the more pleasing to the eye.
7. Eat with fluffy white rice or translucent rice noodles

You could add some noodles to this to make it a one pot meal or have it as a carb-less meal

Linguine in creamy mushroom sauce

Tags

italian, mains, Noodles, Pasta, western

– Linguine in mushroom cream base topped with earthy parsley 

Pasta is a pretty convenient food. A staple of many a student, you’ll find spaghetti packets in almost every student’s kitchen cabinet. Let’s just say I ate a ton of pasta when I was studying abroad in the UK. It was easy enough to make. At the bare minimum we would get instant Dolmio sauce, the type you can pour directly from the plastic container right onto some freshly cooked pasta. Survival skills at its best =)

And you can never get sick of it, there are so many ways to prepare pasta. A red sauce, cream sauce, pesto, aglio olio, salads and even strange bases you’d never have thought of such as tom yum pasta, which used to be one of my favorites.

I’ve included here one of the recipes that I make when I’m feeling slightly decadent and craving for the comfort of cream and carbs. The swiss mushrooms coupled with butter, cream, cheese and the earthiness of the English parsley just makes an incredibly heady combination in my mouth. There is a some heat coming from the chilli padi in the background to just cut through the richness (or jelakness as Malaysians call it) of the dish.

The ingredients for cream sauce, mushroom pasta: Linguine, Double or thickened cream, Mushrooms, Garlic, Butter, English Parsley, Black pepper and Salt

Ingredients (Serves 1 pax)

1. 100g dried Linguine (adjust according to how hungry you are)
2. 20g – 30g butter (if you’re using the smaller packs of butter for individuals, those are normally 10g each)
3. 3 cloves garlic diced
4. 5 swiss mushrooms sliced or white mushrooms if you can’t find the former.
5. 1 chilli padi
6. 1/2 cup of thickened cream or you can go by gut feel as to how much you need to properly coat the noodles
7. 1 tbsp Parmesan cheese and more to top if you wish
8. 1-2 tbsps of chopped English parsley
9. Black pepper

Cooking Instructions

1. Cook the dried linguine in salted water until your desired level of firmness. Some like it al dente, I prefer it a little more cooked than al dente. Drain and set aside.
2. Melt half of the butter in a sauce pan, add garlic and fry until golden but not brown. By this time the mixture should be fragrant.
3. Add mushrooms and continue frying. Add the rest of the butter and continue frying. The mushrooms may release some liquid, you should continue to fry it until the liquid has dissolved.
4. Add the cream and chilli padi to the pan and season with salt pepper. Add the parmesan cheese. As parmesan cheese is generally salty, check the sauce to ensure the salt level.
5. Add the drained pasta to the pan and toss for about a minute to incorporate the cream sauce and the pasta.
6. Transfer the pasta to a serving plate, scatter more cheese if you desire and the gorgeous parsley on top. Eat in front of the telly =D

Mushrooms cooking in the butter cream base