Whole Roast Chicken and Roast Chicken Thighs

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baste, butter, celery, chicken, chicken thighs, compound butter, dinner, easy, easy meals, easy preparation, french cut, garlic, mains, onion, oven, oven roast, protein, quick preparation, roast chicken, roast chicken thighs, rosemary, thyme, western, whole, whole roast chicken

Roast chicken dinner for the family! There’s nothing quite like a full roast at the dining table… and no, Nandos and Kenny Rogers do not count. Roasting a whole chicken (or just the thighs as I will show later on in this post) is actually easier than one would think.

Fresh out of the oven and piping hot, it releases a perfumed steam as you cut into the juicy roast. Absolutely divine.
My shopping haul XD. So without further ado, the ingredients:-

Ingredients (for just 1 roast chicken, you can double it if your family is as greedy as mine)

• 1.7kg whole chicken
• 25g salted butter, softened
• 1 tsp chopped fresh rosemary (or whichever herbs you prefer)
• 1 tsp chopped fresh thmye
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 medium white onion
• 1 stalk of celery of around 10 inches, chopped into large sections (optional)
• 2-3 sprigs fresh thyme
• 2-3 sprigs fresh rosemary
• salt
• black pepper

Instructions

In a small bowl, combine the butter, chopped thyme, rosemary and garlic to form the compound herb butter.
  To prep the chicken, remove feet, giblets, head, neck and internal organs. Give the chicken a rinse and then pat it dry with some paper towels.
Gently separate the skin from the meat of the breast and spread the herb butter on the meat underneat the skin. If you can get to it, try to spread it onto a part of the thighs as well. Take the remaining butter and rub the skin (do it as gently as possible so the skin does not break. It is very important to keep the skin intact and whole). Rub some salt and black pepper onto the entire surface of the chicken, including the cavity of the chicken. If you’re prepping the chicken the night before, cover the chicken with cling wrap and refrigerate it. Some would condone leaving the chicken uncovered for crispier skin but I just can’t bear the thought of food exposed in the fridge!

Take the chicken out of the fridge an hour before cooking. This makes for tender chicken and even cooking throughout the bird.
  Stuff the cavity with the onion, celery and 1 sprig each of the thyme and rosemary. Here I had stuffed a lemon into the chicken but I’d much prefer the onion and celery option.
Scatter the remaining herbs on top and it’s good to go into the oven!  
Into the oven they go at 205 degrees celsius.   Roast for around 1.5 hours, basting the chicken in its own juices every half an hour.
And there you have it,  a hearty roast chicken that’s ready to be eaten with a variety of side dishes, as can be seen in the picture below!   Roasted some vegetables (recipe to come), made some mushroom soup, lobster pasta, cauliflower cheese (recipe to come) and pomme puree (recipe to come) as well as gravy to go with the chicken.

My sister also made some excellent focaccia bread to go with aged balsamic vinegar. I’m going to nick the recipe off her as well!
  Complete roast chicken dinner.

Roast Chicken Thighs

This is a good alternative when cooking for 1-2 people or if you simply prefer the thigh meat.  Clean the chicken and pat dry. You can use the chicken straight away but I prefer to make it look … somewhat more posh and french.   With reference to the above picture, I cut around the bone near the end of the drumstick. What happens is that I cut through the tendons and sinew (as seen in the top chicken). Remove visible tendons (they’re tough to eat). After which I proceeded to remove all skin, bone and cartilage from the bone end of the chicken, thus resulting the the chicken on the bottom of the picture. All cleaned up at the end.Chicken quarters cleaned up french style.

Make the compound butter (same as that used in the whole roast chicken recipe)

  Smear the compound butter under the skin as evenly as you can.

Tempt the dog (dog doesn’t seem tempted at all).Place the chicken into the oven preheated at 205 degrees celsius (ignore the 190 degrees seen in the picture) for about an hour or until juices run clear and the skin is golden brown in colour. Don’t forget to baste the juices onto the chicken, a couple of times will do I should think.

That’s it! Oh and if you have spare sprigs of herbs, go ahead and arrange them onto the completed dish for decoration.

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White truffle series part 1: Garlic soy lamb with white truffles

Tags

aluminium foil, baked, dinner, easy lamb recipe, easy meals, easy meat recipe, easy recipe, garlic, lamb, mains, meat, soy sauce, truffle lamb, truffle oil, truffles, white winter truffles

This is a super easy recipe, all you need is a rack of lamb, some chopped up garlic, soy sauce and some white pepper. And then you shove it in the oven. I used to make this in university when I could spare the money for some lamb meat (definitely did not fancify it with truffles back then!), and I ate it with rice. It made for a really satisfying meal!

This time around I made the dish again along with my other truffle themed dishes:-

Top left; uni mixed with sushi rice topped with ikura, truffles and more uni

Centre: Sea bream/tai sashimi with chopped canned black summer truffles in truffle oil, fleur de sel and shaved white truffles. I’ve made this before with black winter truffles

Bottom right: Garlic soy lamb with white truffles

Bottom left: Uni sushi with truffles, japanese mayonnaise, chives and white truffles

Here are a couple more pictures of the sashimi, won’t be doing up recipe posts on it as I’ve done it before:

(Yes, I bought a mountain of uni in honour of the white truffle! Hello cholesterol!)

Ingredients for the trio of truffle carpaccio dish (yeah well it was supposed to be a carpaccio but truth be told I bought it as sashimi)

Chopped canned black truffles

Here’s a peak of the monster white truffle…

Ingredients (for 1 pax):

(Please ignore the ice wine, balsamic vinegar and honey that’s in the photo… I had initially wanted to make a separate sauce for the lamb but I found that the sauce from the lamb after cooking was more than sufficient!)

• 3-4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 small rack of lamb, around 200g with the bone – this was a really small rack of lamb, thus only feeds one person
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• white pepper to taste
• 1 tsp white truffle oil (optional)
• white truffle shavings to top (optional)

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 160 degrees celsius
• Place the room temperature lamb in a sheet of aluminium foil large enough to entirely wrap the lamb.
• Rub in the soy sauce, minced soy sauce and a dash of white pepper into the lamb

• Place 1 tbsp of water into the sheet before wrapping up the lamb.
• Place the lamb in the oven for about 35 minutes for a pink centre (you can adjust the temperature slightly higher and/or leave it in the oven for longer if you like it well done)
• Remove from oven and let rest for 10 minutes at room temperature.
• Shave white truffles over the top and serve

mmmmm…

Kimchi Bibim Guksu (Spicy cold noodles with kimchi)

Tags

bibim guksu, cold noodles, dinner, fast meals, gochujang, kimchi, kimchi bibim guksu, Korean, lunch, mains, Noodles, perilla, quick meals, sesame, sesame oil, shiso, spicy, spicy cold noodles

I’m a big fan of Korean dramas and variety shows (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before). I blame it on those very shows that I’m getting fatter by the day. They make Korean food look so sooooo appetizing! These are one of the dishes that I saw on the telly sometime back. It sounded and looked good… cold kimchi noodles.

After a bit of research, I decided to try the recipe from Korean Bapsang (website below). Her stuff is what you’d call “daebak” (awesome). Her food photos and recipes seem pretty and easy to follow so I made the noodles a few months ago with the recipe. It was good! Totally would make this again. Cold, sour rounded by some sweetness, and a little spice. And kimchi always makes everything taste better.

http://www.koreanbapsang.com/2011/07/kimchi-bibim-guksu-spicy-cold-noodles.html#.Ug-0fhYqS0s

Speaking about spice, I ordered this dish today at a Korean restaurant. All I can say is that I must have downed a whole jug of iced water after a few bites. I’m a person that would sprinkle chilli flakes liberally all over my food and use chilli padi soy sauce as a favourite condiment so I don’t think my spice tolerance is that low. But I really couldn’t enjoy the noodles, it being so spicy! So if you’re not a fan of spicy food, you can adjust the level of gochujang to suit your preferences (this recipe isn’t that spicy in any case).

Secondly, on my recent trip to Japan, I frequented a korean restaurant in Takashimaya, Tokyo (I really liked it!) and made a discovery. In all my posts on Korean food so far I’ve been referring to shiso/Japanese perilla leaves as the Korean perilla leaf. When I tried the real Korean perilla leaf I was taken aback. I absolutely had no idea that they were so different! As wikipedia clarifies:

“The flavor is distinct from Japanese perilla, and the leaf appearance is different, as well – larger, rounder, flatter, with a less serrated edge, and often a violet coloring on the reverse side.”

Well that explains why the leaf was so large. So now, I’m on a mission to find Korean perilla leaves in Singapore ;p

Ingredients (2 pax); recipe from Korean Bapsang

• 8 – 10 ounces somyeon (somen) noodles
• 1 cup thinly sliced kimchi (fully fermented)
• 1/4 cup juice from kimchi (use a little more soy sauce and vinegar if unavailable)
• 1 tablespoon Korean red chili pepper paste, gochujang (adjust to taste)
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon corn syrup (use honey or more sugar if unavailable)
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons rice or apple vinegar
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon sesame seeds
• Optional garnish:
• 4 perilla leaves, kkaennip, thinly sliced (my pictures show the Japanese perilla leaves/shiso leaves)
• (or cucumber or lettuce, thinly sliced)

Cooking instructions

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil while preparing the kimchi sauce.

Thinly slice the kimchi and place it in a medium size bowl. Add the remaining sauce ingredients and mix well.

Add the noodles to the pot of boiling water. Cook the noodles according to the package instructions (3 – 4 minutes).

Prepare a bowl of iced water to dip the noodles into. The recipe in Korean Bapsang calls for cold water, however if it is not cold enough the noodles could get soggy quite easily. So just in case, just use iced water.

Drain the noodles quickly and shock in iced water to stop the cooking. Drain and rinse in cold water again. Repeat until the noodles become cold. Drain well.

Here’s the fun part! Throw your cold noodles into the sauce mixture and toss so that the sauce coats the noodles evenly. Try not to over-handle the noodles with utensils or you could get mashed noodles. Not yummy. Use your wrist to toss the noodles in the bowl and use chopsticks to further mix the noodles.

Dish into a serving bowl and top with (Korean) perilla leaves. I thought Japanese ones worked just as well.

Perfect dish for a hot day!

Uni cream pasta (Sea Urchin)

Tags

angel hair, butter, chives, cream, cream pasta, dinner, fusion, ikura, lunch, mains, Noodles, parmesan cheese, Pasta, prawns, salmon roe, sea urchin, shrimp, sinful, uni, uni cream pasta, uni pasta

Sea urchin roe is one of my favourite sashimi! So rich and creamy and briny <3. I tried  sea urchin pasta for the first time in Japan a few years back and it was amazing as well. And of course I had to try to make it myself, but I always feel heartsick at the thought of throwing all the expensive uni into pasta when I can just have it as sashimi and savour every single bit of it. That’s why on my first attempt at uni pasta, I just used a few bits (see the following 3 pictures).

I probably used a quarter of the package of uni. The box of uni in itself is already really small, so the uni flavour in the pasta wasn’t as prominent as I would have liked it. But the pictures were way better as I took them during the daytime, whereas my 2nd attempt photos were dependent on dim lighting =(.

Pleased to say that on the 2nd attempt, the pasta came out creamier and more luscious! I sacrificed the whole box this time… just for myself *guilt*. I also omitted the seaweed as it got in the way of the flavour of the pasta. It goes better with mentaiko pasta I think.

The recipe was adapted from http://www.eataduckimust.com/uni-pasta

Ingredients (For 1 greedy person)

• 1/2 cup thickened cream (the original recipe calls for 1 cup cream per person, you could just adjust accordingly. I’m just trying to make myself feel less guilty)
• 3 prawns shelled and deveined with tails on (Reserve the prawn shells and heads)
• 20g butter
• 1 package uni (sea urchin)
• 1 chilli padi, sliced
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• 1 egg yolk
• chives for garnishing
• handful of parmesan cheese
• Angel hair/instant cook spaghetti or other pasta noodle of your choice
• Ikura (as much as you like)

• Melt the butter over low heat and add the prawn heads/shells in. Crush the prawn heads so that all the flavour comes out into the butter. Take the pan off the heat so that the butter doesn’t brown and continue crushing the shells.

• Pour the butter and shells into a sieve and squeeze out all the juices/butter into another pan (you’ll use this pan to make the cream sauce)

• Meanwhile, sear the prawns and set aside

• Throw in the chilli padi and the minced garlic into the pan with the prawn head butter and fry until the garlic turns golden. If you like, you can also add a little more butter.
• Add in the cream and bring to a simmer before switching it off. Don’t boil the cream.
• When the cream has cooled a little, pour into a blender. Your cream shouldn’t be hot as this would cook the uni and scramble the egg later. The uni needs to be soft, raw and creamy while the egg yolk needs to be silky.
• Save a few pieces of the uni for garnishing, and add the rest to the cream.

• Blend the uni and cream (just need to give it a few pulses) and pour the mixture back into the pan.
• Add the beaten egg yolk and stir it in.

• Add a tablespoon or so of parmesan cheese into the cream and heat the mixture up again (I’m guestimating here, adapt to your own tastes ;p) . Taste it and season with some salt. (I didn’t put pepper as I thought it might overpower the uni)
• Add in the freshly cooked pasta and mix it into the sauce. If you have strong wrists, toss the lot to combine.

• Dish out the pasta onto a serving plate, top with the prawns, raw uni, some chives, a bit more cheese and as much ikura as you like~

So silky and creamy and decadent 😉

Now that I’ve seen the amount of sea urchin, prawn head brains and cream that went into the dish, my heart is starting to palpitate at the sheer amount of cholesterol that went into this meal ;(

To the gym!

Bolognese Pasta

Tags

basil leaves, bolognese, italian, mains, mince, Pasta, red sauce, sauce, shell pasta, sun-dried tomatoes, tomatoes, vermouth, western

Everyone loves pasta. There’s something comforting about all those carbs slippery in a creamy or a hearty red sauce. Another university favourite, where at the bare minimum we just cook the noodles and throw in ready to eat sauces. Ah the simple life.

I guess as we’ve grown up, our tastebuds will naturally progress so that we’d need something either more healthy/wholesome and more complex. (To be honest I’m still very happy with the noodles and sauce out of a can but that’s just me being lazy).

This is my version of bolognese, I’ve been using this recipe for many years but it could be better. This version is sourish and slightly spicy just because I like it that way! Will update as and when I try out new bolognese recipes 🙂

Ingredients (8 pax)

1kg minced meat (I use pork, but most people would use beef)

1 large green onion roughly chopped

1 can tomato puree (or 1 tube if you can’t find the canned version)

8 cloves of garlic or more if you like it garlicky, minced

1 bottle of dolmio red sauce (sometimes I use a can of tomato chunks instead)

1/2 cup of chopped fresh basil leaves

1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

3 tbsps dried oregano

50 gram salted butter

Salt and Pepper for seasoning

Optional: 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese and more for serving

Optional: 3 birds eye chillies, sliced

Optional: 1/2 cup dry Vermouth

Optional: 6-8 sun-dried tomatoes, sliced

Optional: Pureed carrots or sugar to offset the sourness from the tomatoes

Instructions

1. Melt the butter in a large wok. Fry the onions first and just when it turns slightly translucent, throw in the minced garlic and fry until the garlic is golden in color. If you opt to use the pureed carrots, add it now and cook til soft.

2. Season the minced meat with salt and pepper beforehand. Add the mince into the wok, breaking the mince into small pieces as it browns.

3. When the meat is browned, pour in the dolmio sauce/canned tomatoes, the vermouth, sundried tomatoes, oregano and birds eye chillies. Stir to incorporate and let it simmer.

4. Add Worcestershire sauce and stir. Let the sauce simmer until the consistency is chunky and there’s no excess water. The sauce should be thick and chunky but not so dry such that it sticks to the wok.

5. Stir in the parmesan cheese and basil leaves.

I love to eat this with shell pasta. It holds the sauce so well!

Stir fried pork tenderloin in dark sauce and onions

Tags

Chinese, healthy, Home Cooking, mains, onions, pork, tenderloin

 

This is one of my brother’s favourite foods. As he’s a picky eater, I thought I’d make this for dinner. Made this in Whistler, Canada during the christmas holidays. We go almost every year and there’s always a kitchen in the winter lodging where we can cook our meals. Of course, the kitchen was probably not made for serious cooking… probably meant for stuff like heating up soups, making instant noodles and the such but not that we cared 😉 We’re Asians! We like our stir fry and rice! This year I even brought my own condiments and essential ingredients like soy sauce, dark sauce, ABC sauce, corn flour, sesame oil etc. I was almost asleep on my feet, cooking in the kitchen after putting in a long day of snowboarding in the powder, but I enjoyed myself 🙂

Ingredients (Serves 6-8)

1) 500g pork tenderloin at room temperature

2) 1 tbsp ABC sauce (kicap manis)

3) 1 tbsp dark soy sauce

4) 1/2 tbsp soy sauce

5) 2 tbsp sugar

6) 2 tsp cornflour

7) 1/2 tsp sesame oil (optional)

8) 1 large green onion, sliced

9) 5-6 tbsp Chicken stock

Cooking method

1) Prepare the pork by cutting it into slices. The way you cut it is important to retain the succulence and tenderness of the pork. As you can see from the photo below, I’m cutting it lengthwise, or “along the grain“. To do this, I cut up the tenderloin into four separate pieces so I can cut along the grain for each of the hunks of meat to result in bite sized slices (see pictures below). I find that if you cut horizontally, the meat tends to dry up quickly and would become rubbery and harder in texture. If you follow this method there is absolutely no need to use a meat tenderizer and the meat stays tender even after a night in the fridge and a reheat! The other important bit is that the pork has to be at room temperature when you cook it.

2) Marinade the meat with soy sauce, dark sauce, ABC sauce, sesame oil, sugar and flour. Leave for about half an hour at room temperature.

3) Fry the onions first until translucent and gold around the edges (they turned out kinda white in the photos but it’s supposed to be a little golden!) and set aside in the serving plate.

4) Station your chicken stock next to the frying pan (I used half of the chicken stock in the bowl below)

4) Heat up your pan to medium-high heat and add some oil to cover the surface of the pan.

5) Once your pan is hot (doesn’t need to be smoking hot as it tends to burn fast), place your pork in the pan (yes I’ve overcrowded it but it still came out awesome ;p) and brown both sides. The pork should not be sticking to the pan.

6) Add the stock to the pan and cover for 30 seconds.

7) Remove cover, stir through, cover again and lower the heat to medium.

8) Stir every 30 seconds for another minute or two until the gravy thickens and pork is cooked through.

9) Ladle the pork onto the serving plate atop the onions and spoon the sauce all over the pork and onions

The result is really juicy pork in sweet dark sauce, the perfect accompaniment for fluffy white rice.

 

The rest of the dinner I made that day:

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?

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

Oyakodon

Tags

chicken, eggs, healthy, japanese, mains, rice

A dish made with chicken, eggs, onions, sake and mirin

Oyakodon is a Japanese dish consisting of chicken and onions simmered in a dashi broth with eggs lusciously and carelessly drizzled over the whole mixture. The eggs should be silky smooth and the chicken tender and juicy. It is also called the “Parent and child” donburi (donburi = a sort of Japanese rice dish in a bowl) for obvious reasons; the egg and the chicken.

My brother loves this dish and always orders it at restaurants but it is pretty easy to make once you’ve gotten the hang of it. I tend to mess this recipe up when cooking for many people but it’s easy cooking for one or two people at a time. It’s healthy, no frying or oil in sight, thus no stinking up the kitchen (or my hair =D) while cooking. And it’s got eggs and onions, my favourite combination!

It’s the ultimate Japanese comfort food for me.

Cooking for 1-2 pax:

Ingredients

1. 2 Eggs (3 if you’re cooking for 2)
2. 1/2 a green onion, sliced
3. 1 Chicken thigh deboned and cut into bite sized pieces, skin on (1 Chicken thigh per person)
4. Dashi, I use the bottled one
5. Sake
6. Mirin
7. Light soy sauce
8. Sugar
9. Some sliced Japanese leeks for topping

Cooking the Oyakodon

1. Your rice must be already cooked and warm as you will ladle the chicken and egg mixture directly on top of the rice.
2. Crack your eggs into a separate bowl. Use a chopstick to break up the egg whites so that they separate easily. Gently break the yolk and give it a stir so its slightly mixed but not incorporated with the whites When you pour in the eggs to cook you want to have some distinct white pieces and yellow bits from the eggs. Don’t scramble the eggs.
3. Get a small saucepan ready, it shouldn’t be too big as we want the dashi/sake mixture to cover half of the onions and chicken.
4. Add about 3/4 cup of dashi and 1/4 cup of water to the saucepan. Taste your dashi sauce before cooking. You may want to make fresh dashi from scratch, by all means do but I’m too lazy! This brand of dashi that I’m using already has soy sauce in it so it’s salty.
5. Add 3 capfuls each of mirin and sake and half a tablespoon of sugar. Taste the mixture and adjust dashi, sugar or water content. Remember it has to be a bit salty as it will form the sauce for your rice. I forgot about that at one time and made the dashi mixture nice on its own but too bland when put together on the rice.
6. Heat up the dashi on medium high heat and add onions. Again remember that the dashi mixture has to cover up to half of the chicken and onions. Cover until onions are slightly translucent.
7. Add chicken bits evenly throughout the pan and try to avoid overcrowding. Cover for 1 minute. Uncover and turn the chicken chunks over to cook on the other side. Cover for 1 more minute.
8. At this point, pour half of the eggs in the bowl over the chicken and onions. Make sure the eggs are evenly distributed throughout the pan. Cover for 10 seconds til partially cooked but still runny. You could cook it further if you prefer your eggs cooked through. Pour the rest of the eggs evenly into the pan. Switch to high heat for 1-2 seconds and turn off the heat, covering entire mixture, and let stand for half a minute.
9. Ladle your rice into a bowl and spoon the chicken and egg mixture on top carefully so as to keep the shape of the eggs chunky and silky.
10. Top the whole bowl with shreds or slice of raw Japanese leek which lends a crunchy accent and spicy punch to this sweetish savoury chicken dish.