Hainanese Chicken Rice

We all have comfort foods, those foods that we turn too when we want to enjoy the flavours, but also bring back the sounds, smells and tastes of some fantastic memories. I spent a long time in South East Asia, and I love the crisp clean flavours, I close my eyes and I can see the vivid colours - red chillies, green limes, vibrant coriander and delicate crystals of palm sugar. I can smell the galangal, the sharpness of lemongrass, the hint of aniseed in thai basil, and the nose wrinkling pungency of fish sauce. And one of my most favourite dishes is Hainanese Chicken Rice, it's a delicate blend of ginger and green onion stuffed chicken, poached in water with a hint of sesame oil, and served with garlic & ginger rice, and hot chilli sauce, both made with the liquid the chicken is poached in. It's a simple, peaceful dish, it doesn't need powerful flavours and it doesn't pretend to be anything that it isn't. It just is!

for the chicken,

• 1 whole chicken, about 1.8 kgs
• coarse salt
• 2 large thumbs (8cm long) ginger, sliced
• 4 spring onions, chopped into 2cm pieces
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil

the rice

• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 cm piece of ginger, grated
• 2 cups basmati rice, washed and rinsed
• 2 cups of the chicken stock that the chicken was cooked in
• 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

and finally the chilli sauce

• 1 tablespoon lime juice
• 3 tablespoons of the chicken stock the chicken was cooked in
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 4 tablespoons hot chile sauce
• 4 cloves garlic, grated
• 2cm piece of ginger, grated
• a generous pinch of salt, to taste

 Method

• Scrub the outside of the chicken with the coarse salt to remove any residue on the skin, rinse thoroughly.

• Stuff the chicken with the ginger slices and spring onions.

• Pop it into a large stockpot and cover with water, and add the sesame oil. Bring it to the boil and then turn down and simmer. Skim the froth of the top of the water. Cook for about 45 minutes until chicken is done. Remove chicken and reserve the stock. Keep the chicken warm wrapped in tinfoil

• For the rice, place the oil and garlic and ginger in a pan and heat on medium heat until garlic and ginger are sizzling, Add the rice and sesame oil and cook for 2 minutes. About now, I'm in heaven with the smells from the rice, yummmm!

• I now pop this mixture into the rice cooker with the chicken stock and cook. To make it in a pot, add the stock and bring to the boil, lower the heat and pop the lid on. Cook for 10 minutes, take the pot of the heat leaving the lid on and set aside for 10 minutes to absorb the rest of the liquid.
• For the chile sauce, put all of the ingredients into a blender and blitz.
• Heat the remaining stock for soup
• Slice the chicken ready to serve. Serve the chicken with the rice, the chile sauce and the rest of the stock.

And enjoy!

A mixed bag this week

It's been a busy couple of weeks, I morphed into a crazy cookie lady, baking and decorating a couple of hundred cookies for Valentines Day. I have to show off my favourites, see!

 

 

I also made a bunch of dips to showcase the organic vegetables that The Green Box (www.the-box.me) gets from a local farm here in Qatar, and we went out to see the farm last week - the kids had a great time riding around on bikes, and I loved walking around the farm picking and eating organic cucumbers and tomatoes straight from the vine. Here I am at a Health and Wellness Fair, don't the dips look fab!

 

 

 

Here's the recipe for the beetroot dip, so simple, but absolutely delicious, and great with Arabic bread or chopped veges. You can also make it with drained, canned beetroot as well.

 

Beetroot Dip 

• 5 beetroot, washed
• 1 1/2 cups yoghurt
• juice of a lemon
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground cumin, ground coriander, paprika
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste

 

Method

1. Boil the beetroot for 45 minutes until cooked, cool and peel (use plastic gloves, unless you like your hands a lovely blush shade of red)
2. Pop them into the food processor and blitz until smooth
3. Add the rest of the ingredients and blend well.

 

And finally...I struggle to find healthy tasty meals that the kids will enjoy, but struck a winner this week with a simple lightly spiced cajun chicken pasta. You can use sundried tomatoes, or in my case, I had some tomatoes in the fridge that I dried in the oven last week (I know...I'm a bit of a girlie-swot when it comes to the kitchen). They're really easy though, so do try them, and they're not slathered in oil like the supermarket kind - cut the top off 20 tomatoes, cut them in half, sprinkle with sea salt and pop them cut side up on a baking rack (with a tray beneath it) in the oven, put the oven on the lowest setting you can, and leave them there for between 6 and 12 hours, mine were quite large, so they took 12 hours. They keep for weeks in the fridge.

 

 

 

 

And here's the pasta recipe, I used a short pasta, but think it would be amazing over some thick long parpadelle.

 

Cajun chicken Parpadelle

  

2 medium chicken breasts, cut into thin strips 

2 cloves garlic minced

2 teaspoons cajun seasoning

2 tablespoons butter

1 teaspoon olive oil

2 spring onions, thinly sliced

1/2 cup cream

1/2 cup milk

2 tablespoons chopped sun dried tomatoes

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon fresh basil, chopped 

ground black pepper

grated parmesan cheese to top

  

Method

1. Heat the oil and butter in a pan over medium heat and stir fry chicken for 5 minutes until almost cooked, add cajun seasoning, spring onions and garlic and cook for 1 minute
2. Add cream, milk, sundried tomato and cook for a few minutes until sauce has started to thicken, add fresh basil and ground pepper and salt, and stir
3. Serve over cooked long pasta, like parpadelle or fettucine - add the pasta to the pan and toss till all of the pasta is coated in the sauce, serve topped with parmesan cheese

Little Chef's

I'm not the only one in the house that loves cooking - I have two little chefs who enjoy mixing, stirring, chopping, and most importantly, eating. So this week we spent lots of time in kitchen making cakes and cookies, and I just have to share little chef #1 cooking up some fabulous butterfly cakes. I tried to convince her to make banana cakes - I was thinking about the school lunchboxes the next day, but I couldn't turn those puppy dog eyes down when she wanted to cook chocolate cake.  I'd share the recipe, but really... it's on the box. Yep, I'll admit it, when it comes to kids and chocolate cakes, cooking with Betty (Crocker that is) is the way to go.

So here's little chef#1 breaking eggs, don't you love the chef's hat!

And pouring the batter after mixing

And her favourite part, didn't we all love this bit when we cooked with mum

and the finished product - how cool are these

They didn't last long!  The butterfly pan was my christmas present from the little chefs, painstakingly picked out amongst all the other cooking stuff at my favourite kitchen store - I love how much thought went into it.

Pad Thai

One of my favourite weekday meals is Pad Thai  (actually its one of my favourite meals any day of the week) - google it and you'll find a plethora of recipes. A good pad thai can be cooked in 5 minutes, and is the just the right heavenly mix of salty (from the fish sauce), sweet (from the sugar), spicy (from the chillies) and sour (from the tamarind and lime). 

 

Before you start to cook the pad thai, have everything chopped and ready to go. I like to keep my pad thai simple and I only ever cook one or two servings at a time, so that the wok stays really hot. I made the pad thai sauce earlier this week and popped into a big jar in the fridge, and it will keep for a few months - though never that long in my house, as I use it up fairly quickly.  I like prawns in my pad thai, but I also find it great for using up leftovers, so will pop shredded cooked chicken, and random vegetables in there (particularly for the kids). One of my biggest gripes about stirfrying is that the pan has to be so hot, the garlic and shallots can burn and become bitter, so here's a quick tip, pop the garlic and shallots into cold oil and then put the pan on to heat - as the oil heats, the garlic and onion will infuse flavour into it without burning.

 

 

 

Pad Thai

Serves 2 

 

Pad thai sauce

• 1/2 cup tamarind concentrate (the runny stuff in a jar)
• 1/2 cup palm sugar
• 1/4 cup fish sauce

 

Pop tamarind sauce, palm sugar and fish sauce into a pot and heat over medium heat, stirring, until sugar has dissolved. Pop into the fridge.

  

• 5 tablespoons pad thai sauce (or to taste, if you like it more saucy, pop more in)
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 shallot, or 1/2 small red onion, finely chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon chile powder (or to taste)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup chopped spring onions
• 1/2 cup beansprouts
• 200 grams prawns, peeled and deveined
• 200 grams rice noodles
• chopped peanuts
• 1 lime, halved
• coriander to garnish (not traditional, but yum)
• chopped chillies to garnish

 

Method

1. Soak the rice noodles in warm (not hot) water for 10 - 15 minutes. You're looking for the rice noodles to free up, but still be fairly firm. It's better to undersoak then oversoak, as you can add water to the wok to cook the noodles more if needed
2. Put oil, garlic and shallots into a cold wok, or pan, and heat to a high heat. When the garlic starts to sizzle, add the drained noodles, pad thai sauce, chile powder and prawns
3. Stir constantly over a high heat for a few minutes until noodles soften and prawns are cooked.
4. Push noodles to the side and break in the eggs, scramble with the stirrer and when almost cooked, pop the noodles on top of the egg to finish off the cooking (about 1 to 2 minutes)
5. Add beansprouts and spring onions and stir for another minute, serve with a squeeze of lime, and garnish with peanuts, coriander and chopped chillies.

Time on my hands

I've had a lazy hazy week or two, lots on, but loads of time for cooking as well. I had a great morning outdoors at the lagoon teaching a group of lovely ladies how to cook some simple tapas - delicious chicken meatballs in sofrito sauce (basically a spanish tomato sauce loaded with smoked paprika) & eggplant, capsicum and sundried tomato rolls served with a rich garlicky coriander salsa.

I turned a glut of courgette into zucchini and tomato chutney which tastes divine (even if I say so myself), and will be fabulous in a few weeks when all the flavours have meshed together and the vegetables smoosh down into a jam-like consistency, and finally I remembered I had some lemon curd and christmas mince in the fridge, so threw together a bit of pastry, and made some bite size xmas mince pies and lemon meringue tarts (recipe below). Please excuse the photo, I only had my iphone, so the quality isn't fantastic, but it shows you how they looked and in case you're wondering - the pies were delish!

 

Lemon Meringue Tart

makes one medium size tart, or 24 mini tarts.

Pastry

• 1  1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 cup cornflour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon caster sugar
• 180 grams cold butter, cut up
• 1/4 cup cold water

Pop the flour, cornflour, salt and caster sugar into a food processor, add cold butter and blitz until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. With the processor running dribble in the cold water until the pastry start to comes together, tip onto the bench and squish together into a ball, cover in plastic wrap and pop in the fridge for 30 minutes

Lemon Filling

• 1/4 cup cornflour
• 1 cup sugar
• grated rind from 1 lemon
• 1/2 cup lemon juice
• 3/4 cup water
• 3 eggs, separated (keep the whites for the meringue)
• 1 tablespoon butter

Blend cornflour, sugar, eggs, lemon rind and juice together until smooth, Add water and cook in a bowl over a pot of simmering water, whisking continually until mixture thickens (about 5 minutes). Remove from heat and add in butter.

Meringue

• 3 egg whites from above
• 1/4 cup caster sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence

Beat egg whites until stiff, beat in sugar 1 tablespoon at time, until thick and glossy, stir in vanilla essence.

And now comes the fun part - roll out the pastry to 5mm thick, Line a 20 cm pie plate, trim off excess pastry and bake blind (pop baking parchment on the pastry and fill with rice) at 190 degrees celsius for 20 minutes. Pour lemon filling into the pie base, and spoon meringue filling over the top. Return to oven and bake for 10 minutes until meringue is golden.

(for mini tarts, cut out circles of pastry, pop into mini muffin pans, prick all over with a fork and bake for 5 minutes, before adding filling and meringue)