Chicken Stir-Fry
Chicken stir-fry. Again. We’re not winning any prizes for originality with this one are we? It’s the best way I know to use up leftover chicken though and since Stephen bought a super-chicken yesterday, we had to do something. It is tasty though and quick to throw together, which is a definite winner on a Monday night.
Quick as it was, we did spend most of the evening in the kitchen tonight using the rest of the chicken to make stock and baking potatoes and salmon for tomorrow night’s fishcakes.
G
Roast Chicken
Mmmmmmm roast chicken. A Label Anglaise chicken from our local butcher, roasted and served with roast potatoes, runner beans, savoy cabbage and carrots. And those strange things on the top left of the picture are jerusalem artichokes; they look deep fried but they were done with the potatoes. And gravy of course. Mmmmm gravy.
The chicken was the largest we’ve had for ages – just over 2kg. So there is a lot of it left for lunches and also dinner tomorrow evening. Will see what we can do with it. There was loads of gravy because I poured almost half a bottle of wine into it in order to use it up, but that unbalanced it rather and by the time I’d added enough stock and water to dilute the wine and make it taste like gravy, we had more than would fit in our gravy jug. It pained me to pour it away afterwards, it but had to be done.
Barbecue
Tonight, after a quick wander around Borough market and the Thames Festival we barbecued some scallops and some bass. The scallops were enormous but really tasty and we finally found a use for the shells that have been hanging around for ages.
The bass was simply stuffed with lemon, parsley and garlic and served with barbecued peppers (brilliant, try them) and our usual salad and new potatoes.
Hamburger
Last night we had a quick supper of hamburgers which we ate while the rubgy was on. Minced beef, grated onion, salt and pepper with a splash of red wine. Served with lettuce, cheese and tomato. Super quick and yummy.
G
Thai Green Curry
We went through a phase of eating this almost every week because we’d found a recipe that was really tasty. We don’t eat it quite so often anymore but both Stephen and I have been craving it for a while. Luckily, we had some paste that we’d made previously in the fridge (eat that Nigella!) so I cooked this while waiting for Stephen to come home. I even managed the rice, sort of.
It was hot and creamy and tasty and fragrant and delicous. We ate it in about five minutes.
G
Steak and Chips
I’ve been going on about steak for a while. So when I started a new job on Monday, Kerri decided to buy some steak as a “happy new job” present. We had it tonight with chips (Marks & Spencer ready-made oven chips which were pretty good) and green beans and some cherry tomatoes roasted with garlic and salt and pepper and olive oil.
The steak was good; cooked quite rare and the “cheating” chips worked out well too. The tomatoes might actually have stolen the show though, they were brilliant; garlicky without being overpowering and having just a bit of pepper to counteract the sweetness that the roasting had given them.
Barbecue
The weather report claimed that we were going to have sun yesterday and it didn’t work out that way, but we had planned to barbecue so we went ahead.
We started with prawns which we’ve done a few times before and we marinated them in oil, lemon, garlic and chilli as we usually do. Then we had spatchcocked poussins, marinated in oil, lemon, garlic and parsely. The first one that I put onto the barbecue, skin side down, caught alight straight away (which is apparent from the photograph) so I took them off and put them on again a bit later.
With these, we had some potato salad made from Anya potatoes and a dressing of really nice olive oil, parsely and two types of salt – both granulated salt and crunchy rock salt (mmmm crunchy salt) and also a simple garden salad.
We’ll definitely try the poussins again, as they were tasty and moist and it’s great to have a whole bird to yourself. The potato salad was a great success too (mmmm crunchy salt!).
Carrots!
So, we tried to grow a lot of our own vegetables this year but sadly, while we were on holiday, there was a freak hailstorm and almost everything died. One of the things that survived was the small pot of Chatenay carrots. We didn’t think much would happen with them but we’ve continued to water them every night just in case.
Today, while I was outside willing the barbecue coals to turn ashy I noticed a little carrot head poking out. I thought I’d give it a little tug and just see if maybe something exciting might have happened underneath the soil. Lo and behold a perfectly formed baby carrot appeared in my hand. I tugged on a few more and they’re all ready! We now have six (don’t laugh) perfectly formed Chatenany carrots ready to eat. How exciting!
P.S. That’s my hand you can vaguely see in the picture, I spent about five minutes running around the garden holding my tiny bunch of carrots shouting “Look! They’re ready! We grew something! And Stephen took my picture 🙂
Beef and Water Chestnut Stir Fry
Kerri wanted to cook water chestnuts tonight and we didn’t have any and Waitrose didn’t have any when she went shopping there. So I volunteered to get some on the way home. I visited about 10 shops on the way home and only found them in the last one. I hadn’t thought they’d be that hard to find, but for some reason they were.
The chicken and basil stir fry that we cooked a few nights ago was really tasty, so we decided to do something similar to that and just add the water chestnuts. It was of course a Thai recipe and the water chestnut is Chinese, but this lack of authenticity wasn’t bothering us as we were both rather hungry. It turned out well, but not as well as the chicken and basil even though the recipes were very similar (apart from of course the chicken vs beef and the water chestnuts vs no water chestnuts).
Salmon Pasta
I found this recipe on the BBC Good Food site today while looking for a simple dessert. It sounded interesting: salmon, lemon juice, horseradish and creme fraiche. Stephen is out tonight so simple seemed the way to go.
It was ok but the flavours were just a bit wrong. I like horseradish with fish but this just didn’t seem to work. It was slightly too sweet and it all went a bit claggy. The telling thing about it was that I didn’t finish what was on my plate, didn’t go back for seconds and threw away the remainder from the pan.
