Chicken and Chilli and Basil
Another Monday, another chicken stir-fry.
Make a paste with four cloves of garlic and two birds-eye chillis and fry. Add the leftover chicken and heat through, throw in the vegetables and holy basil and cook through. Add two tablespoons of soy sauce and two tablespoons of fish sauce. Put the lid on and cook for a couple of minutes. Serve with jasmine rice.
We both thought this would work well with lemongrass too…look out for that next week!
Larry
I never knew Larry the Lamb when he was alive, but even if I had done, I don’t think I would have minded eating him anyway because he was very tasty indeed. Regular readers may remember our good friend Geraldine. Larry was next in line for being cooked on the excellent spit created by some very skilled friends of ours.
Being a lot smaller than Geraldine, Larry only required three and a half hours to cook rather than ten. He was stuffed with garlic, onions and herbs and then expertly sewn up, as visible in one of the pictures. Raised on the Isle of Aran he’d been eating tasty grasses and heather all his life and this showed through in the taste of the meat.
We made some tabouleh to take along to have with it and other people made various things, including an excellent ginger and mango upside-down cake for dessert. We forgot to take pictures of anything other than Larry though. Wine will do that to you.
Beef, Chilli and Basil Stir Fry
Back on Tuesday last week, we cooked Beef, Chilli and Basil Stir Fry. We ended up being really busy and/or disorganised for the next few days so never got around to posting about it. Until now.
When we’d tried stir frying with basil before, we used sweet basil (i.e. the usual European variety). Having been to Chinatown over the weekend, I’d bought a bunch of holy basil which we used this time. Holy basil is unlike sweet basil in that it doesn’t taste or smell like much until it’s cooked, and when cooked it becomes wonderfully fragrant.
We followed a traditional Thai recipe for stir fried beef with chilli and basil, which goes something like this: Pound a birds chilli with two gloves of garlic, then stir fry this for a minute. Add half a pound of thinly sliced beef and stir fry for a few minutes. Add a tablespoon or so each of fish sauce and soy sauce, along with half a cup of holy basil. Stir fry for a few more minutes and it’s done.
We served this with jasmine rice and also had a side dish of traditional stir fried vegetables. The beef turned out really brilliantly and we’ll definitely be having it (or a variation on it) again soon. The recipe can be changed to use chicken or prawns too, which makes it quite versatile.
Thai Green Curry with Chicken
Stephen had a busy day shopping in Chinatown on Saturday afternoon buying ingredients for Thai curry paste which he made up in the afternoon. We used the paste last night to make a green curry which was delicoulsy fragrant and zesty. We used reduced fat coconut milk for the first time to save some calories, it had just as much flavour as the full fat but was slightly thinner in consistency.
We use this recipe from ‘Hot Sour Salty Sweet’ by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
1/4 cup minced coriander roots (or leaves and stalks)
11/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup minced lemongrass
1/4 cup coarsley chopped garlic
1/4 cup coarsley chopped shallots
2 tablespoons chopped galangal (or, 1 tablespoon minced ginger plus 1
tablespoon lime juice)
1 tablespoon minced wild lime zest
1/2 cup green bird chillies stemmed and coarsley chopped
1 tablespoon shrimp paste
(This has to be pounded until it’s smooth and free of coarse bits – about 20 minutes in a large stone mortar and pestle).
Teriyaki Salmon and Tempura Vegetables
I wanted to cook salmon in a sweet chilli rub this evening but couldn’t find a recipe for it, a quick look on BBC food threw up this recipe for teriyaki salmon which both Stephen and I thought sounded good. Stephen had the fantastic idea of making tempura vegetables to go with it so that’s what we did.
The salmon turned out brilliantly, the teriyaki sauce is made seperately and the fish is fried before being added to the liquid – I was really surprised that it managed to take on so many flavours without actually being cooked in the sauce but it did.
The tempura vegetables also worked out well, the second batch were better after we realised that the oil wasn’t quite hot enough in the beginning. We used a plain tempura batter but I think it could have done with some seasoning and/or some chilli.
Liver and Bacon
For a while we’ve been wondering if there was anything particularly Halloweeny that we could cook tonight. Eventually, we gave up and decided to have liver and bacon. Kerri picked up some calve’s liver from the butcher as well as some rather nice bacon. We fried the bacon first, then cooked the liver in the same pan. An old recipe from Mrs Beeton told us to put the bacon next to the fire while we were cooking the liver, but we skipped this step, hoping it wasn’t too important.
We served it with mashed potato and the result was good. I particularly enjoyed the bacon and resolved always to buy bacon from a butcher in future and never from a supermarket. As it turned out well, I assume that resting the bacon next to the fire wasn’t that important a step and we were right not to start a fire purely for the purpose of doing so.
Lamb Chops with Red Onion Reduction
That sounds a bit “cheffy” doesn’t it but I don’t know what else to call this. We bought some lamb chops to eat last night but weren’t hungry enough and ended up eating cheese instead. We’d planned to have them tonight with sauteed potatoes but a friend of mine suggested this instead. Sautee some onions and garlic then added red wine, balsamic vinegar and some tinned tomatoes before reducing the sauce for about 20 minutes. It worked well with the lamb, a good mix of slightly tart onions balanced by the sweet tomatoes and balsamic vinegar.
We served this with mashed potatoes, roasted parsnips (which, although good, didn’t work) and runner beans – I think that’ll be the last time we eat runner beans this year though as they were quite tough. Not the last time for the reduction though, I think that has a lot of potential.
Things en Croute
Last night we had an informal dinner party of sorts. I had four consecutive vintages of the same wine that I’d bought on trips to South Africa and wanted an excuse to open them all at once and do a comparative tasting. So this was the excuse for it. More on that later.
We started with a couple of bottles of sparkling wine from a little closer – Nyetimber Classic Cuvée 2000 and Denbies Greenfields Cuvée 2004, which was kindly brought by our guests. We’d had the Nyetimber 1999 and really enjoyed it; the 2000 was similar but tasted a bit riper and slightly sweeter. The Denbies was really good too – less toasty and more floral and aromatic than the Nyetimber. With these we had some roasted mixed nuts. We’d been discussing roasting our own nuts, but didn’t get round to it.
Starters were two pates – chicken liver and smoked mackerel. We’d made them both the night before and they certainly tasted better for having time for the flavours to blend; the mackerel had a bit of a kick from the cayenne pepper. I think the chicken liver was a bit under seasoned though and it’s a bit hard to add seasoning to it afterwards as it solidifies.
Next up was “things en croute”. Both salmon en croute and beef en croute have been our list of things to make for a while, so we did them both at once. The beef was surrounded by a layer of mushrooms and onions cooked down almost to a paste. The salmon was done in two layers, with a filling of cream cheese, spinach, rocket and watercress between them. I was rather pleased with the way these two turned out. I’d asked the butcher for a longer thinner piece of fillet but he recommended the fat piece as it had a better flavour. It certainly did have a good flavour, but the wideness of each slice of beef meant that the ratio of pastry and mushroom filling to beef was quite low. And I did leave it in for a little too long – should have used the meat thermometer!
Then apple crumble, which we’d made earlier in the day and reheated. Kerri was a bit worried about the topping not being quite right, but it tasted good. And the custard. Mmmmmmm the custard. We made real fresh custard for the first time and it was brilliant. We might have to make custard every day in fact. We certainly need to get our blow torch refilled so that we can make crème brûlée, or make them under the grill.
We had three cheeses – stilton, lancashire and stinking bishop.
Back to the excuse for the dinner in the first place – the wine. It’s not wine that was made to be kept for ages, but I happened to have four consecutive years of this particular cabernet sauvignon so just ended up keeping them for fun; it certainly wasn’t made to be kept for 11 years. We started with the 1996, which disappointingly had quite a lot of cork taint. So rather musty and hard to tell how the wine would have been but from what we could make out, it seemed a bit over the hill. Needless to say, we opened the 1997 shortly afterwards. This was immediately better in that it was clean. It still had some fruit but was a little past its best. The 1998 followed and this was good; lots of cabernet fruit flavour with smooth tannins and generally well balanced. We didn’t get to the 1999 as we’d had a fair amount of wine by this point. It was an interesting experiment, but next time I’ll try it with wine that’s designed to be kept for a long time.
Spaghetti with Parma Ham, Tomatoes and Mozarella
Another looong day at work today but I came home to find Stephen busy in the kitchen. I’d had an idea that the combination of roasted tomatoes, mozarella and parma ham would work well with spaghetti so we picked up the ingredients and put it together tonight. Neither of us had much time to think much further than throwing the ingredients into the pasta and unfortunately it showed in the end result – the flavours worked well but the components should have been smaller. A work in progress I think.
Dinner Diary – One Year On
I had a loooong day at work today and Stephen went out so there was nothing of note happening chez Stephen and Kerri (unless a much-needed glass of wine and a slice of Marmite toast counts?)
So, as I’m sitting here I thought I’d post anyway and started thinking about one of my favourite things about Dinner Diary….the fact that I can look back and see what I was eating this time last year. It turns out we didn’t post anything on this precise day but not long after we did make this not very interesting fish and pasta dish. When I wrote about it I mentioned “if there was a next time” but it turns out there wasn’t a next time.
