Barbecued Chicken
Last night we planned a quick barbecue in the evening as it was such a nice evening. It turned out not to be that quick due to lighting the fire and waiting for it to be ready and also for choosing chicken thighs, which take a while to cook.
However, when it was finally ready, it was very tasty. We marinated the chicken for about half an hour in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, rosemary and paprika and although the flavours of the marinade came through well, it also tasted very chickeny. Along with the wonderful char-grilled barbecue flavour.
We had some salad as an accompaniment, which was fairly plain except for the addition of some walnuts and some broad beans. We blanched the broad beans and then marinated them in some olive oil, white wine vinegar and salt and pepper for a while before tossing them in with the rest of the salad.
Barbecued Lamb Leg
Because of the the brilliant weather we’ve had lately, we just had to barbecue. Recently a colleague was telling me about a leg of lamb that he had cooked on the barbecue and how good it was, so when Kerri suggested the same thing, it just had to be done.
We had a half leg of lamb, which I attempted to tunnel-bone before butterflying, but failed, so just attempted to butterfly it anyway. It worked out pretty well, and we marinated it in lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, crushed garlic cloves and various herbs:
We cooked it over direct heat for a bit to get it nicely charred, then moved the coals towards the edges and put the lid on the barbecue, cooking it for a while longer. Towards the end we added some aubergine slices too:
The aubergines looked rather good with their stripes when they were turned over when the lamb was cooked and resting:
We served it with flatbread, Greek style salad and tsatsiki:
The lamb turned out very well indeed. Possibly the tastiest thing we have ever barbecued in fact. We managed to cook it just right – nicely charred on the outside without actually being burnt, and still a bit pink and juicy in the middle. We had some left over for lunch the next day too, which was a bonus.
Impromptu Sausage and Mustard Pasta
Ingredients:
See method.
Method:
Wander around the shop wondering what to have until you see some nice-looking sausages. Buy them and take them home without much idea of what you are going to do with them. On the way, mull things over and decide on some sort of pasta-related dish. When you get home, open a nice bottle of red wine while you contemplate further.
I’ve had sausage casserole and sausage pasta before, but I find that if the sausages are cooked in the casserole or sauce from the start then of course all the fat cooks out into the sauce rather than disappearing, which gives me indigestion. So put the sausages into the oven to cook while wondering what sort of sauce to make. Chop up a red onion and a stick of celery and sweat these with a crushed clove of garlic and a sprinkle of thyme.
When the onion and celery have softened a bit, add half a glass or so of red wine (it’s really nice so you don’t want to waste too much) and wait for the alcohol to evaporate. Search through your store cupboard for a small tin of tomatoes. While you are searching, find some slivered almonds. Add the tomatoes to the pan, but keep the almonds aside.
Decide that sausages and mustard are good together, so add a teaspoon or so of wholegrain mustard to everything else. Have another look in your store cupboard for pasta. Wacky shapes are good if you can find any. Add a handful of slivered almonds to the sauce and cook the pasta.
Taste the sauce and season if required. When the pasta is cooked, drain it and add it to the sauce. Mix it all together and watch that you don’t splash onto your shirt. Take the sausages out of the oven and marvel at the coincidence that they are also done. Cut the sausages into bite-sized pieces and try not to eat too many of the pieces, even if they are really good. Mix the sausage pieces into everything else and serve. Garnish with chopped parsley if you have any (I didn’t).
Enjoy. If it’s not that great, blame the impromptu nature of it and add some more salt and pepper. Decide that crushed almonds would be better than slivered. Remember to keep a piece of sausage for your girlfriend if she’s out.
My Favourite Sandwich
It wasn’t exactly a secret since I’ve posted about it before but I suppose it’s one of those things that doesn’t come up in conversation very often and I don’t really mention it either. The truth is though that I love fishfingers. They remind me of being small but I’m not sure why as we I don’t think we ate them very often and I don’t remember having a particular fondness for them back then either. I do remember the time my dad cooked them for me though (very traditional household: mum cooked, dad mowed the lawn so this was An Event), he used the same frying pan that he’d previously cooked hamburgers for my brother in and I declared them the best fishfingers ever (much to my mum’s subsequent dismay).
I re-discovered fishfingers when I was a student and ate a fair amount of them during my three years at University but as much as I love them, I don’t tend to eat them very often now. I guess it’s because there’s so many other things to eat and it’s rare for us to eat the same things twice these days.
Stephen’s been working really late the last couple of weeks and cooking for both of us has been tricky, not a lot of the food we eat works well when re-heated and I’m usually too hungry to wait until 9pm when he comes home so we’ve struggled. It was at some point last week when I sat down to yet another plate of toast that it occurred to me that fishfingers were the answer. I could grill some quickly for myself and make Stephen a proper (and grown-up!) dinner for when he comes home. And that’s what I did today.
I’m quite particular about how I like my fishfingers: grilled until they’re really brown, a small incision made in each one so that I can adminster the salt and vinegar without making the fishfinger soggy, sandwiched between two slices of buttered toast (I prefer white sliced bread but I didn’t have any) and cut into four squares, not triangles which is how I eat all other types of sandwich.
It was delicious and one of the best things about fishfingers is that they still taste the same as they did when I was small. They may have shrunk a bit (but so have Double Deckers and Wagon Wheels) and they may use all natural flavourings now but every time I eat them I remember how much I love them I’m transported back to being eight years old again. There’s seven left in the box, I wonder how long they’ll last now that I’ve got the taste for them again?
Chocolate Brownies
We were invited to a barbecue today and I offered to make cheesecake. When it came to making it though I realised that I’d actually left the base of the tin at my mum’s place so we had to improvise.
I originally made these particular brownies in June of last year and took them in to work, they were devoured in minutes (as anything sugary or chocolatey usually is!) so figured they must have been pretty good and therefore suitable for taking to friends. The added bonus with these particular brownies is that they’re really simple and quick to make. Not quick enough however as we stupidly decided to run loads of errands in the morning and got stuck in the Sunday morning DIY traffic. No matter though as we simply made up the mixture and took it with us to be baked at our friend’s place later on.
I think they were a hit, everyone seemed to enjoy them and there were only a couple left at the end of the day. I did cook them for slightly too long though but I blame our friend’s fancy oven for being too hot!
Barbecue!
It was 20 degrees on Saturday so we thought it was about time we dusted off the barbecue and put it to work. We spent most of last week deciding what to cook but settled on lamb chops since they’re our favourite thing to eat from the barbecue. We marinated them in parsley, mint, coriander, garlic, lemon and oil for a couple of hours before cooking them and they were delicious. The marinade had really penetrated the flesh and the outsides were beautifully charred, just how we like them.
Continuing the middle-eastern them we served cous-cous with the same herbs and we also made some baba ganoush. Both dishes were really good and perfectly complimented the lamb.
Vegetable Stir-Fry
Stephen cooked this for himself on Thursday night, I was out eating steak which was also supposed to go into this dish but apparently it didn’t smell too good. So vegetables it was, and nuts and noodles by the look of the picture.
Chilli Taco
I wasn’t going to post this because I couldn’t get the picture to work but it doesn’t look as bad as I remembered so here it is: Tuesday night’s dinner…apologies for the delay!
Chilli, made to our usual recipe a while ago and frozen for an emergency. Tonight’s emergency being Stephen working late and an empty fridge. We served them with taco shells for quickness. Very tasty but impossibly messy to eat!
Note to self: next time, increase the chilli!
Thai Monday Part 6 – Spicy Minced Chicken Salad (Larp Gai)…
…and hot and sour soup of clams with chillies and lime (tom yam hoi nahm sai).
It’s been a while since we’ve done our supposedly weekly Thai Monday, so over the weekend we hastily chose a couple of recipes and bought what we needed to.
First up was Hot and Sour Soup of Clams with Chillies and Lime:
The recipe describes this as an “austere” soup because of its simplicity. It contains stock slightly seasoned with sugar and salt, and the clams are cooked in the stock until they open. Then add a couple of bruised chillies, a squeeze of lime juice and garnish with coriander leaves. Very simple, and distinct from some of the complex recipes that we’ve used in previous Thai Monday instalments. The chillies and the lime juice add their flavour to the dish, but just enough so that you know they are there.
The soup would be good served alongside something more complex. However, in our haste to choose recipes, we ended up choosing something that was similar in many ways:
The Spiced Minced Chicken Salad is a larp style salad, which generally includes minced or chopped meat cooked in the dressing and flavoured with dried chilli.
This too contained stock (only 3 tablespoons) seasoned with salt and sugar. We finely chopped a chicken breast with some garlic and cooked it in the stock until just cooked, before seasoning with lime juice, chilli powder and fish sauce and mixing in chopped shallots and chopped mint and coriander leaves. We sprinkled it with ground roasted rice and served.
Although we followed the recipe, I think we got the ratio wrong somewhere along the way and ended up with too much lime and too little chilli. I did add some more chilli to mine, which balanced it out a little better, but having two dishes that were both quite heavy on lime juice was a bit much.
So the salad wasn’t that successful, but that’s all in the spirit of what Thai Monday was supposed to be about: we wanted to explore different styles of Thai food that we hadn’t tried before, rather than just cooking green curry every time because as brilliant as green curry is, a bit of experimentation and horizon-broadening is always a good thing and some of these simpler recipes serve as history lessons as they often form the bases from which more complex dishes evolved.
Spiced Lamb Shanks with Olives
Continuing our weekend of Spanish food, we cooked this dish from The Real Taste of Spain. It is a dish from Andalucia in southern Spain, influenced by the Moorish occupation centuries ago, hence its spicy flavours.
Luckily, we read the recipe yesterday and realised that the lamb shanks needed to be rubbed with the spice mix and left to infuse overnight. The lamb shanks that we got were very small ones, which meant that we got two each rather than the usual large one shank per person.
The spice mix was cinnamon, ginger, cumin, coriander and paprika, which went onto the shanks yesterday. Today, when we came to cook them, we browned the shanks in a casserole dish, then removed them and browned some onions in the spicy oil. When the onions were lightly brown, we added whole whole cloves of garlic and a heaped teaspoon of flour.
After these had fried for a while, we added wine and water, adding slowly and stirring until it had all been added. Then we put the shanks back into the casserole and put it into the oven for an hour and a half before adding pitted black olives and cooking for a further half an hour.
I’d made some spiced chickpeas and spinach to eat with it, whereas Kerri made some garlicky mashed potatoes. Much as I liked the spiced chickpeas and spinach, I found myself stealing more and more mash as dinner went on.
The shanks turned out rather well – they had cooked down to become very soft and fell off the bone when prodded with a fork. The garlic had cooked down nicely and melted into the onions, making an excellent sauce.
