Category: food

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chicken chickpeas coriander food

chicken and chickpea casserole

I saw this recipe on a low GI recipe website, but it was a little under-developed and felt sure it wasn’t going to quite come together. So I embedded a few ideas: a sofritto base of onion and carrots, but that wasn’t quite enough. I remember doing an Italian pasta sauce starting with basil stalks, infusing the whole thing with a deep flavour. For this I felt coriander would be  good fit. Whaddya know, tastier than expected: red onion, carrots, and coriander stalks sweated off, then diced chicken, chickpeas, button mushrooms, tin tomatoes, tabasco and chicken stock are added. After 45 mins simmering some lemon juice, soy sauce, salt and pepper and coriander leaves are added for seasoning.

Served with greek yoghurt mixed with lemon juice and more coriander, this was quite satisfying and pretty simple.

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chicken curry food rice

chicken curry

Can the world take another generic ‘curry’ recipe? At least one more it seems.

We kick off with ginger, onions, lentils, turmeric and cumin with 2 pints of water. This is left for 40 mins, then diced chicken is added for a further 25 mins. As seasoning right at the end, cumin seeds, ginger, garlic, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt is fried until aromatic, then pounded to nothing and added to the curry with some lemon juice. Turned out pretty good.
The little beige puddle in the corner is one of my fave accompaniments: cashew butter. It’s just toasted cashews and cumin seeds blitzed with oil and salt. Yum!
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bread food

hot cross buns

There was no breakfast for Sunday 🙁 So I refused to go to the shop and make something instead.

I had no idea where to start – I remember Paul Hollywood making some on the superb Good Food Live years ago, and that’s as far as I went. I decided to start at a malt loaf recipe and work outwards from there.
I’m writing the ingredients here for my own benefit really: 350g bread flour, packet of yeast, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 2 tsps cinnamon into which I rubbed in 15g butter. Then I added a couple of handfuls of mixed dried fruit, 200 ml water, 2 tbsps golden syrup and blended until bound. Then turned out, kneaded and stretched until smooth and elastic. After proving and shaping into buns, I gave ’em a milk wash and ovened.
Hot cross buns are traditionally basted with thinned down apricot jam. I possess no such odd preserve so improvised a caramel glaze: water and sugar and a tablespoon of golden syrup boiled until sticky, then the freshly-baked buns were doused in sugary gloop whilst cooling. I have to admit, they were great! Nice toasted the next day too.
Categories
bread food garlic

garlic bread


Another in the continuing saga of a-bread-a-week: this week, king of doughy accompaniments, much undersold as sweaty baguettes, garlic bread.

Polite Notice: please leave Peter Kay-related gags in 2003, many thanks.
My typical BBQ standby is to slice up a french stick, dip it in parsley and garlicky-infused oil and stick it on the bars of a searing-hot grill until blackened. Chomp and watch oil dribble down your chin.
However I wanted to start right at the beginning today, dough first. A little different to regular batter, a fair gloop of olive oil in the mix, and some dried oregano. As Saturday was a very sunny day the conservatory gave the yeast a real party; the dough had risen enormously! Whilst the second proving went on I gently fried some minced garlic in a freakish amount of olive oil. Not so it coloured, just so it was allowed to sweat aand develop a bit of flavour. I slashed the bread a little to allow the garlic juices to seep in between the bread, then drizzled the oil all over, plus a sprinkle of sea salt. 20 mins in the oven later, I had some pretty bloody good garlic bread. It ended up as a kind of fougasse. It was a real success, it’s coming out again.
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