Please give this dinner a chance! Yoghurt-sour is a good thing, plus yoghurt helps all the spices to penetrate the chicken meat whilst tenderising it as well.
The dry fried okra is really delicious and together they beat any greasy takeaway offering hands down, both on the healthy front and on the tasty front.
This is inspired by a dish in "Indian Food Made Easy" by Anjum Anand and I would totally recommend this book to anyone who thinks they love a takeaway!
So, pop some chicken thighs into a bowl, 1-2 per person, and pour over one of those large pots of natural yoghurt.
Add 7-8 large cloves of garlic, smashed up or minced if you can be bothered to clean the mincer - I never can. Take 2-4 cardamom pods (depending on how much you like them) smash them open, extract the seeds, crush them with the back of your knife and tip them in.
Top with a large hunk of ginger chopped up very finely, a heaped tablespoon of ground coriander, a heaped teaspoon of garam masala, a teaspoon of chilli powder, and a generous pinch of cumin.
Sprinkle in a good amount of salt, maybe as much as 2 teaspoons, and mix everything together really well - make sure every inch of the chicken is coated. Marinate for as long as possible, in the fridge overnight would be great, but if I'm honest I left it for an hour on the sideboard and it was tasty for just that time.
When you're ready to cook it, upend the whole lot into a pan and put on a reasonably high heat. In a separate pan, cook up a chopped onion and some green chillies. When they are soft, add them to the chicken mixture.
Cook the curry for 20 minutes, then stick a lid on it, turn the heat right down and cook for another 10 minutes. You can add extra water if it dries up.
While the curry is cooking, slice the okra up vertically and liberally sprinkle gram flour, garam masala, chilli powder and salt over the top. Mix up well, heat up oil in a frying pan and, shaking off excess powder, fry the lot for about ten minutes.
Serve the curry with rice and shedloads of fresh coriander, plus the okra.
Tasty, tasty holiday treat! The last time I had laksa I was in Malaysia and I'll always remember how amazing this noodly, spicy soup was out there.
This particular balance of ingredients was suggested in Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey, currently my favourite book, and turned out tasty as can be - even with a few of my convenience tweaks thrown in.
A warning: this can take a while to make because of all the chopping to make up the paste before you start cooking! I made enough for four dinners, we'll have the leftovers of the first half for lunch tomorrow and pop the rest in the fridge for another time.
The Curry Paste
The spice paste contains lots of ingredients, all chopped or ground up, and popped into a mini food processor to be made into a smooth paste (or you could do it in a pestle and mortar, old style). If you don't fancy making the paste, buy a pot of pre-made from the supermarket and skip to the next section.
Dried Shrimp |
1 tbsp Shrimp Paste |
10 Dried Chillies |
Several garlic cloves |
A peice of galangal |
Two stalks of lemongrass |
1 tbsp Coriander Seeds |
1 tbsp Turmeric |
Handful of peanuts |
Several Shallots |
3-4 tbsp oil |
The finished paste |
* Just by the way: you can use ginger instead of galangal, any onion instead of shallots and can buy frozen, pre-chopped lemongrass as well as shrimp paste at the supermarket. The rest of the ingredients shouldn't pose a problem, except the dried shrimp which you can leave out if necessary.
The Laksa
Heat up a glug of oil in a pan and fry the paste for a few minutes. Add 750ml of stock, preferably fish stock. I was stuck so I used 500ml dashi and 250ml vegetable stock. Also a can of coconut milk, 1 tbsp palm sugar and 2 tbsp nam pla (Thai fish sauce).
While that's coming to a simmer, pour boiling water over some dried, flat noodles and leave to soak. They'll be ready in a few minutes.
Add some king prawns to the soup and leave to simmer for a few minutes. Pile the cooked noodles into bowls along with sliced cucumber, bamboo shoots, beansprouts, red chilli, spring onion, mint and coriander.
Ladle the soup over the top along with the prawns. Goes nicely with Jubilee champagne!
This made a nice lunch for two but would be equally good as a little starter for four. I got the idea from a James Martin recipe in James Every Day, but as usual just had to ring in the changes. It was really tasty and extremely light, for something more filling I'd consider adding a slice of toasted ciabbatta.
First you need a red pepper or two, cut in half and place face down on a tray with some olive oil, salt and pepper. Pre-heat the oven on to 200°C and put the peppers in on the top shelf for about 15-20 minutes.
Meanwhile, finely chop a couple of spring onions, a handful of fresh coriander and half a red chilli and put in a bowl with the juice of half a lemon, a glug of olive oil, salt and pepper.
Once the peppers are cooked, peel off the skin and then very finely dice them. Add them to the other dressing ingredients in the bowl.
Share out some mixed salad leaves between two plates with a few extra coriander leaves mixed in. Take half of the red pepper mixture and mix it in with the leaves using your hands.
Season your scallops with a little salt and pepper. Heat up a dry, non-stick frying pan until really hot and, keeping it on a high heat, lay your scallops in the pan. Count 30-40 seconds and then turn them over and count another 30-40 seconds.
Arrange the scallops on top of the salad and spoon the rest of the red pepper mixture over the top.
This was inspired by a Balinese curry recipe I found in Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey. My dinner didn't end up resembling the original too much, it was pretty tasty though.
This does involve a fair bit of slicing and dicing, so maybe one for a quiet evening rather than when you're in a rush. It fed two for dinner with enough left over for lunchboxes the next day.
So, step one, thinly slice a purple onion and as much garlic as you like. Step two, dice two large or 4-5 ordinary tomatoes, a fat thumb of ginger and as much fresh chilli as you like. Step three, slice an aubergine into big bitesize peices.
Finally, step four, skin, de-bone and dice a couple of chicken legs (or buy pre-prepared chicken leg meat, or just breasts) and lightly coat with a little cornflour. That's it, all the tough prep work is done!
Get your rice on to cook - I can really recommend getting a ricebot (aka electric ricecooker, preferably with a delay timer function). My favourite rice for steaming is Japanese short grain.
Heat up a large frying pan on the hob with a little sesame or vegetable oil and fry the chicken peices until you can't see any pink on the outside, then add the aubergine and continue to cook until the chicken is cooked through and the aubergine is softened but still has a little bite to it. Take them out of the pan and put to one side.
Reusing the same pan, add a little more oil and stir fry the onion and garlic until softened, then add the tomatoes, ginger and chilli along with a smidge of shrimp paste. Give it a couple of minutes before adding the chicken and aubergine back to the pan, along with a massive pinch of lime leaves, a big squeeze of lemon juice, 2 tbsp of soy sauce, a decent scraping of palm sugar and a splash of water.
Five more minutes in the pan at most and it should be ready, mix in a big handful of coriander and serve with a nice mound of steamed rice and, if you like it, some hot chilli sauce.
