Sundays at our house

I just love Sundays! it's the one day of the week that we all get to spend pure quality time together as a family and a day when I get to really indulge my love of cooking. As I mentioned in a previous post about Sundays, we tend to linger over breakfast, then I do some baking and prepare the dinner and put it on low in the oven. Well this week breakfast looked like this:


And then me and the children made double choc chip cookies with hazelnuts:

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I consume 3 before they were even cool!

Then I decided to experiment with the chicken this week. We eat a lot of chicken as it is just so versatile, relatively cheap and, if you buy a whole one, goes a long way. However, it can get boring if you don't make the effort to try out new things. So, inspired by a Lebanese menu for a restaurant that me and Nick will be visiting soon, I decided to try something a little different. I noticed that a lot of the dishes included lemon juice, garlic, olive oil and tomatoes with spices such as cumin and paprika. So my creation went a little something like this (I have tried to give approximate amounts):

1. I made a paste out of tbsp olive oil, 4 large cloves of organic garlic, 1 tbsp of paprika, 1 tbsp of cumin, 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp black pepper corns, juice of 2 lemons, 1 tsp ginger powder t tbsp tomato puree.
2. Put everything into a small blender, or, as I did, pound the garlic in the pestle and mortar then add in the rest of the ingredients and gently pound into a paste.
3. Then I deicded to have a go at preparing the chicken in a spatchcock style by removing the backbone and flattening it out on a board.
4. Wash the chicken, pat dry, then rub the paste all over both the skin and the cavity which is now flat.
5. Lay some halved onions on the bottome of a large tray and place the chicken on top. Drizzle with a little more olive oil and place in the oven on a very low heat (100 degrees c) for 2 1/2 (for chicken of approx 1.8kg)


Well, what can I say, the chicken was divine. The skin was crispy and tangy and the flesh fell from the bones. We had it with a brown rice,aduki bean and roast onion (from the chicken) pilaff, some savoy cabbage that had been blanched, then refreshed in ice cold water and dressed with a lemon juice, olive oil and garlic dressing and some left over fresh bread from the morning's breakfast. We were all ravenous after our 2 1/2 hr long trek through the Cotswolds so needless to say it more than hit the spot!

As you can see, I was so hungry I couldn't wait to get started - the left thigh was the first to fall victim!

Desert was yet more cookies - yum and double yum!

Kaeng phet daeng kai - Thai red chicken curry

My favourite food of all time - apart from Caribbean because it is my 'home' food, is Thai food. The complexity of flavours and the blance of sweet, sour, salty and spicy is just heavenly and the spicier the better as far as I'm concerned. Though try this at your peril - on holiday in Thailand I did have to leave food on my plate (usually anathema in my books!) after a red hot dish of chilli chicken, where every spoonful was covered in so called 'mouse shit' chillies. it blew my head off!

Whilst on that holiday me and Nick took part in a cookery course at the Chiang Mai School of Cookery, where we learned how to cook authentic thai dishes. As my options for produce are rather limited in Witney, when we decided last minute on saturday to cook a red curry I cheated and bought the paste ready made. There is however no shame in this. Whilst browsing the many markets - including the floating one at Damnoen Saduak - it was a perfectly normal sight to see the various pastes being sold fresh by the weight.

Anyway, buying the sauce in a jar is no substitute, either buy the paste, or make the paste. The taste, colour, smell and texture of your finished dish will be far superior to anything you could buy in a jar. So all you then have to do is marinate your chicken (or beef/pork/fish) in some fish sauce, palm sugar, and soy sauce. Next fry the paste until it releases it oils, add the chicken and vegetables (I used green pepper and onion), then pour in the coconut milk, add a few kaffir lime leaves and cook until the chicken is done. Finally garnish with some basil (sweet thai basil if you can get it, normal basil if not) and some shredded lime leaves. Serve it with some jasmine rice and voila - a restaurant quality meal in under 1/2 hour!