Five spice & honey chicken with mushroom noodle stir fry

Well this is the one that very nearly didn't happen.

The menu plan this week has had several different re-writings and re-shufflings largely due to circumstances changing at the last minute.  As a result, this recipe got bounced off the list, then I forgot to get something else out of the freezer and suddenly it was back on again!

I'm glad I made it though, as it was really rather good.

It's all part of my on-going love affair with the chicken leg.  As I've said before, I like chicken breast meat well enough - I just prefer the darker meat.  As our butcher sells 5 good sized chicken breasts for £5, I'd been having that right up until it suddenly dawned on me that if I bought a chicken leg at the same time, that amounts to two dinners (three breasts/two breasts & a leg) as opposed to one and a bit.  I know, I can't believe I didn't work this out sooner as well - but sometimes the obvious is the last thing we notice.
 

 All dressed in their spicy goo and ready for the oven

Well, I've done chicken in curry, chicken in citrus, chicken in a hat (alright, maybe not in a hat) but whatever there is to put chicken in, it feels like I've put it in it.  However, up until now, I hadn't investigated the Chinese 5 spice route.  Can't say that any more!

As I was pondering on what to put with the 5 spice, I had the dulcet tones of hubby running through my head.  He was expounding on the fact that "the Eastern thing is the balance of salty/sweet/ sour etc.", so I kind of went along with that - except I totally missed out the sour thing.  As they say in America, "so bite me".  (Except, I'd really rather you didn't, on the whole).  What I wound up with was the 5 spice for flavour, rapeseed oil to encourage the cooking and crisp up the skin on the chicken leg, honey for the sweet (and to caramelise slightly, which always looks great), soy sauce for the salty, a cheeky pinch of dried red chilli flakes for interest - and thought "that'll do!".  Yes, I could have gone the whole hog and added some lemon juice, or vinegar or some other source of sour, but I was interested to know how the unbalanced version would come out.  As it turned out, it was very nice indeed.  (Thank goodness!).

Stir fry ingredients : check. But where's the noodles?

So, what to put with it?  After all, a woman (or her menfolk) cannot live by chicken alone.  (More's the pity).  Well, with it being Chinese 5 spice, stir fry was the obvious choice and as we still had to settle on a carb. of some kind, a noodle stir fry made sense.
 

Yum - looks healthy!

Now I know that stir fry isn't right up there on son & heir's list of favourite foods, but it's good for him to re-visit foods he hasn't enjoyed, every so often.  He appears to be over his mushroom dislike of earlier years.  Which is just as well, as Asda - in their infinite wisdom - decided to send us a mushroom stir fry pack instead of the Edamame bean stir fry pack such as I'd ordered.  ~shrug~  Oh well, life is all about making the most of what you've got, so that's what we went with.  Of course, the extra mushrooms I'd bought to pad out the Edamame bean stir fry were a bit superfluous, but I chucked them in anyway.   I'd also ordered a pack of mange tout peas - some for the stir fry and some for a salad later in the week and they went in too.  They added a lovely sweet note to the veggies, which would have been a bit cabbage heavy without them.  Yes, Asda's "mushroom stir fry" turned out to be more of a "cabbage stir fry with the occasional mushroom", so it was good that I had a few extra.

At one time, I'd have been happy to have just had the veggies stir fried along with the chicken, but these days I think it is important to have a little carbohydrate in your main meal.  The end result of not having carbohydrates, is just that everyone starts reaching for the bread or crisps at around 8pm.  Truth be told, they do that anyway - but with rather less conviction if they've had carbs in their meal.  Now, because I was including noodles in the stir fry, this meant I needed to also come up with some kind of sauce to include in the wok which would lubricate the noodles and prevent that clagginess that they can sometimes have.  I'm not sure what I had against sour notes for this meal time, but they were very definitely off the menu as I decided to go with the classic dark soy sauce/light soy sauce/mirrin/fish sauce combo - which worked as perfectly as it always does.  This sauce combination gives such lovely colour to your stir fry and more to the point, gives a lovely rich flavour.

Now, a word must be had as regards oil.  If you've been reading along over the years, you'll know that I fairly recently eschewed the use of olive oil in favour of our lovely locally produced rapeseed oil - for the health benefits as much as anything.  As much as I love my rapeseed oil, it does have the unfortunate habit of spitting every flipping where if you use it at high temperature.  I've got a bit fed up with it doing that - and consequently ruining whatever I happen to be wearing at the time, as I've pretty much always forgotten to put an apron on.  We've always got sunflower oil in the house, as there are just some things that are better fried in sunflower than rapeseed (not many though, I'll grant you that!).  However with a stir fry, because the veggies are fried for so short a time it always feels as though the oil is much closer to the surface than with other types of cooking and consequently, you want an oil that has a lovely flavour.  My oil of choice is groundnut oil.  Not surprisingly, it has a lovely, light and delicate nuttiness that goes so well with stir fry dishes and complements curried dishes too, without any of the heaviness that accompanies a mixed vegetable oil or indeed olive or rapeseed.  If you haven't tried groundnut oil, I heartily recommend you get some in and give it a go.  Not as your everyday oil - you want something healthy and full of the lovely omega fats for that - but for stir fries and curries.  You'll be surprised.

So there we have it!  I don't have any special points to make as regards the cooking, as that is simplicity itself.  As regards the chicken, you can cook the breasts for the same time as the legs, so long as you remember to joint the leg portion.  Just cut across the hinge joint and separate it into a drumstick and a thigh.  That way it will cook a lot more quickly and correspond with the time it takes the breast to cook.

Use your own choice of stir fry veggies - they all take roughly the same amount of time to cook.  Just remember if you're adding any extra veg., to cut it into similar sized pieces so that it all cooks in the same time scale.  I sliced my mushrooms and cut the mange tout peas into three, which did the trick.

Mmmmn .... yummy chicken rules!


FIVE SPICE & HONEY CHICKEN with MUSHROOM NOODLE STIR FRY   (serves 3)

Ingredients :

3 chicken portions (I used 2 skinless boneless breasts and 1 leg)
1 tbsp rapeseed oil
2 tbsp runny honey
2 rounded tsp Chinese five spice
a good pinch of dried red chilli flakes
1 tbsp light soy sauce plus another 2 tbsp
a pinch of sea salt & ground black pepper
2 tbsp groundnut oil
4 large chestnut mushrooms, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
40g mange tout, each cut into three pieces
400g pack of fresh stir fry vegetables (cabbage, carrot, beansprouts, pepper etc.)
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp mirrin
2 tsp grated ginger (from a jar, but feel free to use fresh)
3 sheets of dried egg noodles.

Method :

1.  Score the chicken breasts lightly across in a diamond pattern, to encourage the absorption of their marinade.  Score the leg portion similarly.

2.  In a bowl, mix together the rapeseed oil, honey, 5 spice, chilli flakes, 1 tbsp light soy sauce and some salt and pepper.   Add the chicken and toss until completely coated.  Allow to sit for as long as until you have the baking dish and veggies for the next stage prepared.

3.  Slice the mushrooms and mangetout and chop the garlic.

4.  Into a small bowl, add the 2 tbsp light soy sauce, the dark soy sauce, fish sauce, mirrin and ginger and stir to combine.

5.  Place the chicken onto a baking dish with a lip - as it will generate some liquid that you don't want to spill all over the kitchen floor - and place into a pre-heated oven at 190degF/375degC/Gas 5 for 30 minutes or as long as until the juices from the chicken run clear.

6.  When the chicken has just 15 minutes to go, bring a saucepan of water to the boil and add the groundnut oil to a wok.  Heat the oil until almost smoking, then add the sliced mushrooms and stir fry for 2-3 minutes.  Add the contents of the stir fry pack, the mangetout and the garlic and stir fry until tender.

7.  When the chicken has just 5 minutes to go, add the sheets of dried noodles to the boiling water and simmer for 4 minutes or until the noodles are soft.  Drain and return to the saucepan.

8.  Add the soy sauce/mirrin/fish sauce/ginger mixture to the wok and allow to frizzle and reduce whilst you add the noodles.  Toss and stir to make sure the noodles are coated in the sauce and vegetables.

9.  Remove the chicken from the oven and serve with the noodle stir fry alongside.

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Minty mustard lamb's liver pitta bread - a spur of the minute lunch

I'm currently going through a phase of loving pitta bread.

Now I've always liked pitta bread, but just recently I seem to have taken to them in a big way.  I suppose the fact that my tummy seems to accept them more readily than ordinary bread (~sob~ I love my bread!) has made all the difference.

There are a number of other benefits to pitta bread, as I've discovered.  For instance, there's very little on this earth that can't be put into one for a yummy and fairly portable lunch.  Everything from steak and chips, through stew, to trifle can be contained in a pitta bread.  Although why anyone would want to put trifle in a pitta, is another matter.  Anyway - I do think that soup is really the only thing that won't go into a pitta bread - but you can dip your pitta bread into soup, so it still wins!

Pitta bread is also self-limiting, quantity wise.  As an example, I was making scrambled egg to go in my pitta this morning.  As I was just scrambling the one egg, I used just the one pitta.  Now had I have been making scrambled egg on toast, I might have felt I should just use the one slice of bread - but you could guarantee that I'd have put two into the toaster because of habit.  With pitta, just one comes out of the packet at a time and just one does the job with no reason to feel hard done by.

Creamy, minty, mustardy - what's not to like?

The whole butter question is another thing that is improved by the use of pitta bread.  With a sandwich, you would butter both slices of bread.  Not so with a pitta.  Very often it isn't necessary to use butter at all - but if you do, then just butter the one side and the job is done with half the amount.  How good is that?

With regard to quantity, putting a whole bucket load of salad into a sandwich just results in your having to use two hands to hold the whole collapsing mess.  Not so with a pitta.  Jam the salady loveliness in there as hard and fast as you can!  You might need two hands as you go, but only because of the sheer weight of health giving salad inside your cheese or egg pitta.  *wink*

So, when we picked up a little pack of fresh lamb's liver from the Ferndene Farm Shop at Bashley, Hampshire the other day, it got me wondering what to do with it.  Naturally, "put it in a pitta" was right up there as a suggestion.

I was in two minds whether to go down the "devilled, mustardy" route with it, or the "redcurrant and rosemary" route.  They both seemed as enticing as one another, but I could tell from the way my mouth was watering at the idea of the mustardy version, that this was the one.

I love mint sauce with lamb and felt that just the mustard sauce wasn't going to be quite enough.  I didn't have any fresh mint (the awful weather has terminated our mint plant's delusions of grandeur) but suddenly remembered putting mint sauce onto cooked new potatoes and how good that is.  So, if I use Dijon mustard for its piquancy, then add a little mint sauce for the sweet/sour thing it brings with it, hmmmn.  What can I use to lengthen and de-intensify the sauce with?  Aha!  I've a teensy tiny bit of double cream in the fridge looking for a home.  Perfect!  And it was.  The cream - only a dessertspoonful at the most - was sufficient to just saucify (is that a word?  If not, it ought to be) all the lovely flavours.

My friend Suzy Bowler entitled her brilliant food blog "Sudden Lunch" and I had her in mind all the time I was making this lunch, as apart from a little thought, it came together in a twinkling.

MINTY MUSTARD LAMB'S LIVER PITTA BREAD    (serves 1)

Ingredients :

1 pitta bread
1 tbsp rapeseed or olive oil
sufficient lamb's liver for one person, trimmed and sliced
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp Dijon mustard
half tsp Mint sauce (the vinegary kind, not Mint jelly)
1 dessertsp of double cream
small handful of rocket leaves.

Method :

1.  First of all, put your pitta bread in the toaster - put it in diagonally (or as diagonally as you can muster) so that as much as possible of it sees the heat.  Once toasted, split down one side and turn your attention to the liver.

2.  Heat a little rapeseed oil in a frying pan and chuck in the liver pieces.  Fry hard and fast - I like mine to have completely stopped bleeding, but I know there are others who can cope with a little red stuff, so it's up to you how long to cook it for.  A few seconds before finishing and adding the sauce ingredients, throw on a little sea salt and a lot of black pepper.  Then turn off the heat and leaving the pan on the hot plate, add a teaspoonful of Dijon mustard, half a teaspoonful of mint sauce and a dessertspoonful of double cream.  Stir to combine.  Pack the rocket leaves into the pitta and pour in the liver mix.

I can recommend either something tangy to drink with it, or a nice big mug of tea or coffee.  Mmmmn, glorious!

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Paprika Chicken & Chorizo Bake - looks good and tastes even better!

This week has been a bit of a bumpy one for the poor old meal plan, as between one thing and another, we've had to move meals around and change them at short notice.  Amazingly, I actually planned to have meals that could be moved and changed at short notice - which doesn't happen often!

So all this shuffling around, meant that this Paprika chicken & chorizo bake dish wound up as our Sunday roast - which it did very well at.  A lot better than expected, actually!

The dish had been inspired by a Hairy Dieters recipe for Spanish-style Chicken Bake which I'd seen in the BBC Good Food magazine.  It's basically a multi-vegetable tray bake with chicken, but the bit I liked the most was that it purported to be low in fat.

Now I will admit that in the changes I made to the recipe, I included a tablespoonful of rapeseed oil.  However, having swapped their chicken thighs with the skin on, for skinless chicken breasts, I felt I was swapping the potential chicken fat for an oil that was actually really good for you.  Rapeseed oil has every good thing that olive oil does - and more.  The chicken breasts needed some oil in order to stay juicy and marinating them in it, along with the paprika and oregano, was a jolly good idea as it just added to the depth of the flavours.

I wasn't overly confident that the amount of vegetables would be sufficient for my menfolk, either.  The addition of a courgette and some mushrooms - plus the change from an indigestible (well, that's how I find them anyway) green pepper to an infinitely more digestible long sweet red pepper, made all the difference.

I served the dish with some home-made potato wedges that I'd tossed in a little Umami paste - and which were yummy.

I had the makings for a side salad, just in case it didn't look very much on the plate, but they stayed in the fridge as it was more than adequate, as you can probably see from the photographs.

As for making it, well that couldn't have got a lot easier!  I find that getting down to the oven is becoming more of a trial these days, but the 20 minute intervals weren't too uncomfortable to administrate.  Because everything is cooked in the oven you don't have to juggle the timings for vegetables on the hob to coincide with your oven baked components being done - which makes life a lot easier.

Two things are well worth pointing out from a cook's perspective.  Firstly, is the garlic.  Don't be tempted to leave the garlic out.  Now I know not everyone is keen on garlic and you can come away from a meal like this feeling like you've just eaten a garlic sandwich made with garlic butter on garlic bread - but not in this case.  The three cloves of garlic - one each - cook through beautifully and become softly sweet and gently flavoured.  Squash some out of its jacket and eat with a mushroom - and you'll know why I'm saying to make sure to include it.  Simply gorgeous!  By all means include more than the one clove each, if you really like your garlic!

Secondly, is the roasting tin.  I have a lovely, deep, non-stick roasting tin - but I always line it with non-stick silver foil.  I will admit that this was, initially, at hubby's urging as he had got fed up with trying to scrape bits of food from roasting tins whilst trying to leave the "non-stick" coating intact during the washing up.  It seemed wasteful to me, to be using a non-stick silver foil on what was supposed to be a non-stick roasting dish.  However, I do have to agree with him that it is well worth it, to be able to wash up the roasting tin in a twinkling of the time it used to take.  Very well worth it.  So it is up to you - but I recommend adopting the same approach, particularly if you have any disability or your hubby does all the dishes!

So what did the meal taste like?

Well, the chicken was just divine.  The rapeseed oil had kept it beautifully juicy, as had the steam rising from the cooking vegetables.  It was subtly flavoured with smoked paprika and oregano, which complemented the paprika in the chorizo.  The chorizo had let go of its fat, which had combined with the juice from the tomatoes, mushrooms and peppers and provided just enough moisture to keep the whole thing tasty.

The sprinkling of chopped fresh parsley not only makes the plate look extremely pretty, but adds to the flavour.  It provides that dash of freshness that lifts all the cooked vegetables and is very worth including.

All three of us, with our differing likes and dislikes, really enjoyed this dish.  There was sufficient diversity provided by the different flavours and textures of vegetable to keep our interest right to the last bite - and low fat!  You couldn't ask for more.

Oh - and don't forget, you can click on the photographs above and see them in a much bigger format.  However, you might want to avoid doing that if you're hungry.  *wink*  Hubby has been honing his photography skills!


PAPRIKA CHICKEN & CHORIZO BAKE     (Serves 3)

Ingredients :

3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 tbsp rapeseed oil
½ tsp sweet smoked paprika
½ tsp dried oregano 
1 red onion, cut into 8 wedges
3 garlic cloves, unpeeled - just remove the root end
4 tomatoes, quartered
1 courgette, sliced
1 sweet red pepper, seeds removed and sliced into chunks
4 mushrooms, quartered
120g picante chorizo, sliced
sea salt & freshly ground black pepper
a handful of fresh parsley, chopped, to serve.

Method :

1.  Take each chicken breast and lightly score across, twice, to create a diamond pattern.  Place into a bowl with the rapeseed oil, sweet smoked paprika and oregano and toss until thoroughly coated in the herbs and spices.  Set aside.

2.  Into a deep roasting tin, place the onion, garlic and tomatoes.  Season well with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and place into a pre-heated oven at 180degC/350degF/Gas 4 for 20 minutes.

3.  When the 20 minutes is up, remove and toss the contents around to loosen them up a bit.  Add the courgette, red pepper, mushrooms and chorizo and give another mix.

4.  Place each chicken breast on top of the vegetables & chorizo mixture and season with a little sea salt.

5.  Place back into the oven for another 20 minutes.

6.  Remove from the oven and remove the chicken breasts to a warmed plate.  Turn the vegetables and chorizo mixture, then test the chicken to see whether it requires much more cooking.

7.  If the chicken is done, cover with foil and reserve to keep warm.  If the chicken requires a little longer, cover it lightly with three pieces of silver foil cut to match the size of the chicken.  This will help to prevent the chicken from drying out.  Turn the oven up to 200degC/400degF/Gas 6 and return to the oven for another 10 minutes or until the chicken is done and the veggies are all tender.

8.  Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve with potato wedges.

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Smoked mackerel & Mediterranean potato salad - Mediterranean week gets under way!

It seems as though we may very well have had our summer - but in the two days of sunshine that came our way just recently, it sparked off a desire for Mediterranean-style eating.

Ever hopeful that we might get a day or so of sun before winter is upon us again, I thought I'd share the best of the recipes.

Now you know how much hubby loves his smoked mackerel - and I do too, but to a slightly lesser degree.  Hubby will eat his smoked mackerel any way he can get it - hot or cold - but I find that a hot mackerel dish will repeat on me for a month of Sundays.  Now for all that repeated burping causes some hilarity amongst the family, it does get a bit much when it's followed by terminal heartburn - or is that too much information?

As a result, the first dish of our Mediterranean week is smoked mackerel, served cold, with an accompanying warm Mediterranean Potato Salad and a tomato & red onion salad.  If you prefer your mackerel hot, then by all means warm it up - it won't make a jot of difference to the dish.

I spotted the Mediterranean Potato Salad in the BBC Good Food Magazine and it ticked all the right boxes for both son & heir and myself.  I wasn't too sure about hubby, though, as we all know his relationship with potatoes isn't great.  Still, I crossed my fingers that the use of Jersey Royal new potatoes, together with the roasted red peppers and black olives in the dish (both of which are particular favourites), paired with mackerel might do the trick.

Well, it almost did.  It was the garlic that did for him - and oddly, it seemed to be the pairing of garlic and tomato.  Still, there's no accounting for taste - and it will be easy to leave the garlic out next time.

Both son & heir and I really liked the warm salad.  It was a lovely departure and a welcome change from using Jersey Royal New Potatoes in a traditional way (i.e. with butter and mint).  I have also taken to using English rapeseed oil instead of olive oil, now that we have found a couple of suppliers that provide affordable rapeseed oil.  This was, pretty much, my first voyage with using the oil in a salad sense - and we like it.  Rapeseed oil has a much nuttier flavour than olive (not surprisingly) and I've found that it blends very easily with Mediterranean style flavours.  Well worth doing, when you consider all the health benefits of rapeseed oil over olive oil.  If you thought olive oil was good for you, have a look at a comparison between the two.  With half the saturated fat of olive oil and a higher flashpoint which means it can be used in roasting and stir frying, it wins my vote!

It did occur to me, that the salad could be made even more Mediterranean style, by using sun dried tomatoes instead of the tin of tomatoes - but I have yet to try this theory out!

The Mediterranean Potato Salad as it stands, is simplicity itself to make and the sauce can be put together as the potatoes cook.  Paired with the simple tomato & red onion salad and an even simpler smoked mackerel, this really is a meal that takes minutes to prepare - and is good for you on all sorts of levels!

MEDITERRANEAN POTATO SALAD   (feeds 3)

Ingredients :

1 tbsp olive oil (I used Rapeseed Oil)
1 small onion, thinly sliced
1 garlic clove (optional, leave it out of you're sensitive to garlic)
1-2 tsp oregano, either fresh or dried
200g tinned cherry tomatoes (I used the other half for breakfast the next day!)
100g roasted red peppers, sliced (I used them from a jar and rinsed off the vinegar)
300g new potatoes, halved if large
25g black olives, sliced
handful of basil leaves, torn.

Method :

1.  In a small saucepan, heat the oil and add the onion.  Cook on a gentle to medium heat for 5-10 minutes until soft.

2.  Add the oregano and continue to cook for another minute.

3.  Add the tomatoes and peppers, season well and simmer gently for 10 minutes.

4.  Meanwhile, cook the potatoes in a pan of boiling salted water for 10-15 minutes or until tender.  Drain well, mix with the sauce and serve warm, sprinkled with olives and basil.

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