Braised Boozy Chicken

Last night's recipe was somewhat similar to the last recipe I posted, I suppose. The taste and technique were very different, but the pictures are going to look same-y, I think. Given that four days elapsed between them, and that we ate a lot of different stuff in Seoul (I'm still happily remembering that pear and gorgonzola pizza with rocket and caramelized onions... sigh), I think I'm the only person who this is bothering. On, then, with the show!

I took this recipe from BBC Good Food's chicken braised with cider and bacon. Unfortunately we are a cider-less country, and hence a cider-less household, so I had to be more inventive than that. And I invite you to be more inventive too. This is a recipe crying out for alcohol - any alcohol. Whatever you've got. Throw it all in. It's delicious. And if there's any sauce left over, heat it up and eat it as soup the next day. Really.

Braised Boozy Chicken

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

1 tablespoon oil

3 chicken breasts

Half an onion

6 rashers bacon

1 apple

1 tablespoon flour

1 cup red wine

1 chicken stock powdered cube

(or 1 teaspoon chicken stock powder)

250ml apple juice

1 teaspoon mustard

Seasoning

Dijon Chicken

It's been a while since I updated - not, as I mentioned before, for lack of cooking, but for lack of completely original and replicable cooking combined with a holiday!

I cooked the dijon chicken from Smitten Kitchen the night before we went to Seoul and it was very nice. I think it was a little bit vinegary and could have benefited from the double cream (as recommended) rather than single cream (which I used), but Tom thought it was perfect as was, so there you go. I served it with roasted home-made sweet potato gnocchi, leftover from last week, and cauliflower.

 Dijon Chicken

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

1 tablespoon oil

2 chicken breasts

1 teaspoon oregano

Half an onion

1 cup white wine

1 cup chicken stock

1/2 cup cream

1 tablespoon wholegrain mustard

Seasoning

Stuffed Chicken with Roasted Cubes

I now have a new feature on this blog: printable recipes! A (Printable Recipe) link at the start of the list of ingredients takes you to a page where the recipe has been copied up, minus pictures and other frivolities. Scroll to the bottom and amongst all the little blue text ("Sign In, Recent Site Activity, Terms & Conditions") there is a little link that says "Print Page." It should be easy to use, and I hope you enjoy it.

So, a recipe. I decided to re-do one of my essential recipes (the stuffed chicken) and out came this. Ideally, though, the recipe is made with soft and mature cheeses, rather than milk and mayonnaise and the plastic-y stuff here. This is my recipe, but it does come from BBC Good Food's mustard-stuffed chicken which I would much rather eat. Rearrange these words to make the sentence that most often falls out of my mouth these days: Korea no sigh cheese in.

Last night's dinner was fairly easy and pretty tasty. There was a very herbal quality to it, despite only including half a teaspoon of oregano. I felt it lacked cohesion, but then again I'm rapidly becoming a cooking snob so I wouldn't let that bother you. Also, I served it with 'warm broccoli' for a reason: broccoli loses its temperature very quickly, so if you prepare yourself linguistically your dinner won't suffer.

Stuffed Chicken with Roasted Cubes

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2 with extra potato cubes

2 chicken breasts

50ml milk

2 tablespoons mayonnaise

1 teaspoon mustard

1 garlic clove

1/2 cup grated cheese

1/2 teaspoon oregano

4 rashers bacon

Seasoning

3 large sweet potatoes

4 small potatoes

Water

Salt

Oil

Mix the milk, mayonnaise, mustard, chopped garlic clove, cheese and oregano in a bowl and leave it to sit for a while. The mixture needs to be quite thick.

Peel and cube the potatoes and boil them in salted water until soft. Shake roughly in the pan before transferring to an ovenable dish and dousing liberally in oil. Sprinkle some salt over, and put the cubes in the oven for 40 minutes at 220 degrees (430 Fahrenheit) to crisp up.

In the meantime, slit a pocket into each chicken breast and stuff with about 1/3 of the mayonnaise mixture. Wrap two bacon rashers around each breast, and pour the remaining mixture on top. Bake at 220 degrees (430 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.

Serve with warm broccoli.

Apple Mustard Risotto

Risotto has been one of my favourite lunches for a long time - it was one of the first meals I posted, not that I strictly wrote recipes back then. It's the sign of someone who doesn't have to go to work until after 2pm. If I ever have a real job, I'll miss lunch risottos.

So yesterday I made an apple and mustard risotto, after trawling through a bunch of links and somehow finding my way to Cookie & Kate's apple cheddar quesadilla. Oh, I miss cheese. Anyway, more things happened and I ended up using apple in a risotto. (I also used apple in a peanut sauce for dinner, which was also delicious, but there are no pictures of that meal - partly because Tom burnt his contribution - so it's like it never existed!)

 Apple Mustard Risotto

(Printable Recipe)
Serves 1

1/2 an onion

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 an apple

1/2 a glass white wine
1 cup rice

400ml stock (roughly)

1 tablespoon mustard

Seasoning

Chop your onion and apple, and fry in butter until softened. Add the rice to the pan and stir to coat the rice in the butter - it should go translucent. Pour the white wine in and allow the mixture to simmer for a few moments.

A very liquidy pan.

Add stock to the pan little by little, waiting until the rice has absorbed the liquid before adding the next 100ml or so. Stir as regularly as possible. Usually I just dump all the stock in in one go because I have better things to do with my life, but you do run the risk of oversaturating the rice that way.

The rice has absorbed more of the stock.

Towards the end of the cooking time, add the mustard - it should need about five minutes in the pan to heat through and allow the rice to absorb some of the flavour without being totally overwhelmed by it.

Season the risotto, and taste - after twenty-five minutes it should be nicely edible. Serve.

Throw some extra apple chunks on to garnish.

Oven-Fried Chicken and Hasselback Potatoes

Yesterday I felt very much like Nigella as I decided to marinade some chicken for dinner about three minutes before we had to leave for work. If only I'd been wearing a lower-cut top, with mood lighting rather than brash sunlight, and a camera crew ready to put everything I needed within arm's reach. Instead I was rushing maniacally around my nonetheless tiny kitchen, grabbing and shaking and stirring and trying to reassure Tom that it would only take a second longer.

Dinner was delicious, and taken from recipes here and here. I've done Hasselback potatoes before, but in the spirit of my only real New Year's resolution (which is to make a bit more of an effort with this blog, in case you couldn't tell) I'll write up the recipe again. With pictures! Oooooh.

You may have noticed a new 'Recipes A-Z' at the top of the page. I'm not sure it's entirely easy to use at the moment, so please comment if you have any suggestions for improvement. Also, if you click on the title of a recipe and then scroll down to the bottom of the recipe, you should see a list of related recipes that might interest you.

In other news, I received Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus as a late Christmas present, and - wow. Just wow. In a few days I might have gotten over my infatuation with the book enough to talk about it like a normal human being talks about books, but for the moment I'm just going to wallow in my crush.

Oven-Fried Chicken

(Printable Recipe)
Serves 2

3 chicken breasts

200ml milk

1 tablespoon lemon vinegar

1 teaspoon lime juice

3 finely chopped garlic cloves

Small handful of chopped onion

1 teaspoon mustard

Spice (I added a teaspoon of ssamjang and a hefty handful of chilli flakes)

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Seasoning

4 crackers

1 slice of bread

1 handful grated cheese

Sprinkle of chilli flakes

1/4 cup flour

2 grindings of black pepper

Mix the milk with the lemon vinegar and lime in a bowl, and leave to stand while you get the other ingredients out. Chop the garlic cloves and onion (I probably used about a quarter of an onion) and add to the slightly-curdled mixture. Add mustard, spice and cinnamon, and stir everything through. Dump the chicken in, turn to coat in the marinade if necessary, cover the bowl, and leave for work.

The chicken should sit in the marinade for at least three hours - mine sat for about eight. In a separate bowl, crumble the crackers and bread and mix with the cheese, chilli flakes, flour and pepper. I used a blender to whizz everything together to make a very fine dust which coated the chicken remarkably evenly.

Marinaded chicken ready to be coated.

Pick up each chicken breast and shake a little to get off any excess drops. Dredge in the coating and put on to a baking tray. If you want the coating to go properly golden, dot some butter on top of the chicken - I forgot to but was nonetheless perfectly happy with the results.

Waiting to go in the oven.

Bake at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit) for thirty minutes.

In the meantime, pour the marinade into a heavy-bottomed pan on a low heat. Stir frantically to decrease the likelihood of making flavoured ricotta. After about five minutes, it can be left on the heat to reduce - I left it for about ten minutes until the sauce was the consistency I wanted. Add seasoning, and herbs if wanted. I served this sauce on the side of the meal in a separate bowl in case it was disgusting, but it was actually really nice and added some less-subtle spice to the meal.

Hasselback Potatoes

(Printable Recipe)
Serves 2

6 small potatoes

Oil (lots of oil)

Butter

Seasoning

Put each potato in a wooden spoon and cut across at intervals. The wooden spoon will stop you from cutting all the way through, so each potato will fan out as it cooks.

Chopping the Hasselback.

Put onto a baking tray and cover liberally in oil, salt and pepper. Cut small pieces of butter and put one on top of each potato (which should be cut-side up). Roast for forty-five minutes at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit), adding more oil halfway through if you think the potatoes don't look crispy enough. Bigger potatoes will take more time, and crispier potatoes (my boyfriend's eternal desire) will also take longer. Serve.

Dinner is served.

Branflake Chicken

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but tomato sauce is only really available in Korea in tins that weigh over three kilograms. We bought a new tin a couple of days ago, and on opening it yesterday, realized that it was actually tomato paste rather than sauce. Great - means it'll last for longer! With our pantry being so cold (it's a couple of degrees warmer than the outside, but stuff has frozen in there), it's brilliant for storing huge amounts of tomato paste without taking up tons of room in our fridge.

The last tin of tomato sauce was disgusting - cheap, and sharp, and with the magical power of making anything it touched inedible. I was very excited to use the new stuff.

Branflake Chicken with Spicy Tomato Pasta
Serves 2 with leftover pasta

2 chicken breasts
2 handfuls bran flakes
1 teaspoon mustard
1 tablespoon grated cheese
1 tablespoon mayonnaise

1 onion
3 garlic cloves
1 green chilli
2-3 tablespoons tomato paste
150ml water
Half a glass red wine
Oregano, basil and seasoning
200g pasta

In one bowl, crush the bran flakes. In another, mix mustard, mayonnaise and cheese. Rub each chicken breast thoroughly with the mayonnaise mixture and then cover with the bran flakes. Put in the oven for twenty five minutes at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit).

Put the pasta on. Chop the onion, garlic and chilli and fry on a low heat with oil. When softened and slightly brown, add the tomato paste, along with water. Simmer for a few minutes and then add the red wine. Add herbs and seasoning and allow the sauce to reduce to the desired thickness. When the pasta is cooked, add it to the sauce pan along with a little pasta water and heat through. Serve with the chicken.

Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Red Wine Sauce

Original recipes can be found here and here. They go surprisingly well together!

This could also be an oven-free recipe if you boiled the sweet potato. I chose to roast it for extra flavour.

Sweet Potato Gnocchi
Makes about 50 gnocchi (enough for 4 meals)

4 large sweet potatoes
Oil
Seasoning

1 and 1/2 cups milk
1/2 cup cream
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 cheesecloth (I used a clean pillowcase)
Or about 100g ricotta cheese

2 eggs
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
2 cups flour

Peel and cut the sweet potatoes into chunks. Put into a baking dish and toss with salt, pepper and oil. Roast at 180 degrees C for 40-50 minutes. (I layered the sweet potato in a narrow dish and it took about 55 minutes for all of it to cook - if all the potato was at one level it would cook faster.)

In the meantime, make ricotta: mix the milk, cream and lemon juice in a pan and put over a medium heat for five to ten minutes, until the curds and whey have separated. Stir occasionally to minimize any of the milk sticking to the pan. Put your cheesecloth into a colander and drain the ricotta. Leave for two minutes, and then squeeze gently to remove excess whey. Tip the ricotta into a mixing bowl.

Add 2 eggs to the ricotta and beat. Add the brown sugar and grated ginger and stir to combine.

Remove the cooked potato from the oven and mash it, trying to break up any lumps. Spoon the mash into the ricotta-egg mixture and stir everything together. Gradually add the two cups of flour while stirring everything through until you have a slightly sticky dough. With clean hands, pick up about a tablespoon of the dough and roll it into a gnocchi-shaped ball. If the dough sticks to your hands too readily, add some oil and re-mix. (Our potatoes roasted in quite a lot of oil, and I believe this helped the sweet potato dough achieve a texture which made it very easy to work with.)

Make the dough into gnocchi-esque balls - we got fifty exactly from ours. Boil a pan of water and drop some of the gnocchi into it (how many will depend on the size of the pan). Once the gnocchi float (this will take longer for the larger gnocchi, although generally about two to three minutes), remove them from the pan and serve. A regular serving is about thirteen gnocchi balls per adult, I find - although I did eat chocolate afterwards.

If there is any unused gnocchi, do not boil it. This can be refrigerated or frozen. With frozen gnocchi you can boil it exactly the same way as unfrozen gnocchi - it will add no more than a minute to the cooking time.

Red Wine Sauce
Serves 2

1 onion
1 garlic clove
1 cup black raspberry wine (or substitute a slightly sweet red wine)
2 chicken stock cubes
100ml boiling water
1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard
1 teaspoon cream cheese
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon gravy powder
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon thyme
Seasoning

This sauce takes about twenty minutes, so I started mine as the sweet potato came out of the oven and was being mashed; it required very little attention except for the odd taste and stir.

Chop the onion and garlic and fry in oil until soft. Add the red wine and allow the sauce to bubble for two minutes. Add the chicken stock and boiling water and stir. After two minutes, add the mustard and cream cheese. This then simmered for a little over five minutes while I made the gnocchi. In a separate bowl, mix the soy sauce and gravy powder together to form a paste and add this paste to the pan. After five minutes, during which the sauce should have reduced a little, add the balsamic vinegar and thyme. Season to taste. Once the gnocchi is done, this will be ready to serve.

Sweet Potato Macaroni Cheese

Sweet Potato Macaroni Cheese
Serves 3

250g fusilli pasta
1 onion
1 garlic clove
3 cups mashed sweet potato (leftover from Thanksgiving)
1 cup cream
1 cup milk
1 1/2 tablespoons cream cheese
1 teaspoon mustard
1 tablespoon soju (weak Korean vodka)
1 teaspoon each of basil, rosemary, thyme, parsley and oregano
1 cup grated cheese
3 savoury crackers
Seasoning

1. Put the pasta in boiling water.
2. Chop the onion and garlic finely, and put in a pan on a medium heat with oil.
3. When soft, add the mashed potato and stir for a few moments before adding the cream and milk.
4. Whisk the potato into the liquid to thicken it before adding cream cheese.
5. After five minutes on a low heat, add the mustard, soju and herbs, and allow to simmer for another two minutes.
6. Turn the heat down to the lowest possible setting and add the grated cheese, stirring to melt.
7. Drain the pasta and tip into an oven dish with the sauce. Stir to coat.
8. Sprinkle some more cheese and crushed crackers over the pasta and put in the oven at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for 20 minutes.
9. Stuff your face.

Gallimaufry Pie

I'm quite pleased about this recipe for many, many reasons. It is first on the list of my must-make oven recipes, for one. It was delicious. I get to call it a cool name (my various substitutions and additions would lengthen the original title of Winter Squash and Caramelized Onion Biscuit Pie by quite a bit). And this marks my fiftieth post, which feels like some sort of anniversary worth celebrating.

The pie was brilliant, although slightly dry - I didn't have enough mayonnaise so that's probably why. Nor did we have a proper topping as I was too lazy to roll out the remaining dough because it meant getting not only my hands dirty (again) but getting the counter dirty as well. It took about an hour and a half from start to finish, although I was working at a leisurely pace.

Gallimaufry Pie
Serves 2 hungry people, or 4 with a salad

Filling:
1 small pumpkin
2 large sweet potatoes
7 rashers of bacon
Dried oregano
1 egg

Mayonnaise
1 teaspoon mustard
Lemon juice
Lemon vinegar

1 onion
1 tablespoon brown sugar
Balsamic vinegar


Dough:
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon lemon vinegar
Seasoning

I halved the pumpkin and sweet potatoes, sprinkled salt, pepper and oil over the cut sides, and roasted them at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for thirty minutes. In the meantime I mixed the dough ingredients together and used half of them to line the bottom of a round dish. (If you're not stupid, you'll grease the dish first. I didn't, but it meant that we were rewarded with difficult-to-scrape-off delicious crispy bits.)

I made the mayonnaise mixture, which was fairly paltry as we had almost no mayonnaise left, by combining mayonnaise (probably about 2 teaspoons worth), 1 teaspoon mustard, a big squeeze of lemon juice and a couple of drops of lemon vinegar.

Sliced the onion and fried on the lowest possible heat for about ten minutes before adding the brown sugar and a squeeze of balsamic vinegar and stirring that through.

Removed the pumpkin and sweet potato from the oven and scooped the inside of 1 potato and half a pumpkin into the pie dish. Layered with three rashers of bacon, half of the caramelized onion, half of the mayonnaise mixture and a hefty sprinkling of oregano. Repeated, using the remaining pumpkin, sweet potato, bacon, onion and mayonnaise. Seasoned with salt and pepper as well as oregano.

Dolloped the remaining dough on top without bothering to roll it out - it was more like having (American) biscuits on top than a pie crust, although the dough spread and ended up covering most of the pie. Brushed the dough with one beaten egg and put in the oven at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit) for half an hour.

Chicken with Mustard Sauce

This week, I've been re-doing recipes rather than trying new ones. Unfortunately, the cheap passata we bought was more like ketchup than tomato sauce, so a second attempt at Tunisian chicken was disgusting. Yesterday, I mixed milk and broccoli pesto to retry the amazing pesto chicken, which worked pretty well but wasn't worth creating a whole separate post for. Basically, pesto + creamy sauce = delicious. And easy.

Tonight was a third night of chicken, inspired by (not really adapted from) this recipe at BBC Good Food. We served it with rice, which is bland anyway, but this dish did lack something. I'm not sure what, and it was perfectly pleasant - I could have had more afterwards - but... yes. Not a meal to impress.

The good news, however, is that this is the first time I've successfully made mustard sauce!

Chicken with Mustard Sauce

Serves 2

Handful of chopped onion

2 chicken breasts

1 tbsp flour

2-3 cups milk

2 tsps cream cheese

1 tbsp parsley or other herb(s)

1 splash white wine

3 tsps wholegrain mustard

Seasoning

The onion was fried in hot oil for a few minutes before the chicken was added, to seal on each side. The flour was sprinkled over and stirred through to make a loose roux, and the milk added. The heat was turned up until the milk was on the point of boiling before being lowered again. Cooked through for ten minutes before the cheese, parsley, wine and mustard were added. Stirred and cooked for another ten minutes until the chicken was no longer pink in the middle. Served over rice.

A whole chicken!

We watched the first episode of Nigella's Kitchen at the weekend, which got me ridiculously excited because it included an oven-free way of cooking a whole chicken. I have really missed using bigger cuts of meat so the 'praised chicken' (not a fan of the name) was perfect. The meal was really nice, very easy, made the flat smell wonderful, and was best eaten with mustard as Nigella recommends.

This recipe could be improved in a number of ways; the one that comes most readily to mind is the water that the chicken is poached in. This could be made into a less watery, more flavoursome sauce. If I had the funds to buy more alcohol (oh, Korea, why do you make my wine so expensive?) I would have used more wine and less water. A stock rather than plain water would also have helped. Almost anything could be substituted for that 'water' part of the recipe!

Oh, and most excitingly of all - I now have a chicken carcass in my freezer, waiting for some friends before it is turned into stock =)

Stovetop Whole Chicken
Serves

1 chicken (730g)
1 garlic clove
2 potatoes
2 sweet potatoes
Big glug of white wine
Water
Italian herbs
Parsley
Seasoning

2 servings rice

Chopped the garlic, and the potatoes into batons. Heated the garlic in oil on a low heat. Broke the chicken's back to flatten it and sawed off its feet. Added the chicken breast-side-down to the hot pan and cooked for about five minutes while I struggled to open the wine. Turned the chicken over, added the wine and the chicken feet, and turned the heat up. Bubbled for a minute or so. Added the potato batons with lots of Italian herbs and parsley, poured in enough water to almost entirely cover the chicken, and turned the heat up to its highest setting. When it reached a boil, I put the heat back down to very low and covered the pan with tin foil.  After leaving it for about fifty minutes, I put the rice on. At the 1 hour mark I checked that the chicken's juices were running clear and turned the heat off, leaving the lid on. Ten minutes later Tom shredded the chicken and the rice was ready.

Stuffed Chicken Thing

Last night I was craving my stuffed chicken, but a lack of the vital ingredients and cooking devices stopped me in my tracks. Until! I came across this recipe from Love and Olive Oil. Stuffed chicken... in a pan. But how to get around the fact that there was no cream cheese? Aha! Mustard to the rescue, from Wilde in the Kitchen.

I actually really enjoyed this. Tom is not a fan of the natural yoghurt, which (like everything in Korea) has had a bunch of sugar added to it, so that diminished his pleasure. However, it was hot and filling and still light, without being overly spicy. It definitely comes second to the original recipe - in fact, to every one of the three or four which inspired it - but it was not a bad substitute at all.

Also - welcome to the new background, drawn (admittedly poorly) by myself =)

Stuffed Chicken Thing
Serves 2

2 chicken breasts
1 egg

Stuffing:
Wholegrain mustard
1 natural yoghurt (serving sized)
Handful of grated cheese
Handful of chopped onion
Honey
Seasoning

Rub:
Wholegrain mustard
Oil
Curry powder
Thyme
Seasoning

2 servings of rice

Mixed the ingredients for the stuffing (lots of mustard, little bit of honey) until thick. Mixed the ingredients for the rub. Put the rice on to cook. Slit open the chicken breasts and stuffed each with 1/3 of the stuffing mixture, coated in the oily rub, and put on a medium heat for about seven minutes. Added the leftover stuffing, rub, more onion and one egg to the pan and stirred thoroughly before turning the breasts. The stuffing fell out at this point but I kept spooning it back over the chicken.

Chicken and Beer Stew

When I told my Korean co-teacher that I would be making a chicken and beer stew tonight, her mind was blown. Apparently Koreans simply don't put alcohol in their food. A whole culture missing out on one of the greatest things to happen to humanity! I feel such pity, and am renewed on my quest to introduce boozy food to this country. (Or maybe not. Wine is expensive!)

Anyway, chicken and beer stew, from this recipe at Everybody Loves Sandwiches, my new favourite website. I would love to try this with homemade bread, but as everyone knows we are still an oven-free apartment. It was absolutely delicious anyway - the gravy ended up really creamy for something that included neither cream nor milk.

Chicken and Beer Stew
Serves 2

3 chicken breasts
1 garlic clove
Chilli powder
Basil
Seasoning

3 potatoes
2 onions
1 fat garlic clove
Flour
300ml chicken stock
Half a bottle of beer
Oregano
Wholegrain mustard
Gravy powder
Seasoning

2 servings of rice

I put the chicken breasts, minced garlic, chilli, basil and seasoning into a plastic bag and scrunched it all together. Peeled and cut the potatoes into eights, onions into quarters, and minced the other garlic clove. Put the chicken in an oiled pan on a medium heat, turning once, until it is browned. Removed. Added more oil to the pan along with the vegetables and cooked for a few minutes, stirring, until coated in the oil. Sprinkled flour quite heavily over the vegetables and stirred. Added the chicken back in along with the stock and beer. Sprinkled with oregano and squeezed as much mustard as I could out of the bottle - probably about a tablespoon's worth. Seasoned and left to simmer for about forty five minutes. Added some gravy powder, not much, when the sauce was looking too thin. Twenty minutes before serving, once the potatoes were nearly edible, I put the rice on. Served in bowls.

Honey Mustard Pork

I've added a 'Pages' gadget on the left hand side, below 'Recipe Websites' and above 'About Me.' At the moment there is only one page, 'Oven Recipes', which will list recipes I come across and am desperate to cook but can't until we get an oven! The oven recipes page currently only has one link, which is irritating because I know I found a gorgeous, mouthwatering oven-baked meal yesterday but apparently I forgot to bookmark it. (Edit: ignore that! Recipe found and linked. I'm extremely pleased with myself.)

From this BBC Good Food recipe. Another stovetop meal.

Honey Mustard Pork with Mashed Potato
Serves 2

1 400g pack of pork
Lemon vinegar (or vinegar and lemon juice)
Wholegrain mustard
Honey
Chilli and cinnamon spices
Thyme
Seasoning

4 potatoes
Butter
Milk
Seasoning

Chopped the pork into chunks and marinaded in lemon vinegar, wholegrain mustard and honey for about twenty minutes. Peeled the potatoes, cut into chunks, and boiled in salted water until soft. Heated some oil in a pan and poured the pork with marinade in. Kept on a medium heat and stirred often. Added the chilli, cinnamon, thyme, and a spoonful of the potato water. Seasoned. Drained and mashed the potatoes with lots of milk and butter until creamy, seasoned. Served.

Wrestle Curry

I didn't strictly make this: I supervised and guided my little brother as he made the meal. It was actually quite nice, and I was very impressed with the level of cool he maintained while cooking his first meal for the family - and it was for 10! The name of the dish is a reference to the person he got the recipe from - a wrestler, obviously.

Chopped 13 chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces and mixed in a bowl with 4 big tablespoons of mustard, till coated. Drizzle of olive oil heated on the stove, chicken pieces put in on a high heat.
2 apples, 3 figs and a handful of large cherry tomatoes were chopped and added to the chicken once it had browned lightly all over. 1 litre of natural yoghurt was added along with curry and chilli powders. Heat was reduced from high to medium.
Enough rice for 10 was put on the stove with boiling water and salt.

The dish was amazingly simple, delicious and fruity. I was surprised by how watery the sauce was given that it was mostly made of yoghurt. It had a bit of a kick to it, balanced out by the apple & fig. I was very proud of my brother and would be happy making this dish myself.

The next time I cook will be in Korea!

Penne alla Betsy + a breakfast

From this recipe for a creamy, tomato-y pasta - wow, it's delicious. There was much left over and I had it for breakfast and lunch the next day.
Made for 10.

The main substitution was that I used chicken breast chopped into small pieces instead of shrimp - my boyfriend and little sister will absolutely not eat seafood. So I chopped 8 breasts (2 were huge) into small bits and fried them for 10-15 minutes in the butter and oil mixture on a medium-high heat. It produced a LOT of liquid: I drained it and continued to fry for a couple of minutes on a high heat. Put the chicken to one side.
Added a bit of butter to the hot pan along with 2 chopped onions and 4 minced garlic cloves. Cooked till translucent, then added half a bottle of white wine and half a litre of vegetable stock. Allowed to reduce briefly on a high heat before adding roughly 700g of passata. Salt + pepper. Stirred on medium high heat for quite a while - probably 15-20 minutes, I didn't really keep an eye on the time.

In the meantime I boiled 1kg of pasta in salted water and drained it.

Once it started simmering, I added 3 cups of cream to the sauce while my boyfriend (who was meant to be stirring it in) exclaimed over how pretty the cream looked. Finally got him to help mix it! Salt + pepper. Left it for five minutes on a medium heat before putting the chicken pieces back in. Stirred. Ran hot water through the pasta and mixed it into the sauce. Served - there was TONS. Enough leftovers to feed a good few people.

The pasta was still too cold and we didn't leave it in the sauce on the heat long enough: it was cold and the eight people eating then ALL had to use the microwave. Sigh. Served with some grated cheese. My mum commented that it was very like a dish that her friend used to make a couple of decades ago. It's nice to be reminded how cooking can be such a historical thing.

Also a quick recipe for cheese-onion-mustard scrambled eggs that I made the other day and forgot about. One serving.

Half an onion, chopped and fried in butter on a medium heat until beginning to soften. Two eggs cracked into the pan and swirled round. Handful of grated cheese thrown in and mixed. Heat turned down to low. Teaspoon of mustard added. Salt + pepper. I like my eggs a tiny bit runny, so I spoon them into a bowl sooner rather than later. The whole thing takes about 5 minutes.

Stuffed Chicken with Pasta

Recipe taken from/inspired by Mustard-stuffed Chicken.
Cooked for 8.


9 chicken breasts, slit down the fatter side to make a pocket. Stuffed with a mix of: 1 packet cream cheese, some mustard, some grated Gouda, some chopped spring onions, parmesan, salt and pepper. Wrapped with pork belly strips. Baked in the oven at 200 degrees C for 20-25 minutes.
1.5 packets of spaghetti, boiled with salt for 10 minutes.
Sauce: chopped and fried 1 clove garlic and most of 1 onion, added parmesan dust. Added 1 packet cream cheese, full fat milk, some mustard, lots of grated Gouda, parmesan, salt, pepper. The remainder of the pork belly (cut up) and chopped spring onions were stirred through just before mixing with the cooked spaghetti. A bit carbonara-esque.


Spaghetti tossed with sauce before serving. Spaghetti was a bit cold, and better when eaten in a mouthful with the chicken and its creamy-cheesy-sauce. Could have used more sauce (another packet of cream cheese could easily have been added).