Xmas feast

Roasted carrots and potatoes

Yokshire Pudding

Brussels sprouts

Roast Chicken

The carved chicken

Aimee's yummy Lasagne

It was a quiet xmas gathering this year and I don't mean it literally because it sure didn't. My cousins are all loud! It was quiet in a sense that there were only six of us  (including Haris) today. Although it's a small group this time, it was indeed a good holiday and we had a great time stuffing ourselves silly with food! By the way, that's only the lunch menu. For dinner, I made Rick Stein's Vietnamese Duck Stew with rice, which I will be blogging on a different post.

So, lets start with the roasted vege. Carrots were roasted simply with olive oil, salt, pepper, fresh thyme and rosemary. The potatoes on the other hand were slightly more special this year. It was roasted in duck fat! Since I was making the duck for dinner which needed to be fried first to rid of the fat, so I used that for the potatoes.Iit has been my long dream to roast potatoes in duck or goose fat, since it was made famous by Nigella (i think). Obviously, the duck fat in the form of butter bar is not Halal over here, but now that I have a bowl of duck fat sitting nicely in my kitchen, I have to use it! I swear, it makes the potatoes so much more crunchy and tasty.

But, if you don't have any duck fat, just use lots and lots of butter. So first, par-boil the potatoes. Melt the butter, season and add mince garlic. Then, mix well with the potatoes and roast it at 180 degrees until golden. Another trick to crunchy potatoes is to shake the boiled potatoes to roughen up the edges. When you roast them, these edges will be the crispy bits and that's what you really want on your potatoes (by the way, I learnt the trick from Jamie!). 

The cripy edges

Brussels sprouts wasn't a hit with the family. Hubby thinks it tasted like fart, though I have no idea how he came up with that. Fine, brussel sprouts do have an after taste but it's an acquired taste. So, you need to get used to it. For that, I just boiled it in salt water and crumble some roasted chestnuts when served.

My yokshire pudding was bought and Aunt Bessie's are the best! :D So there you go, hope you guys had a good holiday!

Roast Chicken

There are so many recipes for Roast Chicken and even I have gone through several different recipes until I finally settled on just one. My version of roast chicken is lightly marinated with garlic because I find that roasting with just olive oil or butter and salt & pepper is a bit too bland for my liking.

So, here it is, my roast chicken recipe.

Ingredients:
One whole chicken, trim the ends and the extra skin at the cavity.
2 cloves garlic, crushed
3 onions- 2 chopped into big chunks and 1 onion leave it as a whole
3 carrots, chopped into big chunks
Thyme and Rosemary, (preferably fresh, if not dry ones are good enough)
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil
A lil bit of butter
additional: clementines

Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Scatter the chopped onions and carrots onto a roasting pan, a pinch of rosemary and thyme, drizzle some olive oil and season. Set that aside.
Now, smother your chicken with olive oil, salt & pepper and the crushed garlic, making sure that you rub all over. Insert one whole onion and the herbs into the cavity. (you can add 2 clementines, cut into half into the cavity for some xmas taste).
Place the chicken, breast down on the roasting tray, on top of the chopped vege. Finally, sprinkle a bit more salt again with some of the rosemary and thyme herbs, as well as a dash of olive oil.
Usually, I'll add a few knobs of butter onto the chicken and the roasting tray.

Cover the chicken loosely with foil and put it in the oven for 45 mins for 180 deg. Then, remove the foil, making sure that the meat of the chicken is cooked. You'd know it's cooked when the meat is all white. Then put it back in the oven at 150-170 degrees and roast it until the skin turns crispy brown. Once the back side is brown, turn the chicken breast side on top, and roast it until it's golden brown. When doing this, make sure that your oven is about 140-150 degrees. Before that, transfer all the juices at the bottom of pan into a saucepan, taking all the onions and carrots (if you can manage).

The reason that you start off with the breast of the chicken down on the tray is to not over cook it. The breast gets dry easily and if you want to roast your chicken to a perfert golden brown, then be sure that the breast will be really dry. So, to avoid that, start with breast down, with this, all the juices will move down to the bottom of pan and obviously to the breast too. So, what you get is a tender, prefectly cooked meat.

Now, move on to the yummy juices in the saucepan. That will be your gravy. Put the saucepan on a medium heat. Stir it well, add 1-1.5cups of fresh boiling water and a half a cube of stock. Let it simmer and thicken. Add salt and pepper to taste. (if you find that it's hard to thicken the gravy, mix a teaspoon of cornflour with 2 tablespoon of water and add it to the gravy, whilst stirring- that should help)

So, there you go. Of course, serve it with your favourite vege and yokshire pudding!

That's actually the roast turkey I made last year. It's not chicken but I hope the picture helps and I used the same recipe too!

Hope that'll help, Hawa! ;)

Cooking for Xmas

We don't celebrate christmas per say, but what we do is have a massive cook out and just stuff ourselves silly. It's hard not to be jolly at this time of the year especially when you're in overseas. The sparkling decorations, the merry carols and of course, the amazing christmas cooking program on telly! Last year, we (nisa and myself) roasted a huge halal turkey. It was a success, if I could say so myself. After watching Jamie's Christmas three times in a row, you seriously can't go wrong. That was how obsessed I was in getting it right.

So, this year, I'm trying to get out of this turkey business. Firstly, turkey meat is a bit drier than any other poultry. Secondly, it's seriously huge and since we're not expecting alot of people this year, it's just us and my cousins so, a smaller bird would be sufficient enough for the 5 of us. Third, Adli and I are kinda bored with the turkey meat, plus the leftovers will be too much and it will be a waste. And finally, I want to try cooking a different bird this year! I've been going through this xmas menu in my head over and over again, but I somehow have settled on this.
1.Duck- it will be my first time cooking it. I still can't decide whether to roast it the traditional way with xmas spices or make it into something like a stew like Rick Stein's Vietnamese Duck Stew.
2.Chicken- I still find that we need some kind of white meat on the table. The sight of carved breast meat somehow is always, always appealing. So, instead of roasting turkey, I'll be roasting chicken and I know this will be a hit with everyone. Roast Chicken- you can never go wrong with it!

3. Stuffings- I have never been a fan of stuffings and that's why I have never actually made one. But, after having some of my friend's stuffings of apples and mince meat, I might have changed my mind about this stuffing business. So, I'm going to give it a shot with stuffings made with chestnuts, apples and... (still deciding) The only thing is, I'm not sure where it should go into, the duck, if I do decide to roast them, or the chicken. Chicken don't have thick skin like a turkeys so I'm not sure if it holds. Maybe I'll just do the stuffing the Jamie way, i.e. roast in a dish pan.

4. Trimmings- Roast potatoes is anmust, roast carrots, yokshire pudding, brussels sprouts and a new addition to the trimmings family- Sweet Potato and Marshmallow. I first heard this from the tv show, Chuck. Then, Shasa (another fan of Chuck) has also made this dish before, though she has it as dessert. So, I will let you know how it goes with mine. And of course, Gravy, Gravy and Gravy!!

5. Dessert- Apple Crumble. After watching Hugh's River Cottage last night, I can't help salivating on his Apple Crumble with a Crunch. The crumble has an extra crunch of oats and ground almonds. Since I already have apples in the kitchen, I might just make this (if I have time, that is.)

I should really start preparing today, the day before the big lunch. But, with Haris in the house, there's nothing much can be done. Well, at least the gravy can be made earlier, and the crumble and the marinating and stuffing. Ok... that sounds like almost everything. Have to wait till tonight when Adli is back to look after Haris so I can get busy in the kitchen! Can't wait!



Till then...

Winter Warmers

It's been so cold lately and everyone has been down with a cold, sore throat or flu. I had a really bad sore throat last week and all I could swallow was food in a liquid form. Even then, it was still hurting like crazy but my tummy keeps grumbling and I still keep complaining of hungry. For me, soups can never fill you up unless there are something solid in it, like rice or pasta. But, with that kind of soups it's always thick and not the brothy ones that I was craving for.

Finally, I decided to make some homemade chicken soup, after all isn't chicken soup is best for curing colds? Somehow, chicken soups always remind me of the Chinese, they always make a nice clear and very tasty broth, whereas, we Malays will have our chicken soup more spicy and that's not what I'm looking for. With the Chinese Chicken Soup, ginger is the main ingredient and of course it has a lot of benefits for curing colds but again, it wasn't something I imagined in my mouth. I have nothing against ginger because I do love them, but I wasn't feeling for it.

So, I devised my own Chicken Soup, and after 2 tries and tested by dearest hubby and friends, I might just found My Chicken Soup recipe.

Ingredients:
One whole chicken bones
Chicken breast, thinly sliced
2 onions, diced
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 pinches of thyme (fresh is always better than dried one, but dry ones is good enough)
Fresh boiling water, 4-5 cups
Barley, has to be cooked in water for 1-2hrs until it's soft
Savoy Cabbage, thinly sliced
Carrots, medium sliced
Mushroom, medium sliced

I include Barley for this recipe because as I have mentioned, I wanted the soup to be filling. Instead of using the ol' rice, barley is a great substitute and a great fibre at it too. I also wanted to make the soup a wholesome meal, hence the vege. I find that savoy cabbage is the best cabbage for soups because it's light and very flavoursome and you can't go wrong with carrots because they're ever so sweet and finally. mushroom for that meaty bite!

Firstly, saute the onions and garlic on low heat. I always find that seasoning the onions makes it sweeter, so sprinkle some salt and pepper on it while sauteing. Once, the onions are transluscent, add in the chicken bones and turn it around a couple of times, then cover the pot. This will cook the bones through and by covering, we retain the juices in the pot. Now, add the boiling water, carrots, season it and let it simmer. (At this time, I usually add a cube of Boullion or Maggi Chicken Stock- but you don't need to). Then, once the carrots looked slighly soft, add the mushroom, savoy cabbage and the chicken breast. The reason you add the chicken meat last is because you don't want to over cook it. You want the chicken meat to be tender and smooth, not hard and dry. Now, cover the pot and let it simmer under a low heat. Finally, once the chicken meat is cooked add in your cooked barley, cover again and simmer to the lowest heat for 20 minutes.

And tadaa! My only advise is to keep tasting the soup, with that you can only know whether it needs more seasoning- salt and pepper. I can't tell you how much salt I used exactly, because it's all in your pallete. It is what you need to discover yourself, if you love food enough you should be able to know if it needs more salt, pepper or even a dash of ajinamoto!