The Joy of Simple Chicken Dishes

It is strange to think that a chicken in every pot (an ambition ascribed to Catherine the Great, Herbert Hoover, Francois IV and doubtless others) was once a dream. Nowadays the meat is something too easily taken for granted. The cheapo white and nasty supermarket 'bargain' stuff should not be taken at all, but a good quality butcher's bird or free-range ones from the supermarket can still be made so easily into delicious dishes. At the weekend we had two such.

The first was wings marinated (if that is the right word for something relatively dry) with a paste zapped in the  blender - cumin and fennel seed, garlic, a green chilli, pepper (slightly too much, you forget how potent quite new peppercorns can be) salt and star anise - then left in the fridge for three or four hours covered with clingfilm. Rolled in a bit of oil and baked at 190C for 30 minutes, turned regularly, they were sticky and spicy and delicious, one part of an oriental (-ish) meal. I love wings, the sweetest and cheapest chicken on the shelves. The fennel gives it a hint of the KFC, though the Colonel's changeless recipe may oxymoronically have changed since the last time I dared try it in about 1995.

Second was another dish that is simplicity itself, and a reliable way to perk up an uninteresting bird. How very Sid James. The herbs are looking healthy again in the garden, though the bay has never looked less than perfect all through the winter. I took the scissors to par-cel (leaf celery), the first decent-looking rosemary of the year, a load of sage, 8 - 10 leaves of bay, and what thyme I could cut without the operation being terminal to the plant, and rolled a jointed chicken in them once they had been snipped small. With olive oil poured on and seasoned with salt, pepper and some smoked paprika, I again baked them in a roasting tray (or roasted them in a baking tray, with meat the terms are almost synonymous, doubtless to the annoyance of terminological purists) for 50 minutes or so. Nice and moist, the herbs were very much to the fore and the golden skin was fantastic.

How much KFC would I have got for £7, the price of the chicken if memory serves? Useless factoid out of nowhere, Preston my (adopted-)hometown was the site of the first KFC in Britain, opened in 1965. Still doesn't endear the food to me.

Austerity and the Chinese Supermarket

My trip to the Chinese supermarket was a pleasant eye-opener, and even with my man-flu-ebola-dengue-fever virus (it would have killed a lesser man if you could have found one) it was a joy to smell the spices permeating the various rooms. For the austerity cook it showed that shopping around is worth it - noodles were about half the price of Sainsbury's for example, tins of bamboo shoots maybe 20% cheaper, and so on.

But for any cook interested in new stuff it was brilliant. I bought some tinned mushrooms that will add a touch of authenticity to a dish or two; dried chillis that I now thanks to Norman Musa at Ning know how to use correctly; shrimp paste; sweetened soy sauce; proper milky coconut milk; cassia bark; palm sugar...

So this evening's meal will be a Malay/Chinese mini-feast, trying to repeat what I did under careful supervision on Saturday. My hope is that the house smells a little like Ning after my efforts. And that the dishes tonight are as delicious as Saturday's.

Pulled Pork - Thing du Jour

Every now and then you notice one food or another suddenly coming up time and again in conversation, the colour supplements, and on TV. The one currently making it big is pulled pork. The magnificent (or hated, depending on your viewpoint) Man v Food was where I first came across the dish. On a new Channel 4 programme tonight about spices - after an awkward start surprisingly interesting - the chef made it with chilli. Because my son and I love BBQ food I looked up some recipes two days ago with a view to making some soon. And by accident I made some today. Cooking by accident?

In fact it was pulled ham from the ham shank cooked yesterday in my Lancashire pea soup, simmered slowly with the peas for about three and a half hours until it was falling off the bone. Normally from my researches this is made with shoulder of pork rubbed with herbs and spices then roasted slowly, covered with foil to keep the juices in.

When Sternest Critic returned via Dad's taxi from his sleepover party he was hungry, so an instant filler-upper was a sandwich made with chunks of the leftover meat pulled into shreds with two forks then covered with cheating BBQ sauce. It went down very well. We have enough meat still for a dish of this, (so the £2.60 shank bought on Blackburn market really was a bargain), which I'll do tomorrow, spiced up to ring the changes.

One Flame Chinese - Take-out Made in

Chinese food is one of my favourite cuisines, or several of them - there is, after all, not one single style of Chinese cookery. What I have eaten as Chinese food has changed over time and geography. In the Seventies when the first Chinese takeaways opened in my hometown there was a preponderence of really gloopy stuff, like sweet and sour sauce in which a spoon would stand. Today the dishes available from such places are - often - subtler. In the Gorleston of 1975 Peking Duck never featured on the menu.

I was lucky enough to visit mainland China about a dozen times and Taiwan far more often when I worked in industry, so had the opportunity to try authentic Chinese food. On the mainland I ate in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai, the food in the latter - especially in the countryside beyond the city - very different from the first two. Taiwanese food was different again, perhaps for economic reasons then with meatier dishes to the fore, and fantastic seafood (barbecued chilli whelks one of the best things I ever tried). 

Travels in the USA meant trying their version, again with its own characteristics. I still don't get the point of fortune cookies. 

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I love food made in a Chinese style. So I make my own attempts at it. One of my favourites, and something that qualifies as austerity cooking and one flame cookery, is fried rice, which was the core of last night's meal, and we would not have been deprived had it been all of the meal. 

White rice carefully and lengthily washed in a fine sieve to ensure the grains keep separate later was boiled quickly (boiling water covering it and a half inch more, slow simmer in covered pan for five or six minutes, then taken off the heat and left to steam for another ten minutes). While it steamed finely chopped carrot, red onion, yellow pepper, and a red chilli seeds-and-all were fried gently in rapeseed oil, then the boiled rice was added with about three tablespoons of soy sauce, the mixture stirred together and allowed to fry again very gently for five minutes. Defrosted sweetcorn and peas, and a handful of basics prawns were thrown in, and two brutally crushed garlic cloves to max their impact. A shake of 5-Spice powder completed the flavour enhancement.

I did enough for six, and the three of us ate it. Which when you think about the millions who have to survive on a bowl or two of plain boiled rice a day gives pause for thought.

Another no-flame dish complemented this, a way of using a bit of leftover (uncooked) white cabbage - the Chinese love their brassicas. The thick stalky bits were removed, leaves rolled together like a cigar and chopped very finely, then with a few spoons of boiling water and another of soy added to their bowl along with another smashed garlic clove it was cling-filmed and cooked on medium-high in the microwave for a couple of minutes or so to steam it. Virtuous and delicious. 

End of the Summer that Never Was

It is cold and nasty outside, the last day of a September every bit as wet and wild as 2012's summer that never was.

In spite of the vile weather that began in June and has barely let up since, we did grow plenty on our allotment and in the garden. As ever, though, I failed with tomatoes, with only a few reaching ripeness. Today I gave up hoping that the remaining green ones would even manage a blush of pink, so I picked the lot - lot being about 20 marble-sized fruits - and made them into a salsa.

As anyone who has read other posts here will know one of my favourite cooking verbs is 'to zap'. These enjoyed that treatment, along with some of our own coriander seeds, a red chilli seeds-and-all, some parsley,  and salt and pepper. Very very hot, unlike the weather.

That salsa (with some yogurt, it really is damned hot) will coat chicken breasts for baking tonight, to be served with a spinach salad to help the cooling process and offer some green defiance to the unkind elements.

Chicken Burgers Needn't Be Sad

Saturday's evening meal here tends to be a bit more relaxed, finger food stuff, and this week we went down the burger route. That need not mean some vile mechanically recovered slurry dried and reprocessed with 50 per cent salt. I used £3 worth of Sainsbury's chicken thigh fillets zapped to a coarse consistency, with some onion, a whole red chilli for a bit of kick, parsley and par-cel from the allotment, and freshly-ground spices -pepper, cumin and fennel, the lot held together with a large egg and seasoned with salt.

The only drawback to cooking these is that unlike say lamb or beef burgers you really need to make sure they cook all the way through - raw chicken is not good for you. So they were made as flat as was practical, and then fried over a medium heat in a bit of olive oil and turned regularly until the outside was crisping up nicely. I have to admit to putting them in the microwave for a couple of minutes at the end to make sure any nasties had been killed off.

Served in the flat-breads about which I wrote some time back, and with a simple salsa of tomatoes, green chilli, parsley and onion turned into mush by the spice grinder there was plenty of flavour and the crispy outside was a treat.