Awesome Breasts!

Now it’s really time for the culinary egomania. For lunch today, we enjoyed a dish that was named after me. Yup, that’s right, little old me! It happened like this.

About a month ago, I received an email from my friend Lisa in the States, saying that she’d created a dish which she’d named after me – “Awesome Aussie Sarah Chicken”.

yes, a dish I've named after our dish aussiesarah. It's chicken sprinkled w/Ranch dressing mix, roasted on rice, then sliced red peppers added and doused w/Tabasco at table. Ace!

You won’t believe how excited I was. When I showed Daniel, he was well impressed too. You see, I don't think he realised that people actually read my blog. I think he just thought I spent an inordinate amount of time at the computer. When he heard about the chicken dish, he started telling his friends things like, “Sarah’s got this blog that’s got international recognition. This woman in America, she created a dish after her!” He seemed so happy, I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was actually just a friend who created it, not some fan-cum-stalker. Shhh...

But I digress. Lisa’s a pretty special lady; she’s the one who introduced me to the totally drool-worthy ranch dressing. I emailed her a few days later to get proper instructions on how to cook it.

I had chicken on my mind for dinner, and I thought, you know, how good would Ranch dressing be on that chicken? Good! And since meeting you, I've become a rice addict, so of course that was my selected side. But being the lazy person I am, I'm a one-potter gal, so I shook the chicken up with the Ranch dip mix, I put a cup of basmati in the pan, then two cups of water on top, and then I put the chicken breasts on top of that, with a pat of butter on each, and put it in the 400F oven for like 20 minutes. Then I put the red peppers in so they would be just tender-crisp, and baked it for about 10 more minutes. It was awesome! Of course, to top it off, I had to add the Tabasco (fresh parsley, too). It all worked.

Obviously I wanted to make the AussieSarah Chicken as soon as possible, despite it not being a How to Eat recipe, so when I made it today, I chose a pudding from How to Eat to go with it. I went for an American-style pudding, in honour of Lisa.

248. Red Slump (Weekend Lunch)

A slump, as far as I can gather, is one of those American desserts in the realm of cobblers, grunts and so on – a fruity filling, topped with some sort of sweet flour mixture and baked. Nigella says that her recipe will make enough for 6 (or will stretch to 8), so I figured that halving the recipe would make 4 generous servings for us.

The filling is a 500g packet of frozen red berries (fresh is do-able too, but there’s no way I’m paying $7 for a 150g punnet of raspberries!), covered with sugar and alcohol. You could use any appropriate berry or orange based alcohol, so I used cointreau.


Frosty berries – I love the snow-kissed look of berries covered in sugar.

You then cover it with foil, and bake it until it gets hot and bubbly (about 35 minutes). I put it in underneath the chicken as it was cooking.

Making the dumplings is just like making pastry, crumble topping, or anything of that ilk. Mix flour, sugar and almond meal with butter to make a crumbly mixture, and then add enough milk to bind. The full quantity of slump topping should make 24 small dumplings, so appropriately enough, I got 12 out of my halved quantity.


Dumplings

It did look like a very meagre amount of dumplings, and I was almost temped to make another half batch, but I thought that they might expand significantly upon baking.

Once the filling is piping hot, you dollop the dumplings on top, cover it again with foil, and bake it for another 15 minutes. I took the chicken out at the same time as the filling, and let the dumpling-topped filling cook while we were eating the chicken.


Ready for oven


Awesome Aussie Sarah Chicken

Check my other cooking blog for more details on the Aussie Sarah Chicken, but Lisa was right – it’s awesome! And so easy to make too. Since starting the How to Eat project, my whole family has been suffering some serious rice cravings. We descended upon the delicious ranch-dressing-infused rice and chicken like a pack of hungry wolves.

Here is the cooked red slump.


red slump

One thing I have to learn, is that frozen berries are very sour. I’m always very sparing with sugar in general, but when it comes to frozen berries, I need to learn to let go of my sugar-phobia. Even at my old job as a cook, I couldn’t bring myself to dump the necessary amount sugar on the berries when I did crepes flambées, much to the chagrin of my (really cool) Chef. “Sarah sweetie, you need to put more sugar on the crepes… the frozen berries themselves are very sour, and the tannins in the preservatives make them quite sour too… also because you cook them in butter, you need sugar to counteract it”. Judging from the taste of the red slump today, I still haven't learnt my lesson. I'm lucky that my family (myself included), prefer our desserts not to be too sweet, but for more normal people, make sure you increase the sugar content if you use frozen berries!

Dan: Woah… that’s strong.
Me: Is it too sour? You want sugar?
Dan: Nah… it’s good… it’s very strong… the flavour hits you like a bitch. It’s very good.
Me: …totally confused… So do you want sugar or not?
Dad: No, no don’t worry, it's good! And the ice-cream balances it out.
Dan: Yeah, no sugar. But you need more of these things. ...points at dumplings

He was so right about the dumplings, they were brilliant. They soaked up the delicious berry-juices, and were soft and fragrant on their own merits as well. I'd have preferred the slump to be covered in dumplings, rather than sparsely dotted.

Mmmm... tasty berries.

Cream... Sh-boogie bop

As you might have gathered from my title, both courses of tonight's meal involved cream. And lots of it.

207. Cream of Chicken Soup
208. Risotto-Inspired Rice Pudding

These recipes are from the One & Two chapter, and they're pretty much storecupboard. Saturday night dinner found Mum and I home alone, and with no energy to shop, so I thought I'd give these a whirl.

I had some double cream in the fridge (leftover from the seven-minute steamed chocolate pudding), and a couple of leeks (intended for consommé... wait for tomorrow!) from which I could scavenge 200g for my soup. Technically, Nigella stipulates "dwarf leeks", but concedes that the white parts of ordinary leeks, "very finely sliced", will suffice.

This soup is a lot more trouble in real life than it seems on the page. You've got to cook the finely sliced leeks in butter in one pan, then in a second pan, poach a chicken breast in milk and stock, with a peeled garlic clove and some bay leaves. Then add some flour to the leeks in the first pan and cook until no longer raw and floury. Remove the chicken from the first pan and set aside, then add the poaching liquid to the first (leek+flour) pan, and cook for a few minutes. You then have to shred the chicken, add it to the mixture, and cook it for a few more minutes, before adding butter and letting it cook some more. After this, you blend the whole thing in a blender, (I removed the bay leaves first and left the garlic clove in, even though Nigella doesn't say to do either), before returning it to the rinsed-out saucepan, and heating through. To finish, you stir through (off the heat), a beaten egg and some cream. Are you still following me?

By this stage, you will have used 3 pans, 2 chopping boards, a ladle, a wooden spoon, 2 knives, a couple of little bowls, and endless spoons and forks.

I didn't actually have a chicken breast at home, and was so not in the mood for going out to buy one. So, I rummaged around in my freezer and found some chicken drumsticks, which I thawed and boned with a sharp knife, before chucking the scraggly bits of mutilated meat into the poaching liquid.

Now on the topic of chicken, I find that lots of people seem to be oddly loyal to either breasts or thighs. One girl I know, in particular, only goes for breasts, and will not eat chicken legs/thighs. Ever. At all. So just stop asking and get that thigh off my plate, Sarah. Others I know will only eat drumsticks, complaining that the breasts are dry and tough. You might have picked up the fact that I hold no particular preference for either, as long as it's tasty. And I couldn't see that it would make much of a difference anyway, seeing as it gets blended up in the end. Thighs also have the advantage of being done faster than breasts (especially when ripped off the bone into small pieces in my usual unskilled way).


Soup with toast (Phillpa's bakery's Corn Bread)

Mum and I ate this in front of the TV, (Futurama, of course), and I found it to be enough for two of us, with me taking the lion's share and with Mum supplanting her smaller serving with some noodles. It tasted good, and was everything you'd expect a good home-made cream of chicken soup to be. But by God it was an effort. I wouldn't recommend making this for a quiet dinner for one or two, unless you felt like some quiet pottering around the kitchen.

After dinner...

Me: Hey Mum, did you want me to make a dessert?
Mum: ears pricking up and eyes widening... YES!

I wasn't exactly planning on making a dessert at all, but looking at Mum's sweet face, I could hardly say no. So, the sweet risotto. It's also from One & Two, and comes under the title "comfort food". It reappears in Nigella Bites, (complete with photo) and I'm glad I had that reference with me so that I could check that my risotto was going right. I'm not always super confident with risotti, as I've said previously, my ones always end up taking at least double the time and with double the stock. Nigella said that the sweet one might take up to 35 minutes, so I was afraid I might be at the stove for an hour.

You cook this rice-pudding risotto with the same method as you'd use for a normal risotto. Start off with some butter and vanilla sugar in a pan, then stir in the rice, and add warm milk ladleful by ladleful until all is creamily absorbed and the rice is swollen and tender. It's simple, but it takes fucking forever. For some reason, rice absorbs milk much more slowly than stock. I started at about 9:00pm, hoping (optimistically) to be ready to eat by about 9:30pm, and then ready to leave my house at 10:30 pm to go out. Well, 9:30 came, and I was still standing there stirring. And I know a risotto needs constant attention and stirring, but make-up does need to be applied, hair needs to be blowdried, clothes need to be changed and MSN conversations need to be carried out. So it was about this time that I started multi-tasking - I'd add a scoop of milk, run to the bathroom, apply foundation, run back to the risotto, stir some more, go to the computer, back to the risotto, back to the bathroom and so on for the next 20 minutes, until the risotto was done. I was a bit worried that I might screw up the rice this way, but it didn't suffer for the lack of constant stirring.

I had only used about half the amount of milk when the rice was cooked, for your information. The end result is a pudding that is rich and creamy, even before you add the double cream.


Risotto - before the addition of cream

Even though it looked allright as it was, I added some double cream anyway, because we had it, and because Nigella says to. I multiplied the recipe (which serves 1) by 1.5 for my mum and I, and it turned out to be waaaaay too much. The recipe says 60g of rice per person. Halfway through cooking, the ever-expanding mass of rice in the pot was looking kinda suss, so I had a look at the quantity of rice I used in the last rice pudding I made. That rice pudding also uses 60g of rice... and feeds THREE. (It fed us pretty decently, too, as I recall). I suppose that when Nigella wants food for comfort, part of the comfort lies in the enormous quantity available. Mum & I ate just over half of this one.


Bowl of risotto

It was warm, it was sweet, it was soft, it was comforting. I loved it. But seriously, it's very rich, and a small taste was quite enough.


Typical, eating in front of the computer.

My 100th Recipe!

When I invited my friends Adri, Bernard and An over for dinner last night, I knew there would be a few requirements...

No onions, no fried onions, no western-style pork, no lamb, no beef, no "meat that smells", no coriander, no capsicum, no spring onions, no shallots, no "weird Middle-Eastern food", nothing "strange or fancy"

...what on earth was I going to cook for them?

I spent a couple of days reading through my How to Eat, and finally chose the most normal, simple, unadventurous menu I could find.


SPRING-SCENTED LUNCH FOR 8

Tarragon French roast chicken
German leeks and wine, rice, peas and mangetouts
Lemon Pie

I did make a few small adjustments to the menu, mainly because of ingredient sourcing issues... and also scaled everything down (apart from the pie) for 6 people.


WINTER PRE-GOING-OUT-DANCING DINNER FOR 6

French Roast Chicken
German Leeks and Noilly Prat
Rice
Sugar Snaps and Peas
Lemon Pie

100. Lemon Pie

I made the pastry for this the night before, and let it sit, glad wrapped in the fridge until Saturday afternoon. The lemon filling also has to be started in advance - zest and slice some lemons, mix with sugar, and leave it in the fridge overnight. When you're ready to bake (and it can be eaten "hot, warm or cold"), you just have to roll out the pastry, add some eggs to the lemons, assemble the pie and shove it in the oven.


Pie filling

You know, this pastry was an absolute nightmare to roll out - it kept cracking on me, and I had to scrunch it up and start again, like, a million times. Maybe it was just too cold. But I persevered, rolled it out as best I could, and roughly mended the few cracks with the excess. During baking, some of the sugary-lemon filling overflowed and dripped down the sides. Luckily I'd anticipated this and had chucked a tray in the oven as well to catch the (rapidly bubbling and blackening) drips.


Lemon Pie - My 100th Recipe, "Well, I'm going for the rustic look, aren't I?"

About the chickens - I went to the supermarket on Saturday afternoon (before baking the pie), only to find that there's no bloody tarragon in the shops!! The grocer said it's been too cold to grow it. But I'd already bought the chickens and everything else! I thought, "Oh fuck it, we'll have the chicken anyway", and brazenly cooked the chickens as stated in the recipe, but without the tarragon. So, you smear a mixture of butter, sherry and pepper onto the breasts of the chickens (this is where you'd add the tarragon), and roast them over stock. As Nigella says, "Pour... stock into the bottom half of a roasting pan which has a grid that fits over, on which you can sit the chickens".


"French Roast Chicken", not "Tarragon French Roast Chicken". (And I'm going to make it again, properly, once I can get my hands on some bloody tarragon).

Now, the side dishes.

101. Foolproof Rice

I know I don't really need a recipe for rice, as I've got a rice cooker. But, a recipe is a recipe, so I was obliged to try rice the Nigella way. Her method's really weird - she says to turn the rice in some melted butter in a pan first, then to add the same volume of water to rice (normally I'd go double), and cook it on a super-low heat for, like, 30 minutes. It turned out fine, but strange. It was that bizzare Western-style rice which is really dry and separate, as opposed to being soft and clumpy, like normal. Anyway, I'm sticking to the rice cooker from now on.

102. German Leeks and Wine

The leeks are easy - you slice them into logs, and turn in butter in a pan. Then you pour some wine over (I used Noilly Prat because I didn't want to break into Dad's wine collection), and simmer until tender.

Nigella also suggests mangetouts and peas, but mangetouts were $12 a kilo. Yeah right!! I used sugar snaps instead, and just boiled them briefly with the ordinary peas.

My friends were running a bit late, so I just started the leeks and peas when they arrived. Everything else was ready, and able to sit around without going bad.


Foolproof rice, peas, German Leeks and Wine

I can't carve, and normally I get Mum to do it, but she was watching Midsummer Murders or something like that, so I had to try it myself. Chicken cooked this way is, in fact, so tender, that it is very easy to clumsily pull apart with a kitchen knife and tongs. And it tastes great! So juicy and tender, with the butter giving a wonderfully crisp skin.


My attempt at carving


An loves chicken fat

So yes, a fab dinner. All the elements (peas, leeks, chicken, rice) go together wonderfully, and are satisfying, but not bloating (which is a danger of menus in Nigella quantities).

And dessert...


Ta Da!

This is a gooooooood pie. The pastry is both crunchy and cakey (which I love!) and the filling is strongly lemony (which Adri loves). It was very sharp, and after taking a bite, we realised we desperately needed cream to go with. I didn't have any, so pulled a carton of Streets Blue Ribbon Vanilla Ice-cream out of the freezer, and dessert was saved. As Nigella says, it is a bit of a mess to cut up and serve, but it's so worth it! It's a damn tasty pie.

Everyone (apart from An, who's not into this sort of thing) had second helpings of my pie. Yay!


Adri & Bernard enjoying Pie


Pie