"STEEL-POT" CHICKEN RICE!!!

WONDERFUL!! The reason I call this "steel-pot" chicken rice is because I didn't have a claypot and therefore had to make do with the only pot I have..... my steel pot! One mistake I made was to cook the entire dish in a rice cooker first but it was too small which meant that the rice was bitey on the top and cooked at the bottom. That meant I had to take it out and do what I should have done from the start... cook it in the steel pot.

Now to start with this amazing dish.. The chicken! It was cooked to perfection. Marinate marinate marinate! That is one point I can never drive hard enough. The only way you get chicken pieces tasting perfect right to its core is to leave it to marinate for more than half an hour. A simple mixture of oyster sauce, soy sauce, chinese rice wine, dark soy sauce, sugar, salt, pepper, garlic, ginger and flour. Do NOT remove the chicken skin from the chicken when you cook it. It flavours the rice so well and leaves the rice with a smooth coat of chicken-y goodness!

Cook the chicken partially before layering it on top of the partially cooked rice... which takes me to.....

THE RICE! Our hawker brothers would cook the rice in a clay pot before dumping the chicken on top of it. Well.... I didn't do that. Amazing food taste more amazing when the rice is also flavoured. Prepare a broth. A good broth. Chicken stock, oyster sauce, soy sauce (light and dark). Don't overdose the broth with these sauces as that would leave the rice too black for your (or my) liking. Too much chicken stock can produce highly salty rice which would leave you feeling the need to climb to the top of your house, find the water tank, dunk your head in it and spend the rest of eternity drinking.

Allow the rice to cook partially and when the water on the top of the rice recedes, layer the partially cooked chicken on the top. Allow the chicken and rice to steam together. That allows the rice to soak up the chicken juice and for the chicken to get enough heat to steam and cook without losing too much water and retaining its tenderness!

All in all... The picture may not look amazing because I mixed up the chicken and rice before dishing it on my plate but trust me it tastes like a million pounds... That's right pounds.. with the currency conversion and all! 8.9/10!!

PRAWN WONTONS!!

I am a big fan of wontons! Wonton noodles, wonton soup, fried wonton,... you name it I love it. I love the fact that someone came up with the idea of packing meat or seafood or a combination of the two in a doughy pocket and cooking them in unison:)

So I tried making prawn wontons because my flatmate is a big fan of them. I bought some chicken to make a combination of steamed chicken and prawn dumplings (which you will see in the next post). The balance prawns were used to make this tasty treats.

I couldn't be bothered looking up recipes on how to make wontons so I experimented with lots of soy sauce, oyster sauce and many other ingredients... But my favourite ingredient in all of this was SESAME OIL! Yes! Sesame oil is the key ingredient in this dish. Not only does the dish have a nutty fragrance, it tasted delicious. The prawns were pre-cooked and that is something I have never been a fan of. If the prawns were raw, the dish would have had a sweetness to it and it would have absorbed more of the flavours created by the other sauces I threw in.

Personally, I think throwing in some chopped spring onions and water chesnuts (like the wontons back at home) would have given a distinct aroma and also an extra crunch to the wontons. But with no water chesnuts in sight, one can only imagine the crunch as they bite on the wontons to make up for the absence.

Packing the wontons! I had a blast doing this. Spooning the ingredients onto the wonton pastry, wetting the square edges and folding them into little balls were fun to do. I prefer dropping the wontons into a pot of boiling water but today I decided to just fry them and I don't regret my decision:)

An amazing appetizer/snack to have before eating and it rates an 8.7/10 :)

PENANG ASSAM CURRY MEE!!

I have to start of by saying that I intended to make curry mee but the end result, and my flatmates comments on it, prompted me to change the known dish to a somewhat fused concept between laksa and curry mee. Penang Assam Curry Mee!! However, I shall tell you the story of how I tried to make curry mee as this was the intention:)

Well this was a close call to home. My flatmate loves her Maggi chicken curry paste mixed with egg noodles and fishballs and she calls that 'curry mee'. I, on the other hand, have a very different opinion on what curry mee should taste like. Maggi chicken curry and egg noodles was NOT curry mee to me (although the result was still pleasant). I researched different recipes online and a fusion of those recipes have me this end result.

The oriental shop, where I bought my ingredients, had run out of egg noodles and the only other alternative was ramen. I thought there wouldn't be much difference but there was. It was less springy and less flavourful compared to thick egg noodles. It also had a starchy after-taste to it which I would have been happy to dispense with.

So I started the process of making my curry mee and suprisingly, it took me more than 1 and a half hours to finish cooking! I am a very fast cook but the peeling and the deseeding of dried red chillies really did get the best of me. What did I think of the dish? I will take this in turn:

The Penang Curry Mee gravy:

I really liked the base. The coconut milk was a splendid addition since it balanced out the richness of the spices in the gravy. The entire curry base came from a mix of coriander powder (suprisingly not curry powder), dried chillies, belacan, shallots, garlic and a variety of other ingredients. There was also the addition of lemongrass which was nice but many recipes asked that I put in 3 stalks into the blender with the other spices. I reduced that amount to 2 stalks and still found that the lemon grass smell was a little too strong in the gravy. The citrusy taste was also very evident. Personally, I would have preferred for that taste to be in the background rather than fighting its way to the forefront.

The Fish Balls!:

Nothing else needs to be said about these beauties. Always a delight to have in any soup-based or curry-based noodle dishes. The only other thing I wish I had was cockles! My mother would probably scream in terror as she is not an advocate of consuming shellfish in abundance, which is exactly what I would have done had I been able to get my hands on these critters! Blanched and served, that is how I like my cockles. Still a little rare in the middle and not overdone and tough.. Shrimps would have been great as well but here in the UK, shrimps are pre-cooked and highly priced.

The Chillie Paste:

I remember having this little addition in the curry mee shop in front of my house in Johor Bahru. It was spicy, oily and salty. However the saltiness was not excessive. This chillie paste that I had concocted was very 'dried prawn' based and that...... was not so bad. But I didn't think it was all that great. There was too much dried prawns in it that the paste was more flaky than oily smooth. Perhaps I should research more on how to get the best chillie paste for curry mee. It wasn't amazing and that bit needs some work.

Overall, this dish was a good try and aside from the overpowering lemon grass smell and flavour and the flaky chillie paste, the dish was a not bad try for a beginner. 6.8/10 (because we all know that there is no such thing as a 10) ;)

RICH CHOCOLATE MOIST CAKE!!

My housemate says this is 'her cake to go", but to me, it makes my sweet senses glow. Pathetic attempt at trying to rhyme but I must say, this tasted absolutely sinful. Let me take you through the anatomy of this cake.

We start with the top layer of the cake. It is covered with a thick dark chocolate glaze which isn't thick with sweetness but settles very well on your tongue. I am not a person who loves excessively sweet food and this amount of sweetness was just right for me..

The second layer, a warm chocolate cake that was so moist it was almost gooey. The gooeyness of the cake was to die for! It exhibited richness and style in its consistency. I've never been a fan of dry cakes. If it's dry, it might as well be bread. But no, this was the furthest thing away from dry...

The thrid layer, another layer of dark chocolate syrup... This layer was creatively placed even thinner than the topmost layer. I thought that was clever because some people go into an icing frenzy and all you have is 'mush-cake-bigger mush- cake'. By placing the second icing thinly between the two layers of the cake, it glued the two layers of chocolate heaven together and still maintained its distinct richness.

The fourth layer, as you can guess, another layer of chocolate moist cake. What was absolutely lovely about this dessert is that it was served up warm. It allowed me to experience the burst of chocolatey goodness and its 'just-right' sweetness. The warmth also meant that the icing on the cake did not sit on it like a chocolate statue. Instead, it dripped off the sides of the cake and created a small puddle of chocolate around it. Perfect to dip your cake into when you run out of icing on top of the cake...

A perfect dessert to have on a cold night in. Personally I think it would be amazing even if it was coold but I am one of those weird people who actually love cakes out of a fridge. But today, I was in the mood for something warm and fun and I was lucky enough to have it served to me:)

GARLIC ROAST CHICKEN WITH ROASTED POTATOES IN 'LIQUID GOLD'!!

I was absolutely blown away! The roast chicken was crispy on the outside and so tender on the inside. When I say crispy, I mean the skin was crackling when I bit on the chicken thigh. And no, it wasn't because it was burnt! This was how the chicken looked when it was roasted to perfection after an hour and 15 minutes.

I have to admit that this was a Jamie Oliver work-of-art but still proud nonetheless! What I hate about roast chicken is normally the dryness of the meat on the breast. The trick was to pierce a lemon, which had been boiled with garlic (still in their skins), numerous times before stuffing them into the cavity of the chicken. I admit I wanted to say chicken's backside but I refrained myself..... Well, I guess I didn't:P
Once the chicken had come out of the oven and was rested for 15 minutes, the lemon was removed and smearing the garlic in the chicken all over the skin gave it that extra kick. The pungent smell of garlic had already been removed by the hour plus long roasting and all that was left was a wonderful 'mild aroma' and starchy garlic still dressed in its skin. It had soaked up the flavour of the chicken and the zest of the lemon! Smearing it all over the skin was unavoidable..

The potatoes.... Ah, the potatoes... I loved it but personally I think it could have been better. In what sense? Let me explain. I don't have a big enough baking tray to fit a whole chicken and potatoes at the same time. That was the issue. The potatoes had to be boiled in salted water for 10 minutes prior to being tossed in the chicken fat 45 minutes into roasting the bird. I could toss the potatoes in the chicken fat but I could not lay them around the chicken to worship it. The tray was to small and the potatoes had to be baked separately. If I had had the space to roast the potatoes together with the chicken, the result would have been crisp potatoes on the outside with a soft fluffy middle. More fat would have leaked out of the chicken to allow the potatoes to fry in the 'liquid gold' but the soft insides, a product of the boiling, would have been preserved nonetheless. So there, that is how you do it.

Gravy gravy gravy! Right, so I was planning on making the gravy when my 'always hungry' housemate told me, "I can't wait anymore, let's just eat!" Boy was she wrong! She shouted at me from the hall to bring in "more gravy for" her!! This was a simple experiment which proved to be quite a success and tasted so much like the mash potato gravy from KFC. Simple combination of the juice and fat of the roast chicken, flour, chicken stock, the ends of the chicken's wings and drumsticks, pepper and whatever else you want to throw in. It came out a milky brown colour, mildly spicy from the pepper and the delicious juices from the chicken made all the difference in the world.

Well, that was an extremely long post about and extremely amazing dinner I just had. But the saying goes, "winner winner, chicken dinner". Not really a saying but I feel like a winner anyway:)

TUNA AND EGG SALAD!!

This is mediocre. There I said it. In an attempt to be healthy, I attempted this salad and I think I've had my quota of tuna and leaves. Let me point out the flaws in this salad:
1) Drain the bloody tuna well! This was canned tuna in brine and it should be drained VERY WELL. The result of simple draining would mean the tuna would get soggy.
2) Lamb lettuce leaves are nice but make sure you dry the leaves well. This leaves have the tendency to hold in water and release it halfway through eating the salad. I would ahve preferred spinach leaves, kale or some other type of leave. Even the simple lettuce leaves would have been nicer.
3) Should have gone easy on the black pepper. I went on a spree with the pepper. Bad mistake!

Anyway, instead of using mayo for the tuna, I used Greek yoghurt instead and it was quite nice. Sourish and milky! A dash of lemon juice reduces the strong tuna smell and a sprinkle of salt and pepper gives it enough taste. I also liked the boiled egg addition to the salad. Tuna and egg goes very well together and I think that probably raised the dish from a 4 to a 6 on a scale from 1 to 10.

Well, let's get real. All healthy food don't taste brilliant. So I will cut the tuna and egg salad some slack. It was okay:)

LEMON STEAM FISH!

This dish... may be something which a good few may like. I would pin it down as a dish which would appeal to the tongues of people who like mild and bland kinds of food. Not to say this dish is not tasteful. It is tasteful indeed. The highlight ingredient in this dish was the sesame oil. I thought that was the reason why this dish tasted good. Sesame oil, besides it smell, gives the dish a nutty flavour and relaxes the zing of the lemon.

It consists of seabass, stock, white onion, ginger, sesame oil, lemon, pepper, light soya sauce, parsley, and let the steaming bring the seabass flavour out into the soup. The soup base is best eaten with rice and 'cili padi' in soya sauce. It is the perfect dish to eat on a day you're not in the mood to spend a whole evening in the kitchen. It took me literally 20 minutes to get this bad boy cooked up and served.

I would suggest 'pimping' this dish up a little by adding tamarind seeds or/and salted vegetables to give it the 'Teo-chew' effect. Seabass in itself is a meaty fish but probably the slices that I got weren't blessed in the meat department. There was more skin on it than meat=( A better option would have been the siakap or the red snapper.

Easy to make, easy to eat and a safe dish at that:)