Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals: Tray Baked Chicken and Squashed Potatoes

Ever since we started menu planning, Jamie’s 30 minutes meals has been tested and tried almost once a month. Like we said in our last post, Jamie has a way of fast-tracking cooking and preparation times that IF (and that’s a very big IF!) we knew what we were doing, we just might sneak in within the 30 minute timeframe. Having said that, we weren’t too ambitious this time, and our goal was to make a delicious meal for the masses. Masses meaning 5. heh.

So we chose the Tray Baked Chicken and Squashed Potatoes (without the accompanied Creamed Spinach or Strawberry Slushie). Few reasons why we didn’t make the rest of it – we go by the principle of using up what’s in the fridge rather than buying new things, and secondly like what we learn from all cooking shows, we try and use seasonal produce! Strawberries weren’t in season at that time, so we were stuck with…well, no strawberries. It did look really good in the book though!!

If you are familiar with Jamie Oliver’s cooking, he’s often the king of “agar-ration”, by that I mean he’s a huge estimator. He loves using terms like “pinch”, “dollop”, “splash” – totally metric terms obviously! But that’s the whole thing about cooking – which is great! So these ingredients are not from the book but more of by “feel” and “look” – you just have to keep tasting!!

INGREDIENTS:

Potatoes
3-4 large potatoes (that are good for baked potatoes)
3-4 sprigs of rosemary
2 bay leaves
6 cloves of garlic

Start with the potatoes (especially when this takes the longest). Put some water in a pot and sprinkle with some salt. Then wash and prep the potatoes thoroughly and cut them in half length ways before placing them into the water. Boil them for about 12-15 minutes or until they are cooked through. When they are cooked, just leave them to dry for a few minutes.

Meanwhile, get a pan ready and coat it with a layer of olive oil. Start by placing the rosemary and bay leaves into the pan, and put the potatoes on top of the herbs (make sure they are flat and not topped on one another), then sprinkle in some salt (always season!!) and crush the cloves of garlic and add them in as well.

Then comes the fun part – with a smaller pan or any flat apparatus really – press it down hard on the potatoes so that they burst and spread out across the pan. If the potatoes are cooked well, this should be done easily enough. Leave them in the pan for 3 minutes then turn over to the other side.

Chicken
4-5 chicken breasts (skin on or off entirely up to you!)
4 rashers of bacon
Pinch of dried oregano
Couple of tsp of sweet paprika
1 tbsp (roughly) of butter
1 lemon
1 punnet of cherry tomatoes
2-3 sprigs of rosemary

With the chicken, the seasoning (dried oregano, salt, pepper and paprika) were added to the chicken along with olive oil. Then, it was basically pan fried and browned.

When the chicken juices start to flow, place them onto a roasting tray with the lemon (quartered) and the cherry tomatoes. Make sure to pour in all the juices into the pan!!

Then, lay out the bacon onto the chicken. Coat the sprigs of rosemary in the juices under heat and then place them in the roasting tray as well.

Put the roasting tray under the grill and cook for about 12-15 minutes.

And then it’s just a matter of putting together a side of vegetables (in our case it was blanched buk choy) to form a perfectly balanced meal! Hmm, not if you don’t count dessert as a balanced diet that is! The chicken was good because it was not too dry and the bacon added a different texture and taste to it. I thought the idea of the squashed potatoes were ingenious although they might have been around for centuries, and I just didn’t know about it!! So all in all, another satisfied meal from Jamie’s book, but still well and above the 30 minute mark. I was telling Sammy that we might have to do these recipes again and again so that we know exactly what are were doing and that would probably shorten our um-ing and ah-ing and referring back to the book. And practice makes perfect…RIGHT??

Until next time…..!

 

Butter Prawns and a Feast as Sides (奶油虾)

Masterchef started tonight last night! Woohoo!! Was there anyone who watched the Logies instead? No prizes for guessing what we did today yesterday at 7.30pm! (It will be a great relief to be away from the Royal Wedding news that PLAGUE all forms of media at the moment…the dress looked SO good by the way, but was funny that the bridesmaid’s dress outshone the bride just a tad bit :P), but enough about television. In the spirit of Masterchef, we thought we would share a dish that we tried from Adam Liaw’s “Two Asian Kitchens” – Butter prawns!

I think it’s supposed to be “Lai Yao Har” (奶油虾) in Cantonese and this is one of my FAVOURITE dishes back in Malaysia – it’s basically fried prawns stirred in with egg, curry leaves and chillies that have been fried till crisp. So you have some idea of how excited I got when I saw this recipe in his book! We just had to try it!

This made up 1 of the dishes that was part of our feast that night – besides the butter prawns, we also made steamed egg (a quintessentially Cantonese dish I think), vegetables and leftover fried wontons. The recipe has not been changed except for personal preferences (chillies etc) – and I think you pretty much have to cook and taste as you go.

Butter Prawns

Ingredients

500g raw prawns
3 egg yolks, beaten
45g dessicated coconut
100g unsalted butter
1 handful curry leaves
5 chilles, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tsp light soya sauce
1/2 tsp Shaoxing wine
Ground white pepper
salt
2 tsp castor sugar

Method

First things first , you have to clean the prawns! We cut off the legs and feelers of the prawns…

Then, using a wok – fill it halfway up with oil and let the oil heat up. You know when it’s ready if you place a wooden chopstick into the oil and it starts bubbling against the chopstick. Then fry the prawns in batches until it’s crispy – about 2-3 minutes. When they’re ready, place them onto a plate lined with paper towel to absorb the additional oil.

You can then take the oil out but leave some in there for the butter sauce. Then taking a sieve, pour the beaten egg yolks through the sieve into the wok…

Then, whisk it as it cooks on the wok until it becomes strands or little clumps (this was a 2 man job it seems – I was pouring the egg onto the sieve and Sammy was busy whisking away). Take it out onto a separate plate when it’s ready.

Then, clean the wok and dry fry the dessicated coconut until coloured, then take it out.

Melt the butter in the wok and fry the curry leaves until crispy, then add in the chillies and garlic and fry until fragrant. I think we used less chillies than the one in the cookbook, so this would be preferential and depending on how spicy the chillies are! Then add everything else inside (prawns, coconut, egg, soya sauce, Shaoxing wine, salt and sugar) and toss it a few times until it is well combined.

The best way to eat prawns? Peel them with your hands – peel of its head (suck it a little to get the flavour – but please don’t do this if you have gout! :P), then peel off the shells on its body, suck the flavour out of it as you go and then eat the flesh…if its crispy enough, you can even eat everything together!

Anyway, while we were doing this, Sammy also made:

Steamed Egg with Pork Mince (蒸水蛋)

Ingredients

Eggs
Pork mince
Dried Chinese Mushrooms
Water
Shaoxing wine
Salt

Method

Soak the dried chinese mushrooms in hot water. When it’s soft, drain the hot water and dice the mushrooms into small pieces.

Then, fry the pork mince in the wok with a dash of Shaoxing wine and salt, and stir fry until the mince is cooked.

Then, put it into a steamer with equal parts of egg and water (1 cup egg to 1 cup water etc) and then steam until it’s firm. An easy dish to make especially when you need it to make up 3 dishes in a chinese meal.

On top of that, we also made wontons out of the leftovers from the Dumpling Night, and also a token vegetable dish – so suffice to say, we were stuffed that night!! The king of the dishes was the butter prawns, they were DEElicious! Too bad we don’t have enough ‘wok hei’ (people back home, especially in the restaurants will cook from a charcoal stove, that had sufficient heat and added the smoky, charcoal-y flavour to the food that can’t be replicated with gas stoves unfortunately!). But for a dish that was cooked at home, it was a great dish – took a bit more effort though and our house ended up smelling like fried prawns for ages!! All worth it!

 

Jamie’s 30 minute meals: Challenge Accepted!

Wow, that was some hiatus!! We’ve had a lovely 5 day long weekend which was a good break for us from work, but I think we busied ourselves even more with housechores, many baking adventures and er…for me, it was catching up on Amazing Race! (I finished Season 17 and have caught up with Season 18!…Gosh, I’m such a sucker for Reality TV shows!)

So anyway, we have decided to plonk back on the blogging world after a break 😀 my good intentions of blogging the last weekend went out the window obviously! But now, I am truly back into this and we have so many adventures to blog about!

We’ll start with Jamie Oliver’s 30 minute meals – we bought this book quite awhile ago, before the TV series went on air because we generally liked Jamie’s meals. He knows how to put delicious meals together simply and very quickly – great for full time workers like us! Hence the tagline “A Revolutionary Approach to Cooking Good Food Fast”. And I can attest that it’s true! We’ve tried about 2-3 recipes from the book and we are amazed by all the “shortcuts” he takes, and how we can produce 2-3 course meals in about (well it’s not 30), but about an hour – which is quite a feat for us! 😀

If you haven’t seen the book before, it’s not categorized like other cookbooks – but in its own individual 3-4 course meals. It generally has a starter/entree/sides, main meal and a dessert. The steps are meant to be followed to the tee so that while you are cooking, you are multitasking and knowing what step comes next, and in doing that, you are meant to be more efficient in the kitchen.

But to be honest, it’s really difficult to follow every step and every ingredient to the tee – firstly, because we can’t find everything here in Australia – not if we head to specialty shops, ie: some of the salad greens (chicory, watercress) have to be substituted to what we can find here. And also, unless you have a thriving herb garden (which we don’t – sniff! – we have black, as opposed to green fingers), buying the amount of herbs that Jamie needs in his recipe can get quite expensive – but with a little bit of tweaking, and using local produce, it tastes great all the same. We just had to make adjustments and be a little more flexible then the book intended; and we started to see how valuable his little tips are.

So…30 minutes eh? I was intrigued when I looked through the cookbook – how can anyone do this in 30 minutes? CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

Recipe: Pregnant Jool’s Pasta and Salad

Yes, I know that the recipe is different from the book – but I didn’t have watercress, nor did I have time to make a dessert; so I skipped that part and just made the pasta, sauce and salad. It was actually quite easy and quick to make.

Ingredients for Pasta

4 spring onions
2 carrots
1-2 fresh red chillies
6 good quality sausages
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp dried oregano
500g dried pasta (any kind) – we used spirals for this
4 cloves garlic
4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 tin chopped tomatoes
basil leaves

Steps:

5.10pm – I started preparing by getting all my ingredients out of the fridge and different parts of the kitchen all together on the counter so I had things within reach and didn’t have to go searching for it

5.20pm – (yea, took me 10 mins! I need to work a bit faster I think!) I started to boil the water in the kettle for the pasta and got my pot and strainer out. Then, I started prepping the vegetables – washing and roughly chopping the carrots and spring onions

 

5.25pm – I took out my handy food processor (Jamie calls it a food liquidizer – I had to google it!). If you don’t have one of these, go get one! They are inexpensive and versatile, and makes your life in the kitchen less stressful, especially when you’re busy. Anyway, I put the spring onions, carrots and chillies in the food processor and blitzed it for awhile. Then, I added in the sausages and blitzed some more until it was well combined; then I added in the fennel seed and oregano.

5.35pm – I boiled more water for the pasta (left the first kettle of water in the pot, and put it under low heat) and added salt in the water. Then I put the pan on the stove to heat up, placed about a tablespoon of olive oil and then poured the blitzed mixture into the pan, agitating them with a spatula and frying until it separates – much like corned beef.

Then, add in the 4 garlic cloves, crushed, along with the tin tomato and balsamic vinegar.

5.45pm – The meat was still simmering and didn’t look quite cooked, so I left it on and started on the salad. By this time, Sammy came home, so I had an extra pair of hands! So she continued on with the salad while I checked on the pasta. (Also did some washing up so my hubby doesn’t have to deal with it!)

6.00pm – Pasta sauce was done and Sammy finished the salad – and the meal was done!

It obviously took us longer than 30 minutes, but I was amazed by how you can make the sauce from scratch without using the bottled ones. I probably did more things in between (when I should be making the dessert), like putting things back into its original place and some washing up etc so if I hadn’t done that, I probably would have come up with another course.

I’m always amazed by the new things I learn when I cook from this book, and how I can be more efficient in the kitchen, and in doing that I save time and will have more time in the day to do other things 🙂 So if you’re thinking of buying this book, I think it’s a good buy if you’re willing to learn from his techniques and a be a bit creative in terms of the ingredients but still sticking to the overall timing of the book. It’s on offer now, in Big W! Funny, I just saw it on the catalogue for $29.93! Or you can get it from Book Depository.

We cooked another dish from this book…so stay tuned….!!

 

Orange & Poppyseed muffins.. because toast for brekky gets boring!

We tend to get bored of eating toast or cereal for breakfast every morning, so sometimes I go looking for something yummy to bake so we can keep it for breakfast the following day(s). Sometimes we get frozen mantous or rice rolls (chee cheong fun) from the oriental shop to create some variety as well.

But last weekend, we visited the Subi Station St markets for our weekly fruit & veg shop, and jie went to pick up some veggie chips (of which she has an upsetting story to tell) as well as some poppyseeds.

I’ve never seen poppyseeds until I came to Australia, and they would typically be paired with lemon in a muffin/cake. It doesn’t add much flavour or smell, but it is visually appealing, and adds a bit of texture -sometimes you might bite into a seed when chowing down the muffin/cake.

So since we had them, I decided to hunt down a recipe to use them in. Off i went to Dr. G again.. oh what would I have done if the internet wasn’t around? (probably not writing this post.. but I digress!) And I found this orange and poppyseed muffin recipe from taste.com.au (they have some great recipes there! I’ve used them a few times for dinner ideas before)

Muffins have got to be the easiest thing ever to bake! No gentle folding, or creaming butter and sugar, or need for fancy-schmancy cake mixers. Just measure out the ingredients, put them in a bowl, give it a good stir with a wooden spoon (or spatula, whichever you fancy!), and put them into lined/greased muffin pans! even Becks (our younger sister) should be able to do it! 😛

So thats basically what I did. Measured the ingredients according to the recipe, and about an hour later (taking into account the prep & baking time) we had fresh, hot and fluffy orange and poppyseed muffins ready to be devoured! *lip-licking smiley* (someone sholud create one!)

 

Sunday Night Theme: Dumplings Cooked Two Ways

Sunday night’s theme was decided since last week, when someone suggested we should make dumplings, and the immediate reaction was “yummmm”, so dumplings it was! For this theme, we worked on the “many hands make light work” principle and thanks to the many hands, the wrapping of the dumplings were not as tedious as previously thought.

I have always remembered eating dumplings when I was little, and in many different forms. One of my favourite is Won Ton Mee (egg noodles cooked in either soup or black sauce with little yellow pork dumplings as its sides). I like mine dry (non-soup), with lots of flavoursome sauce and soft but chewy dumplings…yumm! We also eat them during Dim Sum, either in forms of Fried Wontons or Gao Jis (Chinese) – pan fried pork dumplings with white skin eaten with chinese vinegar and ginger. Yumm! I’m hungry just thinking about it!

For our dumplings, we made them out of pork mince, prawns, chinese mushrooms, ginger, chives (all diced well) and chestnuts as the main ingredients and seasoned well with salt, pepper, soya sauce, shao xing wine and combined together with corn flour. Then get in there and mix it with your hands (the only way to do it!) until well combined. If you want a more detailed recipe, then follow this blog here.

Then comes the fun part, making the dumplings! We used two different kinds of wrapping skin (no, we didn’t make them, we just bought them from the oriental store), wonton skin and gyoza skin because we couldn’t find the white dumpling skin.

For a full demonstration of how to wrap the dumplings you can refer to various youtube videos that are similar to how we made it. There are quite a few ways to go about making it, so choose one that is easiest or will suit you.

Otherwise you can take private lessons from Esthey who seemed to make a perfect one from the get go! Should have seen the rest of us struggling to get the dumplings look as nice as Esthey’s. She made it look so easy when she demonstrated it to us, but once it came to making mine, it just looked funny and out of shape.

Apparently the tricks are to:

1. Not to fill it up with too much filling (or they will fall out or not be able to seal properly)
2. Wet the edges of the skin with cornflour and water
3. When choosing to crimp the dumpling, only pinch the pastry on one side
4. To make it look pretty, make sure the pinches are heading towards the middle of the dumpling
5. You can tuck in the ends together to make it look neater
6. The shape you would want the dumpling in, is a crescent shape
7. Make sure you seal it well, or it will spill when its boiled, or pop when its fried!

I think we made about 110 dumplings that night, and it didn’t take as long as I had initially expected (well done to all the dumpling wrappers! ours didn’t look great in the beginning, but they certainly took shape at the 20th dumpling – so kudos!). Esthey pan fried half of the dumplings, and Sammy boiled the rest of them.

To complete the meal, we had soup (which Esthey boiled for a few hours with pork bones), noodles, and chinese cabbage. The dumplings didn’t sound like a lot, but they were GONE in a matter of minutes – they were that good! The boiled ones had enough flavour and they were not overdone (so it was nice and soft).

The pan fried gao jis were the hit of the night…! They were cooked so well – crispy skin on the outside with yummy pork on the inside and dipped with Esthey’s amazing concoction of a dipping sauce (fried chilli, onions, dark soy sauce, soy sauce and red wine vinegar, ginger?). It was soooo good and tasty! Paired perfectly with our noodles.

Now, if only our soup was perfect….! In our haste and hunger to feed the masses, we realized that the soup wasn’t enough, so we added more water to it, and started dishing them out into the bowls…only to realize that we didn’t add SALT. Wow, what a difference it would have made because the soup was so sweet…! But it didn’t matter much because the king of the dish was the dumplings, and they tasted so good that i forgot about the soup anyway!

Well done to Esthey for once again preparing, cooking and making all the little side dishes/dipping sauces etc, and then you beat everyone else to helping Aunty Kit wash up (if aunty kit wasn’t there, you’d probably would have taken over!) You are indeed, in many ways, a wonderwoman in my eyes 😀 YOU ROCK ESTHEY!