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Tag Archives: chicken stock

Chicken Tagine with Couscous and Harissa

23 Aug

I’m a bit of a fraud with this recipe.  I made all of it, but have had real trouble getting ‘real’ couscous and not the instant stuff, so I did make the couscous, but the cheating way, not the way described in the recipe.  I definitely need to head down to the Middle Eastern Grocery stores so I can have some on hand.  So that’s why there are no photos of the couscous!

I’ve been looking lovingly at this recipe since I bought “In The Mix” and every time I’ve had the opportunity to make it, my parents have been coming around for dinner.  My Dad is strictly old-school and will not touch chicken or poultry of any description – or so he says.  He’s happily eaten it when he is guest in someone’s home, or if we tell him it’s something else – so it’s definitely a mind over matter thing – but my mother has now spent 56 years making a carpet bag steak for him for his Christmas Dinner while the rest of us eat turkey.  And I think Master 3 can be difficult to please!!  I had thought about just making it and telling him it was rabbit, but the potential guilt complex got the better of me.

I have been the owner of a tagine for about 10 years, but I have never – ever – used it.  It is sitting on the top of my fridge down at the beach in pristine condition.  I love the idea of cooking in a tagine, but just never got around to it, so I wanted to give this recipe a go.  This recipe is from Cath Claringbold, who is an amazing chef who specialises in Middle Eastern food, amongst many other things.  I’ve been lucky enough to eat at a few of her restaurants and they have all been amazing.

This would be a really great dish for entertaining a group of people, or if you were going to bring a dish to a gathering of some kind.  Although the recipe says it serves 4-6, my TM bowl was almost filled to overflowing, and I’m sure we have had at least six generous serves from it. I’m sure that I’ll bring one to our next family ‘bring something along’ gathering, and see if Dad eats it then!

I made the harissa paste required for this recipe a few weeks ago and popped it in the freezer for when I had the occasion to make this.  Although your local herb and spice shop will think you’ve gone mad with the quantity of cumin and coriander you buy for both the paste and the tagine, it really is worth it.  The paste freezes well although next time I’d freeze it in smaller blocks rather than one big chunk – ice cubes worth would be great.  Dani even recommends using the harissa in a Bloody Mary in place of tobasco – I’ll have to give that a go!

The harissa paste is dead easy.  I’d always been a little afraid of roasting capsicums, but I bit the bullet and did it in the oven.  I left them in the oven for about 20 minutes, turning them once, and made sure when they were pretty scorched, then put them in a ziplock bag and let them sweat and cool, and then the skin peeled right off. Even thought it might be tempting, don’t rinse them under water to get the skin off, as you’ll dilute the roasted flavour.  I’m not sure if some people cut the capsicum in half lengthwise before they roast, but if you have space on your tray it would save you turning them.  You don’t need to oil them or anything before you put them in the oven, and you’ll be surprised at the amount of oil that comes out of them!

Roasting spices has never been easier!  No mess, no mortar and pestle to clean up after grinding them, and the smells that waft through your kitchen are just heavenly.

The tagine itself is easy and pretty quick in the scheme of things. You will need a couple of bowls to set things aside in, but there’s nothing too tiresome in doing that.   I did notice after I’d poured it out a little that I had a slightly burned bit on the TM bowl, but it wasn’t burned as such, and the flavours were sound.

I didn’t need anything like 500mls of chicken stock to cover the chicken thighs, in fact I was a little dubious about putting in as much stock as I did as I was over the magic 2 litre mark on the TM bowl.  It didn’t bubble over till the very end though, and even then, not much.  If you had the varoma in place for the couscous, you wouldn’t even notice.

I had some store bought preserved lemon that I used for this recipe, and it really adds a lovely flavour to the tagine.  It’s well worth making your own or having a small jar on hand to use.

All in all, this is a great dish and something I will definitely put in the memory bank for future reference!!

 
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Posted by on August 23, 2012 in Main meals

 

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White Bean Soup with Truffle

29 May

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I wasn’t planning on making this soup for a while, but someone posted a question about it on one of my favourite Thermomix Forums the other day – they had used tinned cannellini beans rather than dry beans, and the recipe was a flop – even though the recipe book says you can use them. So I said I’d make it with the real thing and see what it was like – and then go about working out how to do it more successfully with tinned cannellini beans.

What’s the forum, you ask?  It’s http://www.forumthermomix.com

It has an abundance of recipes, tips, tweaks and general thermomix chat.  I’m a bit addicted.  So if you don’t know about it – get on it!

The recipe is from Guy Grossi.  He’s one of my favourite Melbourne Chefs – for many years I was a Friday regular in the cheap seats at the Grossi Florentino Cellar Bar with a group of my work colleagues.  His food always reminds me of good friends, laughter and hilarious war stories.

Anyway, back to the soup.  This is as simple as it gets to make.  Oil, garlic, onion, beans, fontina cheese and truffle.  You can substitute truffle oil for truffle if you don’t have any – and let’s face it, I bet there’s not that many of us that have truffle sitting around waiting to be used!! So, I used truffle oil, which I always have in my cupboard – I often add some of it to the mushroom risotto, as well as some rehydrated porcini mushrooms.  Yum!  I use the Simon Johnson brand, but I am sure there are many others out there.

Once you’ve added the beans to the thermomix bowl, it can be a little noisy.  The noise dies down after a few minutes once the beans start to soften in the stock.  I used water and homemade vegetable stock concentrate – (mainly because I want to use my batch of chicken stock to serve as a consommé with the dumplings when I make them again.  I’m going to use Heston Blumenthal’s stock clarifying method and see how it works) – and it had a lovely mellow flavour – surprisingly truffley considering the relatively small amount of truffle oil in the recipe.

This makes a really rich soup – I poured it into three bowls as we had a friend pop over at lunch time, but it would easily have done five serves – it really is quite satisfying.  I served it with bread, which frankly, I didn’t need to eat – but it was Phillippa’s bread, and it was fresh!!

This soup forms a skin fairly quickly – so it’s really a soup that you’d want to make and serve immediately, otherwise you’d need to return to the thermomix, heat and blitz for a while to get rid of any chunky bits.

 
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Posted by on May 29, 2012 in Entrees

 

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Hainanese Chicken and Egg

24 Apr

This is a recipe in a few stages, so it does take quite a bit of time – although a lot of it is handsfree, hassle free cooking – one of the things I love most about my thermomix.  You do the basics, set it, press the button, and walk away – and when you come back, dinner is made!  What could be easier?

This recipe is from Trissa Lopez (see her website at trissalicious.com).

I have only had Hainanese Chicken and Egg a few times in my life – but one of them was a meal that stands out in my memory.  I was in Singapore, coming home from a long work trip.  I was exhausted, sick of eating airline food and hotel food, and just wanted to sit on a bed and watch TV and try and feel like I had a life. I saw this dish on the room service menu.  I ordered it, and it was divine.  Real comfort food!  I still haven’t had one that matches the Singapore experience, but this one was pretty good!

If you wanted to make it a little quicker (it takes 3 hours, plus extra time for brining the chicken) you could do the rice the conventional way, or do the poached egg the traditional way.  For mine, I love the way that the thermomix cooks rice AND poached eggs, so I used it for both.  The thermomix poached eggs are a little time consuming…but amazing – and no pan to clean up. I always thermomix my poached eggs now – they are just so good.

Want the recipe?  Check the recipe tab on my home page!

There are four steps to this recipe.  You brine the chicken, then cook that in the flavoured oil that you make.  Then you cook the rice and poach the eggs, then serve.  The eggs are best if you cook them just before serving.

Here are my tips:

I made the brining mixture first.  I always use raw sugar now I have a thermomix, and the salt I used was rock salt.  Because I didn’t want to put the chicken in warm water (which I suspect I would have needed to use to dissolve the sugar and the salt), I put in the the TM bowl to weigh, and then blitzed it for a few seconds to break it down a bit.  Then I poured the mix into a big bowl, and added the wet ingredients.  It must have worked as there was no residue at the bottom of the bowl after the brining was finished.  Brining the chicken makes it amazingly tender, really falling apart kind of tender – delicious!

The flavoured oil is dead easy.  I cleaned the ginger and then cut it into slices – they weren’t too thin.  Once the oil is finished, it takes on a cloudy appearance, so I found it difficult to put the thighs in between the blades.  Next time I’ll empty the oil into another bowl or jug, arrange the chicken between the blades, and then pour the oil over the top.

I used free range, skinless chicken thighs.  Next time I’ll do the skin on, as I think I prefer the crunchy skin once you’ve pan fried them for a few minutes at the end.  If I had have arranged the thighs a little better between the blades, then I wouldn’t have had to keep peeking to see how the cooking was going – I think my prodding broke some of the thighs up a little… I had a few perfect ones, and a few that ended up in pieces.

Rice cooking in a thermomix is a dream.  Perfect rice, every single time!  I think next time I’ll cook the rice in chicken stock rather than plain water, as I think it gives the rice more flavour.  But that’s just a personal preference.

Overall, a good recipe – one that I’d never attempted to make before.  I’m glad I did!!

 
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Posted by on April 24, 2012 in Main meals

 

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Veiled Pilaf

26 Mar

What a great, easy meal for a family!  Loved it, even though in my haste to serve it up I forgot to put the cinnamon and icing sugar on it, and toss over some more currants and nuts.  Sometimes, I am sure I am turning into my mother!

I was all excited about using some preserved lemons my sister had given me a while ago for this recipe, however when I went to use them, I found that the top had gone mouldy, so I had to forget the preserved lemon this time.  It’s a dish I’ll definitely be making again, I think it would make a great picnic dish as well, so once the warm weather returns, it will definitely be on the must make list.

The serving size was just right – we had it as a main meal and it served 4 perfectly.  I served it up with a non thermomix spinach, semi dried tomato and Persian Fetta salad, and it was lovely.

Here are my tips:

Use good chicken stock to cook the rice.  The flavour of the rice is all important in this dish, so if you have home made chicken stock that tastes great, use it!  I didn’t, and used the old Campbell’s Real Stock.  The result was good, but I don’t think you can beat real chicken stock.  (And, believe it or not, I’ve never made the chicken stock that’s in one of the Thermomix recipe books – I promise I will one day, I just get phobic around chicken going bad somehow and fear poisoning my family and friends)  I am not usually a fan of dried fruit in savoury recipes, but this really impressed me – the amount of currants wasn’t overpowering, and were just the right size.  Personally, I think currants are about as big as you’d want to go, although I am considering using chopped up dried cranberries next time.

Dani is right when she says the method of shredding chicken in the thermomix that she describes is the best.  I usually detest shredding chicken, it either takes me an age or I do it too quickly and it looks revolting.  The method she uses, putting the steamed chicken in the thermomix bowl, and blitzing for 5 seconds on reverse/speed 4 is just so easy, and gives a great, consistent result.  I am a big chicken fan, poisoning phobia not withstanding, and I think you could actually use more chicken in this recipe, although you’d probably have to do two lots of chicken steaming, as the 3 chicken thighs cut into three pieces each go a long way in terms of covering up holes in the varoma basket.

Seasoning is all important in this dish, so make sure you taste, taste and taste again to get the seasoning right.

I used two kinds of nuts – just because they are what I already had in the pantry and already opened.  They were almonds (which I blanched and slivered) and pistachios.

I always get a little nervous working with filo pastry.  I was only able to get the frozen stuff – not my first option usually, and it can be a bit difficult to work with, as I find it dries out super quickly.  Make sure you have your melted butter ready to go as soon as you’ve unrolled the filo. I didn’t used the recommended 50 grams of butter – I just melted a little ramekin of butter I already had in the fridge, and I don’t think it was enough, as my end result looked a little anaemic, and i would have preferred it to be a  little more toasty brown.

I used a regular large kitchen bowl from our dinner set as the mould for the pilaf.  It was a nice shape and held the amount cooked perfectly – pure luck on my part!  The bowl is 20.5 cm wide and 6 cm deep if that helps.

I chose to leave the topping sheets of filo ragged rather than tucked in.  To make it look more attractive next time, I’ll skew each of the topping sheets a little to make it look more ragged, and not just like a few sheets of film plopped on as a lid. Presentation fail for me!

Another tip would be to cook it on an oven-proof presentation platter, rather than a baking tray. If you used baking paper, you can tear it off around the edges before serving it up. It would make life much easier than transferring it to a nicer looking platter!

After 10 minutes of cooking, when you take the bowl/mould off the pilaf, it’s pretty easy to do.  Just make sure you use oven gloves, or tongs.  Next time, I might also take the opportunity to put some more butter on it, just to make it brown up a little more.

And, of course – don’t forget the final garnish with the cinnamon, icing sugar and extra nuts and currants!!

 
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Posted by on March 26, 2012 in Main meals

 

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