chicken

Chicken tikka masala and spiced cauliflower

~ Kate ~ 1 Comment

curry

Serves 2.5

For the chicken:

2 chicken legs (breasts would do just as nicely, I just had legs in the fridge)

A thumb of ginger, grated

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 teaspoon of ground cumin

1 teaspoon of smoked paprika

2 teaspoons of garam masala

4 dessert spoons plain yoghurt

For the sauce:

1 onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, crushed

Glug of sunflower oil

1 tin of tomatoes

1/2 tin coconut milk

2/3 cup ground almonds

For the cauliflower:

1 cauliflower in small florets

1 teaspoon nigella seeds

1 teaspoon turmeric

Good couple of glugs of sunflower oil

This looks like a lot of ingredients but all the steps are pretty easy. For the chicken, combine all the marinade ingredients, coat the chicken in it and leave it in the fridge under cling film for about 3-4 hours. (Overnight would probably be even better but I’m not that well organised – I did it while Bert was napping and dreaming about chocolate buttons, blueberries and grabbing the soft fur of put-upon spaniels.)

For the masala sauce, fry the onion and garlic, add the liquids and almonds and simmer for around 15-20 minutes. Blitz to a smooth sauce before serving.

Put your chicken in a hot oven (200-220 degrees or near the top of the Aga roasting oven) for about 40 minutes. At the same time, toss the cauliflower in the spices and oil and cook in a moderate oven (180 degrees or the middle of the Aga roasting oven) for 30 minutes. The cauliflower’s a Leon recipe so I can’t take credit but it is bloody delicious.

We had ours with rice.

Baked chicken sag aloo and easy coconut naan

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

gobi

Serves 1.5; probably more, but I was greedy

For the naans:

100g self raising flour

75ml water

1 teaspoon melted butter

25g dessicated coconut

For the curry:

1/2 an onion

2cm fresh ginger

2 garlic cloves

1 dessert spoon garam masala

Tablespoon sunflower or vegetable oil

1-2 chicken breasts in bite sized pieces

2 or 3 small potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks

2 large handfuls spinach, chopped

200ml passata

Half a can of coconut milk

Mix the ingredients for the bread into a dough and knead for a couple of minutes till smooth.

Boil the potatoes till tender. Blitz the onions, garlic and ginger in a food processor and fry in the oil with the spices till the onion’s translucent and the spices are warmly fragrant. Add the chicken and brown, then add the liquid and bring to a fast simmer. Put the spinach and potatoes into an oven proof dish, pour over the chicken and sauce mixture and pop in the oven at 180 degrees (or the middle of an Aga roasting oven) for half an hour.

Cut the dough in half and roll out to two teardrop shaped pieces about 1cm thick. Don’t worry too much about the shape unless you have a particularly critical baby. Put them under a hot grill for 7-10 minutes, keeping an eye on them. You want them to be soft and pillowy, not crisp.

As you can see, Bert had his with a side of snot.

The curry’s warm and spicy but not hot. It would be nice without the chicken, too.

Half moon chicken pasties

~ Kate ~ 1 Comment

pastie

A bit more sun-like when they’re coated in egg wash, in fact.

There’s something very satisfying about this; using up leftovers and doing the sort of cooking that you watched your mum do when you were little – rolling out pastry, sealing pies, brushing on egg wash.

This is one of those dishes that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Makes 16 bite sized pasties

1 sheet puff pastry

Leftover chicken stew

1 egg, beaten

Flour for rolling

Roll the puff pastry out thinly and cut into small circles – I used a tea cup. Place on a lined baking sheet, floury side up (otherwise when you egg wash you get into a claggy mess of flour and egg), and put around a teaspoon of stew into the middle of each. You need to be relatively stingy with the stew to keep them neat. Brush egg in a circle round the outside rim and seal them into half moon shaped pasties. Brush the top with egg wash and pop them in a hot oven (200 degrees) for 15 minutes, till puffed up and golden.

I had mine with a leafy green salad. I showed Bert what a salad leaf looked like for future reference.

Eastern spiced chicken stew and dumplings

~ Kate ~ 1 Comment

chicken stew

Serves 2.5 or 1.5 with leftovers

For the stew:

400g diced chicken thigh

Flour for browning the chicken – probably about 30g

1 teaspoon zaatar

1/2 teaspoon sumac (if you haven’t had an Yotam Ottolenghi phase you can substitute lemon zest for the sumac and a combination of dried oregano, cumin and marjoram for the zaatar)

A little olive oil

1 onion, thickly sliced

2 cloves garlic, crushed

4 small carrots, cut into batons

Handful of greens, finely chopped

2 tomatoes, diced

A low salt stock cube

200 ml water

For the dumplings:

50g self raising flour

50g breadcrumbs (looking to start my own breadcrumbs business soon)

50g suet

A good pinch of zaatar or other herbs

1 egg

Dust the chicken in the flour and herbs then brown in the olive oil in a hot pan. Transfer to a casserole dish and fry the onions and garlic in a little more oil, adding the carrot when they’re nearly cooked. Cook them in a fairly hot pan so the onions get a little charred. Add to the meat along with the rest of the veg (greens as small as you can get ’em – we mean to deceive here), the stock cube, any remaining flour and 200ml of water. That’s not much water, but thin gravy and babies are a wildly chaotic combination. Bring to the boil, put the lid on and cook in a low oven (140-160 degrees), or the Aga simmering oven, for around 2-3 hours.

The Aga’s actually good at this, since nothing ever dries out in the simmering oven. In a standard oven you may need to keep checking that it hasn’t dried out and adding a little water if so. On the other hand, you have the advantage of being able to cook chips, cook more than once in a 24 hour period, have crisp skin on your chicken…

For the dumplings, combine the dry ingredients then add most of the beaten egg. Hold a little back as you may not need it all. Gather into a dough, adding a bit more egg if you need it. Form into around 10 baby dumplings (about walnut sized) and keep in the fridge till you need them. Pop them in the casserole and put the lid back on when there’s about 15 – 20 minutes cooking time to go and they’ll steam in the heat. The dumplings are a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe and I’ve never felt the need to look elsewhere.

Dumplings aren’t that much more trouble than mash once you’ve taken into account the peeling and the mashing, but this would be nice with mash too (if equally inauthentic).

Breaded chicken and fries

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

chicken

Yes, more crumbed items.

Serves 1.5

2 chicken breasts

Large slice of bread, blitzed into breadcrumbs

Grated zest of half a lemon

1 teaspoon finely chopped oregano or thyme

Milk for dipping – about 50ml

Flour for dusting

Black pepper

Floury potatoes, to your appetites

Tablespoon of vegetable or sunflower oil

Salad and peas to serve

Peel the potatoes and cut into frites – sticks about 1/2 a centimetre square at the end. Soak in cold water for about an hour before cooking if you have time – this helps stop them sticking. Coat in oil, spread out in a single layer on a baking sheet that’s been lined with a reusable baking sheet and cook in a hot oven for about 25 minutes. If you’ve got an Aga and you’ve used it within the last 24 hours, count on it taking at least an hour, including swearing time.

Combine the breadcrumbs, herbs, pepper and lemon zest in a bowl. Beat both chicken breasts with a rolling pin – another recipe for angry days – till flattened. Cut one into bite sized pieces; you’ll probably get enough for three or four baby servings. Dunk each piece in flour, milk, then crumbs, sprinkling your larger piece with salt. You can either fry them in olive oil (for about 10 – 15 minutes) or bake in the oven at 200 degrees for around 20 minutes. The leftover breaded chicken freezes well and can be cooked from frozen with an extra five minutes cooking time.

I served mine with salad and Bert’s with peas.

For the full Austrian ski resort experience, have redcurrent jelly on the side and pop a pair of goggles on your baby.

Chicken nuggets and sweet potato wedges (and a chicken burger for you)

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

nugget

A chicken recipe for Caroline and Rupert.

It’s only when I look at these photos I’m taking every day that I realise how massive my son’s hands are.

Feeds 1.5 with nuggets to spare

2 chicken breasts

2 tablespoons plain yoghurt

4 crackers (we used Jacob’s)

A bread roll

A couple of dessert spoons of mayonnaise

1 lemon

Black pepper

1 tomato, sliced

Small handful of baby spinich

1 large sweet potato

A table spoon of sunflower or vegetable oil

Bash both breasts about with a rolling pin till a little flatter – this tenderizes them. Cut one chicken breast into bite sized pieces and leave the other whole. (If neither of you are huge eaters you could do this with one large chicken breast, cutting a few nuggets off for the baby – that’s what we did.) Put the chicken in a freezer bag with the yoghurt, making sure it’s coated, and leave in the fridge for a couple of hours. The yoghurt acts as an extra tenderizer, so the nuggets are nice and soft for peg-toothed people.

Blitz your crackers to a powder by putting them in a bag and bashing with the rolling pin again (this is a good recipe for punchy days), or by putting them in the food processor for a few pulses.

While your baby climbs inside the dishwasher with a small plastic ball, peel the sweet potato, cut into wedges and coat in the oil. I pour a little oil into my hands and jiggle the wedges around in it.

After their marinade, take the chicken pieces out of the yoghurt and dip in the crumbs to coat. Add a little salt to yours. Pop the chicken and wedges onto a lined baking sheet and bake in a hot oven (about 220 degrees) for about 20 minutes. You’ll probably have more nuggets than you need if you used two chicken breasts. Either cook the lot with a view to nabbing some yourself, or freeze them in their coated state and give them an extra five minutes to cook from frozen another time. The wedges need another five minutes, so take the chicken out and give them a last blast, turning them over first.

Meanwhile, finely grate a little lemon rind (about half a lemon’s) into your mayonnaise with some black pepper and lightly toast your bap. Then construct your burger – bun, chicken, mayo, sliced tomato, spinich, bun. Any extra lemon mayonnaise can have a sweet potato wedge or two dipped in it.

Puffed up chicken pies

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

FullSizeRender

Makes 3 small pies

1 sheet puff pastry

3 chicken thighs, diced

1 large carrot, grated

4 or 5 bok choi leaves, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, crushed

1/2 dessert spoon butter

Splash olive oil

1/2 dessert spoon flour

200 ml whole milk

1 teaspoon mustard

A little milk and a little flour

Fry the chicken in the butter and oil for about 5 minutes, until browned. Add the veg and garlic and cook for another couple of minutes. (You could use any finely diced veg for this.) Meanwhile, stop the baby from throwing size 6 trainers at the dog while laughing his head off. Stir in the flour, add the milk bit by bit then stir the mustard through and cook for about another 5 minutes – the sauce should be thick and clinging to the veg and chicken. Throw the odd carrot top to the baby to distract him. Discover that a baby will happily eat a piece of carrot raw if it’s stolen from the floor.

I used a yorkshire pudding tin for this. Roll the pastry out a little.  You’ll need to cut out two sizes of circles; one a bit larger than the circumference of the holes if they were flattened out (this requires a certain amount of spatial awareness), one the size of the top of the hole. Cut out three of each and line the tins with the larger ones. Fill generously with chicken mixture. Brush milk around the edge of the pastry and place a smaller circle on top, bringing the edges of the larger one over the smaller one to seal it. It’s a bit like hemming a skirt. Make sure it’s tightly sealed, brush the top with milk and make a small hole in the top with a knife. Egg wash would make for a more golden top, but I wouldn’t crack an egg for a couple of small pies.

Cook at 180 degrees or in the middle of the Aga roasting oven for 12-15 minutes. They’ll puff up like footballs in the oven. We had ours with broccoli.