chicken

Lemon Chilli Chicken with Couscous Salad

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lemon chilli chicken with couscous salad

Well, the lemon chilli chicken part of this is really pretty straightforward. What is interesting is the couscous salad. At the risk of sounding like a broken record – I’m quite into salads and during summer we eat quite a lot of couscous. But mixing through the same lot of vegetables can get a little uninspiring.

This recipe comes from Gordon Ramsay’s Makes It Easy. It’s actually the first thing I’ve cooked from this book. Some of the recipes seem somewhat uninspired (roast pork sandwich? really?) but this recipe proves that there’s at least one gem.

The lemon and chilli chicken part is facile. The recipe is for chicken wings on the BBQ. I opted for chicken thighs, pan fried (and boy, did that end up with chicken and fat spitting all over the kitchen …). Simply take your favourite cut of chicken and marinate in olive oil, lemon juice and finely sliced chilli for a couple of hours. Cook in your favourite way.

For enough couscous for two, with a little left over, you need to start by roasting a red and a green capsicum and a few cloves of garlic. Heat the oven to 200°C fan and toss the capsicums and unpeeled garlic cloves with a little olive oil. Place the vegetables on baking tray and cook, turning the capsicums every now and then, for about 20 minutes. The skin will start to blister and you want it blistered all over the capsicums so you can peel them easily.

While the capsicums are cooking, measure out 100g of couscous into your serving bowl and add 100mL of boiling water. Stir the water through with a fork and then cover the couscous for about 15 minutes, fluffing up the couscous every now and then.

When the capsicums are done, allow them to cool then peel, remove the seeds and chop coarsely. Add to the couscous. Squeeze the roasted garlic in too: cut the blunt end off the cloves and just squeeze out the centre. Mix through ½ tsp of ground cumin and a good squeeze of lemon juice and a generous glug or two of extra virgin olive oil (use the cheaper light olive oil for the marinade, but don’t skimp here!). Finish with a roughly chopped a tomato (or use cherry tomatoes, for a prettier look) and a big handful of chopped coriander.

Absolutely delicious!

Chicken and Green Onion Fried Rice

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chicken & green onion rice

I’ve recently had a shuffle around of my cookery magazine collection which has been a great opportunity to try out some new recipes. Looking for something relatively quick for a mid week supper, I came across this recipe in the March 2003 Australian Gourmet Traveller.

This is really a slightly glorified fried rice dish but, as is always the case with these things, it’s a pleasant change to follow a recipe and not dump absolutely everything from the spice drawer in the dish!

I adapted the method a little, so that I could prep the chicken in advance and, when it came time to eat, I just cooked the rice and dealt with the vegetables.

Begin by making the marinade for the chicken. In a pan, heat some peanut oil (any flavourless oil will do) and half an onion, thinly sliced. Cook until the onion is soft. Then add some chicken stock. Now, following the recipe, this would be 50mL of chicken stock. However, we have a tendency to buy stock in the 1L containers and not use it which is rather wasteful so instead I bought some sachets of stock paste and I just used one sachet.

Add your chicken stock of choice, followed by a generous teaspoon of ginger paste, chilli to taste (I used chilli flakes, but finely sliced fresh chilli would be lovely), 50mL of white wine vinegar, 1 tsp of caster sugar and ⅛ cup of soy sauce (this is about 30mL, if you prefer). Give this all a stir and bring to the boil. Once boiling, remove from the heat and allow to cool.

There are two approaches to cooking the chicken. I pan fried my chicken breast in one piece which I think was a mistake because it was so huge. Being huge, it was also very uneven in thickness. Of course, had a chopped it into bite size chunks first, I’d have run the risk of over cooking the chunks. So it’s up to you – season your chicken breast and pan fry until cooked and golden. This is the only bit where the chicken gets cooked so you do need to make sure it’s done properly.

Once the chicken is cooked, if it’s in one piece, allow to cool for a few minutes before chopping into bite size chunks. Add the chicken to the onion marinade, coat well and allow to stand for at least an hour.

When you’re ready to eat, cook your rice. Heat a little oil in a wok and fry coarsely sliced spring onions (a whole bunch). As the spring onions start to take on some colour, add the leaves from two bok choy and fry until they start to wilt. Finish by adding the chicken and onion mixture (include the marinade) and mix through the rice.

Ensure everything is hot and serve.

This was great – perfect food as the weather starts changing (in either hemisphere). You may need to adjust the sugar/vinegar balance. I’m naturally very miserly with sugar in recipes and Andy felt that a touch extra sugar would have helped balance out the tartness of the vinegar much better. I’m inclined to agree and so I suggest that you taste the marinade and adjust as you see fit.

To drink – serve with Riesling. If you’ve been generous with the chilli a slightly off dry Riesling would be perfect. My current favourite is the Greywacke, from New Zealand.

Rob Roy Hotel

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Chicken Parmi at the Rob Roy

date of visit:  Thurs Sept 16 2010

PUB QUIZ:  the Rob Roy runs a pub quiz every second Wednesday.  Please contact the pub for further details!

The Rob Roy Hotel is, perhaps, a little out of the way of most city centre workers. After all, you have to get all the way down Pulteney Street to Halifax Street to find it …

However, if you can manage it, it’s more than worth the detour. Continuously licensed since 1840,  restoration and extension work has been sympathetic. The interior is modern and spacious and there’s plenty of outdoor space and seating.

As a malt whisky specialist pub, there always seems to be a whisky tasting or dinner in the event calendar, as well as wine dinners, quiz nights, and members’ nights.

But we weren’t there for any of that (not even the pints). We were there for the Thursday evening $10 schnitzel. Yes – $10 for a schnitzel (add an extra $2 if you want parmigiana). So, what would it be like? Would it be a tiny portion that left us dissatisfied? Or would it be a monster that put the normal $20 pub schnitzel to shame?

It turned out that there was surprisingly keen interest in this experiment: 10 of us turned up to suss out the cheap schnitzel. One person ordered from the menu (and another would have, except her husband informed her that a schnitzel extravaganza meant she had to order schnitzel) but the rest of us opted for schnitzel with parmigianas being heavily represented.

As usual, I chose a chicken schnitzel parmigiana and I was happy. The schnitzel part was good: thick and juicy, and the topping was not too tomato sweet. While I was not thrilled with how generously salted the chips were I was pleased that it was not the usual ridiculous quantity of them (Andy, while agreeing on the salt, thought there could have been more). The salad was disappointing – far too overdressed, leaving it soggy and being all about balsamic vinegar.

That reflects the general consensus. The $10 schnitzels might not be the best schnitzels in Adelaide (to be honest, we’re still working on finding those!) but not only do they represent excellent value (let’s face it, with a schnitzel dinner you can live without a great salad), they also demonstrate just how overpriced the average pub schnitzel is.

I’d definitely head back to the Rob Roy on a Thursday … but before then, I have to try out Tuesday and the half price pizzas!