Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Lupo's Chunky Mash (served raw)

Well, the title pretty much says it all methinks! The context? Well, Lupo's gone on a cooking rampage... kind of. He insisted on planning out each meal for the week over the weekend and then doing a big shop to get all the ingredients. I had to go through the ingredients list and cross out all the items that we already had. The ones that I can still remember include: milk, tinned tomato, fresh tomato, celery, buk choy, onion, lamb cutlets, beef mince and a couple of other items. You see, he's always complaining that we don't have anything in the house that we can cook. But we actually do!!! It's more that, unless he thinks of something very specific to cook, e.g. spaghetti bolognese, he can't look at what we do have and just make something out of it.

Anyway!!! I humoured him. We went to the market and did a big shop. I pretty much followed him around and handed over money to all the stores when he found something that he wanted to buy. Some of the things I really didn't think that we needed, like a 1kg piece of pork belly, 2 big pieces of salmon, a piece of chicken. I mean, unless we hardcore cook every night, we won't be able get through all that meat. So I guess into the freezer it goes! Don't forget the massive loaf of ciabatta on top of the two packs of wraps!!!

I digest. Hahahahahahaha! I mean, I digress.

So, back to the mash. Lupo decided that we would have salmon and mash last night. Which is a nice meal... although it seems that whenever Lupo cooks salmon, it's always the same - some salmon cooked on the pan and a bit of rice. Sometimes with something green as well, if I put it on the plate. Last time Lupo threw the salmon skin side down onto the pan, and burnt it.

This time! He put them flesh side down and kept the heat on medium-low :-) Although, as I walked into the kitchen, Lupo was cooking the salmon and also had the rice cooker going. Lupo did turn around and ask me when I thought the rice would be ready... I said in prob 20 mins. And also mentioned that he probably should've waited until the rice was ready before cooking the salmon! Then I asked where the mash was. And he said that he hadn't made any, which made me sad. Hehe. So he made mash for one.

I made a point of reminding him that I wanted a creamy mash and not a chunky mash. I think he cooked the potatoes for all of 5 minutes before starting to mash them. I tried telling him that they'd still be raw! As a result, they weren't mashed, they were very chunky and had that grainy-not-quite-cooked texture. Ick! I mean, you could see that they weren't being mashed even as he was trying to mash them!

Well, we had our meal. It looked nice enough. Although the salmon was cold by the time everything else was ready... minor issue. We can work on that. In fact, I've been working on the whole timing-logistics thing when cooking with him for awhile... work in progress.

Photos? Here's the chunky mash with the salmon.

Chunky mash
Here's the chunky mash with the spinach and fetta parcels the next day for lunch. I microwaved them and then put them in the sandwich press to crisp the pastry. Yum!

photo to be inserted

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Recipe: Chicken and potato stew in oyster sauce

Here it is! My favourite!

Very simple recipe that can adjust here and there to suit your own taste.



Chinese Chicken and Potato Stew 2
Here's a very gourmet looking version of it - not enough sauce on it mind you! It's suggested accompanying recipe is also far too complicated to be any good. It's just meant to be an easy and simple dish!

potatochickenstew-8
Here's a far more authentic looking version of it! They also seem to have a far more authentic recipe for it.

Here's my simple version the recipe!

Ingredients
  • Half kilo chicken wings
  • 2 tablespoons oyster sauce (or soy sauce - any sauce really!)
  • Half kilo potatoes, halved or quartered 
  • Onion, finely chopped 
  • Oil
Instructions
  1. Brown the onion in the oil until soft. Add the chicken and slightly brown to seal it.
  2. Add the potatoes and enough water to half cover the ingredients.
  3. Add the oyster sauce and mix well.
  4. Bring to boil and then let it simmer for approximately half an hour, or until the chicken and potatoes are well cooked.
  5. Serve with rice.
You can add in whatever else you want really. Salt, pepper, garlic, ginger, mushrooms... whatevs! A bit of cornflour to thicken the sauce. Also works well with pork. Or lamb and white radish with soy sauce. Sometimes I'll also do it in the morning, bring it to boil and then turn the heat off and let it cook while I'm at work. Then crank up the heat again when I get home. Or I put it in our thermos cooker. It's just so easy. And tasty!

Albino Stew

Ah Missy, it's been quiet here at BB. Mostly due to the xmas holidays and barely being at home to cook. Not to say that we haven't had a few dining mishaps. A couple of pearlers from our camping trip, well, already told you about my lean, mean eating machine friend. And if you can't remember, there were things such as drinking the leftover corn flavoured water from cooking the Maggi noodles out of an empty Heinz Beans can (gross!), drinking the leftover green curry from my Thai meal, drinking the leftover long life milk from my coco pops... lots of drinking it seems.

Some proof?
Pouring the corn flavoured water into the baked beans can... at least it wasn't Lupo doing it!
Then there was the night where we just went to Woolies and bought a roast chicken and other stuff for dinner. Now, I'm all for using hands to eat chicken, when it's approporiate. Camping trip? Appropriate. However, Lupo didn't merely daintily use his fingers to hold up a drumstick and nibble on the meat. He, at one stage, used both hands, shoved them in the centre of the chicken breast and then tore the chicken apart - with his bare hands!!!!!!!!!! Seriously! It was disgusting! I was apalled!!!! I'm not even gonna bother trying to describe what I thought of it - I'm sure you can imagine. Barbaric!

Reminds me of the time when we went out for dinner with my family and we had lobster. Lupo, who struggled with the "Asian" way of eating it, was fumbling with the leg bits and stuff. So I told him that it was ok to use his hands. What I meant was that it was ok to use his hands to assist him in getting to the meat. But what did he do? Again, put the leg bit in his bare hands and snapped it in two. I saw my mum's eyes widen and hand go over her mouth in shock! I've since tried explaining to Lupo that it's ok to use his finger tips to pick things up, but to put the entire piece of meat, lobster, chips, whatever, in his hands is a completely different matter!

Anyway, back to this post's heading: Albino Stew. So if you remember the last question of the Ultimate Jam Quiz from our wedding games, it was: "What is my favourite dish?" The answer to which is "chicken and potato stew in oyster sauce". So last night I told Lupo that that's what I wanted for dinner. Didn't give him too many instructions on how to make it, just made sure that he knew to put in chicken, onion and potatoes.

So I came home to dinner cooked, it smelt nice, and Lupo was very proud ;-)

While I was getting changed, Lupo started dishing it out. As I walked into the kitchen to see what it looked like, I was like, "Um, it's white??!!" You see, this dish that I like is always brown, coz of the oyster sauce. And Lupo's like, "Well, what colour is it meant to be?" And I was like, eh??? Coz we've made it soooooo many times!

I asked him if he'd put any oyster sauce in? And he said no, but that he'd flavoured it with salt. So I said that that was cool. But then he insisted on putting oyster sauce in. And I was trying to tell him that there was no need, as it'd just make it taste too salty. But he insisted. I said that he could put in a very small dollop.

Three massive dollops later...

Hmmm.... it was ok! Not too bad. Only complaint was that there wasn't enough chicken in it, so there wasn't enough for me to take some into work today. And I didn't want to just bring in potatoes and rice. Lupo at the rest of the potatoes for breakfast anyway!

I've said that I would like to eat fried rice for dinner tonight (coz we had so much leftover rice from yesterday anyway). We'll see if the fried rice efforts are good (or bad!) enough to make an appearance here tomorrow!