Orange Chile Chicken Stir Fry

I used to be a little bit afraid of stir fries. Oh, I was happy to eat them, but I was never happy with any that I made. I eventually stumbled on to a few secrets that have worked very well for me: don't put too many ingredients in, don't cut everything super small, give the sauce time to thicken and clarify, and always, always, add the onions last so that they don't overcook.

It was the last one that was the clincher. Putting ginger, for example, or chiles in an otherwise empty pan seemed like an odd thing to do, the first time, but the rewards for stepping out of my comfort zone were pretty substantial, as were the rewards of listening to Palle's advice, despite his at-the-time somewhat limited cooking repertoire.

Palle, who has only come fairly late to really enjoying cooking, mastered the stir-fry long before I did, and it was his insistance - backed with inarguable results - that convinced me to put the onions in last, as I have said before.

I don't often use any sort of recipe for stir fries - I just think of a flavour combination that I like and try it out. Sometimes I base it on something I've eaten in a restaurant, seen on FoodTV, or saw in a book, and I'm certainly not adverse to using a recipe, it's just that I enjoy throwing things together from the fridge, and the stir fry lends itself to that beautifully.

For this one, I tried something new: I zested an orange with my veggie peeler, being very careful to avoid the pith. This was easier to do than I thought it would be, which started the dish on an encouraging note. The zest was sliced into thin ribbons, some of which were cooked in with the stir fry, and some of which were flung on top as a sort of garnish. The juice from the orange gave a gentle flavour to the sauce, thickened with a teensy bit of cornstarch, but not the sort of overly sweet component that you can get if you use concentrated orange juice. Myself, I prefer the savory to the sweet, so it worked out just fine, with just a hint of sweetness. I used finely sliced ginger and dried red chiles to balance out the orange.

The rest was pretty straight forward: chicken, red bell pepper, green onions, and a little regular onion, just so I could add it last.

Taking it Easy

Just because this is listed in the Kiddie Feast section of Nigella Lawson's Feast, doesn't mean it isn't a delicious little supper for a big kid who doesn't want to work to hard to get it.

You don't even really need a recipe - everything you need to know is visible in the picture. A couple of hundred grams of pasta, a good handful of peas, and some cubed up ham. A little cream, to moisten, and a dusting of parmesan, to set it up nicely. Presto! Dinner in minutes.

I especially like Nigella's instruction to drop frozen peas into the pasta water a minute or so before draining - makes for a very tidy sort of recipe, without need for a separate sauce pot or frying or blanching steps. Very civilized, really, and just the thing when you're recovering from being flattened by a devastating head cold.

You don't have to eat it straight from the pot, of course. But I certainly wouldn't blame you.

Soup, glorious soup!

I'm a big fan of citrus in savory recipes, so I was really pleased to see the current issue of Eating Well magazine hit the stands (as an aside, how unfortunate, that a magazine with such consistently good recipes abbreviates to "EW"). As I strolled through the pages of the magazine, plenty of recipes jumped out at me, but the one that demanded immediate attention was this one: Yucatan Lemon Soup. Bright flavours, simple construction, and the promise of a sunny lift in dreary February more than spurred me to the market for the requisite ingredients.

The recipe calls for Meyer lemons, which I had never used before, but which I had noticed were available at Capers Market recently. I followed the recipe pretty closely, and I have to tell you that it was fabulous! This will be made again and again, in our household.

Two things, in addition to the basic goodness of the recipe, contributed to my overall success: One, I had a pot of fresh, homemade chicken stock made from an organic, free range chicken, and two, I didn't shortcut the shrimp. By which I mean to say, I started with raw, shell-on shrimp, and peeled the little darlings before tumbling them into the finished broth.

The results were so outstanding, that I think I will make this again before the month is out - while Meyer lemons are still in season, at least. I suppose in the Yucatan, such soup would really be made with lime juice, and I'm game to try that, too. However, the beautifully mild sweetness of the Meyer, offset with the earthy cinnamon stick and the brightness of the cilantro were a truly winning combination.

Serves four, indeed! Not in this household.

Dark Banana Bread

This is not your garden-variety coffee-shop fare. Full of dark flavours and, just for fun, little chunks of banana-y goodness, it is a perfect morning treat to get you through to lunch without compromising your healthy intentions for the day. It's made with stone ground whole wheat flour, a small amount of brown sugar, and has a mild hint of dark cardamom flavour. Oh, and did I mention rum flavouring? Rum and bananas are just the thing, I think. These squares are not at all dainty, but rather squat and homey - and just perfect for snacking.

Dark Banana Bread

1/3 cup canola oil
1/2 cup brown sugar, lightly packed
2 eggs
2 mashed bananas (from frozen is good)
2 teaspoons rum extract
1 1/4 cups stone ground whole wheat flour
1/2 cup quick oats (not instant)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamom
1 firm banana, diced

Preheat your oven to 35o F. Grease (or spritz with canola) an 8" square metal baking dish.

Beat together the oil, sugar, and eggs. Add the mashed bananas and rum extract and beat again until all nice and smooth.

In a separate, smaller bowl, mix together the remaining dry ingredients. Be sure to use quick oats, not instant or rolled oats, whose texture are quite different. Tip the dry ingredients into the banana mixture, and stir just to combine. Add diced banana and stir through gently.

Pour batter into the prepared pan (it should be a little lumpy looking) and bake for about 45 minutes or until dark golden brown, and a toothpick or cake skewer comes out clean. The cake/bread will have pulled slightly away from the sides, too. Allow it to cool in the pan, then slice into 9 squares. Freeze individual squares in plastic wrap for a stash of lunchbox-ready treats.

You could certainly add raisins or currants, or walnuts, if that's your fancy. You could also substitute the cardamom with cinnamon, but I think cardamom is nicer, here.

Next time, I'm contemplating adding a little coconut, for a full-on Caribbean approach.

The Soul of a New Cuisine

One of my Christmas presents this year was a cookbook by Ethiopian-born Swede Marcus Samuelsson - the beautiful The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa. The recipes therein are quite gorgeous, and it was a bit of a chore to decide what to make first. Palle relieved me of that responsibility by deciding to make the Chicken-Peanut Stew (Samuelsson's own take on a classic combination found all over the northwest of Africa, inspired by descriptions from a dishwasher from Mali).

Classically, the dish would be served with yellow rice, we are told, but in the interests of keeping things simple, we opted for straight-forward basmati, steamed up in the rice-cooker untended, while Palle chopped, prepped and sauteed his way through the making of the dish.

We had shopped earlier that day, down at Granville Island market, a known source of fiesty scotch bonnet and habanero chiles, which the recipe calls for. We used two, trimming out the seeds and much of the incendiary pith, but the resulting dish was not as fiery as, for example, Palle's Jerk Chicken, which has been known to almost blind dinner guests. As you may guess, the man likes his fierce food.

The stew had spinach in it, which I am not accustomed to having in any other iteration of chicken and peanut stew. It was, however, a beautiful and perfect ingredient - added just at the last minute and stirred through, so it stayed jewel-bright and fresh tasting, and that single element really elevated the dish into something special. I particularly liked that, unlike many one-pot meals, this one had a variety of textures and a very well-balanced approach to starch and protein, and vegetables. While the recipe called for a combination of chicken breast and thigh, after making it that way I once again decided that stewed chicken should be all dark meat, whereever possible. It just gives itself over to the task that much better, staying juicy even in large chunks, browning beautifully when sauteed, and having a lot of flavour. For the small increase in fat to be found in the thighs, I'll take them over breast meat in most simmered dishes.

We both really liked the dish, although a couple of changes may be in order. The aforementioned all-thigh approach definitely strikes my fancy, and also, the amount of liquid seems a little higher than I thought ideal, especially for a stew as opposed to a soup. This is the sort of thing that can be very hard to gauge the first time one does a recipe, and moreso in a recipe like this where cooked onions and carrots are pureed into the liquid. Still, it's a good thing to note and adjust on a re-visit.

There are a lot of other dishes I want to try, in this book. There's an outstanding-looking lamb and chickpea sandwich, and a recipe for homemade merguez sausage - made into meatballs. That sounds just about perfect, to me, so I'm really looking forward to making it. I just need to decide what to serve with them...I suspect they are next on the list.

Quite Contrary

I have a tendancy to dig in my heels. To go in the direction I'm not supposed to. It is not a virtue, so much as it is a stubborn refusal to be led by the nose. This does not, of course, mean that I am bandwagon-free (nor does it mean that you can trick me into doing what you really want by suggesting otherwise), but it does mean that it shouldn't be a surprise that while newspaper and magazine articles would have us frantically making diet recipes in a last-ditch attempt to atone for December's excesses, I'm having ribs. Short ribs, to be exact.

Short ribs, for some mysterious reason, don't make an appearance at my local supermarket very often (although they are always available at the meat shops, they are usually the thinner flanken style), so when I do see a meaty set o' bones - one that hasn't been "pre-marinated for the grill" - I can't resist. Since these are cut across the bone, they are in fact flanken style, as opposed to English style, which are my preferred (and, for some reason, even less frequently seen in these parts), but they are considerably meatier and more substantial looking than most of the flanken variety that I've seen around here.

I had been craving short ribs for some time - since I found a recipe for Chimay-braised ribs in the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, to be precise. However, since I didn't have any Belgian beer handy (or enough mustard for the glaze that recipe recommends), and I did in fact have a bottle of wine, I went with a simple red wine braise, full of shiitake mushrooms and chopped red onion and accompanied by some roasted fennel, carrots and brussels sprouts. The herbs were kept simple: bay leaves, salt, pepper, and whole yellow mustard seed, which creates a wonderfully deep background note for the beef. I'll have to go the Chimay-route with the next batch of ribs that I find. Maybe I'll even find a nice accommodating butcher who will cut English style for me. In fact, I'm starting to think that I should go on a mission... just, you know, to be contrary.

Too much milk

What do you do when you unexpectedly have much more milk left in the fridge than you anticipated? Well, if you're not prone to sitting down to a big glass of milk and are not in the mood for a rice pudding, you make paneer. Or, at least, I did. Oh, I had big plans for that milk: eggnog (some of which actually did go toward making eggnog, I confess), white lasagna (maybe next month...), bechamel for moussaka, and even cereal, which I am not terribly prone to, most mornings. However, the milk was skittering rapidly toward its expiry with none of these things having been made. Paneer was the fast, easy option. And paneer, of course, meant curry:


It's not difficult to make paneer. Heat milk until just boiling, turn off heat, and add a tablespoon or two of lemon juice. Cover, let stand for 15 minutes or so, and strain. Place a weight on the reserved solid curds, and the next day you have a nice brick of paneer. Even when you forget to weight it (ahem), paneer is delicious and easy to cook with (albeit more fragile).

With so much paneer at hand, I was planning to make a nice Shahi Paneer for dinner. Yet again, my plans went awry, when I discovered my wonderful thick yoghurt had, in fact, passed its expiry and gone on to produce several exciting new colours while waiting to be discarded. Undaunted, I turned to that ever-ready all-purpose curry base that I'm always happy to have: korma. The fact that there were still a variety of uncooked vegetables languishing in the fridge meant that, with the addition of some ready chickpeas, I had a very easy dinner at hand in only half an hour. For the sake of variety, I added a little cashew paste to the korma sauce, and used half-and-half instead of cream.


How surprised my teenage self would have been, had I known how much I would come to love curry!

And now, for something completely different...

I love the food at Christmastime. Maybe it's the stuffing. Maybe it's that we eat four times as much cheese as usual. Maybe it's the chocolate, or maybe it's just that there are a lot of food-centric gatherings of friends and family. However, when the decorations come down, it's time for something other than the Northern European food that I have been devouring over the past month.

Asian is an easy switch to make; here in Vancouver, there are plenty of the right ingredients to make it easy to make something far and away from roasted poultry, and there's always something that I haven't tried or haven't really had a chance to experiment with. And, what is the New Year for, really, if not experimentation?

I've cooked red rice once before, and I'm pretty sure that I will again. It has a firmer bite to it than white rice, and a nuttier taste than most brown rices. It looks pretty on the plate - not the purply colour of Forbidden Rice, but a lovely sort of warm, dark red that would look really good in a shoe (ahem).


As a plain heap of rice on the plate, it's alright but not a star. As a base for a delicious red Thai curry featuring chicken and most of the vegetables in the fridge that need using up, it's outstanding! It gives a certain heartiness to the dish that is very satisfying, and may well be my preferred application for this type of rice. Of course, there is a lentil-and-red rice patty recipe floating out there in bloggerland that I mean to make eventually, and sometime soon I'll get to it. In the meantime, curry foundation it shall be.

In the Nick of TIme

The baking is finished. Whew!


Cranberry squares. I don't get to make these as often as I would like, since I'm the only person in the house that can eat cranberries. I love them, though, and my mother used to make them, so they're a Christmastime favourite, and if we're having company, I get to make them. They're essentially date squares (or, if you prefer, matrimonial cake) with cranberry filling instead of dates. Less sweet, very festive.


Ginger snaps are a little more festive with red sugar on them...


I've said it before, but there must be shortbread!

I'm ready. Hang the stockings.

How I Spent My Evening: A Story in Pictures

I love making these tiny French butter cookies at Christmas. They are not difficult, but a tad laborious. I realize I skipped photographing a step - the slicing of the dough. Such is the case, late at night, when one's hands are awfully sticky. My apologies...
Step one: Hurl partially formed dough onto a parchment sheet.
Step two: Try to persuade dough to conform to the sized paper under the parchment.
Step three: Try harder... use rolling pin "persuasion."
Step four Cut dough into strips, and alternate.
Step five: repeat, using eggwash "glue" and reverse the colour scheme. Repeat again, reversing colours once more for the final layer.

Step six: chill and thinly slice the completed cookie logs. (You can wrap them well in waxed paper or parchment, and freeze them for several months. Defrost slightly before slicing, or they will be shattery.)

Step seven: bake for 8 minutes.