Testing the Waters (Quinoa with chicken and avocado)

Hi, I’m back. Did you miss me?

So it’s been a while, and I thought it might be a good idea to ease us both back in gently. Although I really cannot judge your state of mind, so I should be honest and tell you that I need a bit of kiddie-splash-pool time before diving in the deep end again.

Cooking has been slow in my kitchen recently. Meals have been easy and baking has been non-existent. However, there is good news because from sheer laziness this lovely salad-like dish was born. It is tasty, quick and even moderately healthy. Let me share with you, for when you’re in need of a bit of kiddie-splash-pool time.


Quinoa with chicken and avocado

Serves 1, easily multiplied

2 cups of quinoa, cooked (about 1 cup of uncooked quinoa)
1 avocado
1 small smoked chicken breast
1 handful of cherry tomatoes, halved (optional)
¼ cup yogurt (preferably Greek style or another thick kind)
handful of basil leaves, crushed finely (or use a squeeze of basil paste from a tube if you’re feeling extra lazy)
1 small clove of garlic, minced

Mix the yogurt with the basil and garlic. Cut the chicken into small pieces and the avocado into largish chunks. Mix the quinoa with the flavored yogurt and then gently fold in the chicken, the avocado and the tomatoes if you’re using them. Stick in a spoon and eat.

Burgers Rule (chicken burgers)

People around me seem to think burgers are unhealthy. Something you eat when you’re on the road and the only food options for miles around is a drive-thru, but not something you would choose to serve at home. I say they are wrong: burgers rule. With bread for carbohydrates, meat for protein and onions for vegetables (what? they are vegetables- and you could even add tomatoes, pickles, lettuce for extra health) they are a complete meal. They’re easy to make and even easier to eat (who doesn’t love a portable meal?).

Plus, and this is the big seller in my book, you can do all sorts of tasty variations and surprise yourself with how well your kitchen experiments can work. Who wants finicky pasta sauces that taste funny with the smallest odd ingredient, risottos you can ruin by getting the stock just a little wrong or, worst of all, expensive cuts of meat that end up resembling leather if you aren’t careful? Far better to fry up some ground meat, add a bit of sauce, clothe it in a roll and call it dinner. Try it tonight, with these tasty chicken burgers.

Chicken burgers

Serves 2

300 gr boneless, skinless chicken thighs
juice from half a small lemon
1 shallot, peeled and quartered
large handful of cilantro leaves
glug of oil
4 rolls (crispy or soft, your call)
½ cup yogurt
1 small clove of garlic, minced
zest from half a lemon
garnishes (ripe tomatoes would be good here, but use whatever strikes your fancy)

Start by mixing the yogurt with the garlic and the lemon zest. Leave the mixture in a cool place while you’re making the burgers.

Cut the chicken thighs in large chunks and place in the bowl of a food processor. Add the shallot and cilantro and pulse the processor until you have a relatively fine chicken-onion-cilantro mixture. Add the lemon juice and stir well. Form the mixture into four patties with wet hands.

Heat the oil in a non-stick skillet and fry the burgers until done- about four minutes on each side should do it, but check carefully because eating raw chicken is not a good idea.

Put the cooked patties in the rolls, add the garlic sauce and garnishes and eat.

Super-Juicy Chicken

Roasted chicken is the quintessential in-law food, methinks. It is what you make when you have people over you want to impress, and there is no room for failure. Because heaven knows you don’t want to serve the parents of your chosen one tough beef, chewy pork or overcooked fish. Or you might want to, but then good sense kicks in.

I made chicken for my man’s parents when they came over for dinner for the first time. Bought a free-range one, rubbed it with olive oil and roasted it with a lemon in its belly. Simple and, after a bit of rescue-work by my dad (a white bottom on the chicken but a good broiling took care of that), delicious. I would even consider the rescue work a plus: nothing like kitchen mishap to keep conversation flowing.

The problem with a perfectly roasted chicken, however, is that it might be remembered. Which is fine, great even, but making people the same thing for dinner on two successive occasions takes away some of wow-factor. So, a twist on the original is always useful- a chicken make-over, if you will. And even though a perfectly roasted chicken certainly isn’t a “Before” to spit at, Nigella Lawson’s Super-Juicy Chicken is a worthy “After”.

The recipe is easy: you mix buttermilk with garlic, soy sauce and mustard and soak the chicken in the mixture for eight hours in a cool (but not cold) place. Then you pat it dry, coat it with a bit of melted butter and olive oil and bake it in a hot oven. What you get is seriously juicy chicken and seriously impressed guests. So go on, give your mother-in-law a ring. You know she’ll appreciate the invite.

Super-Juicy Chicken

From Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat (text adapted)

1 l buttermilk
10 cloves of garlic, finely minced
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp soy sauce
16 meaty pieces of chicken
3 tbsp butter, melted
3 tbsp olive oil

Mix the buttermilk with the garlic, mustard and soy sauce. Dunk in the chicken pieces and turn them over a few times so they are covered in the marinade on all sides. Divide the chicken over two large plastic bags, add half of the marinade to each and place them in a cool cupboard for eight hours (longer if you put them in the fridge because the cold will slow the flavoring process).

Preheat oven to 210 C. Remove the chicken from the marinade and pat dry with kitchen towels. Place the pieces on two baking sheets (greased or covered with a baking mat), skin-side up. Mix the butter and the olive oil, add some salt and pepper and brush the chicken with the mixture. Bake pieces until done (Nigella suggests 30-40 minutes for legs and 20-25 minutes for breast meat).

Herbs in a bag

During the first real conversation my man and I had, I asked him what he would cook a new girlfriend. He answered "lamb joint with garlic" and the first seeds of a crush were sown.

We got together five months later and have been together for two years now. He has cooked me maybe ten meals in that time, each and every one of them based on sauce from a jar. Broccoli in sauce, chicken in sauce, pasta in sauce, but not a roast in sight. I figured he'd just been trying to impress me and wasn't actually much of a cook. No big deal, since I am always happy to do the cooking. In fact, I thought it was sweet he'd tried to woo me even then and gave him credit for saying precisely the right thing. Nothing like a man who can read your mind.

Still, yesterday's discovery came as a bit of a shock: my man owns herbs and spices. A whole bag of them. I was in his kitchen, brushing my teeth, when a plastic bag caught my eye. I had a little snoop, as you do. There, in that innocent-looking bag, they were: oregano, tyme, paprika and quite a few more. Plus things like bread crumbs, flour and semolina. A whole world of culinary activity that I had never known about!

Guess what is going to change around these here parts? I'm already dreaming of lamb roasts with garlic and home-made semolina pudding. In the mean time, I'll share one of his sauce-in a jar specialties with you; because it is actually quite tasty.

My man's chicken-cherry-curry

2 chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized pieces
a little oil for frying
1 clove of garlic, minced
small jar of mild curry sauce
chili paste to taste
½ cup of crème fraiche
1 tbsp of capers
ready-made croissant dough
¼ cup of grated cheese

Preheat oven to 220C. Fry the chicken in the oil until just done. Add garlic and fry until it starts to smell nice and garlic doesn't look raw anymore. Add a small dab of chili paste (you can add more later if you like). Mix well, add curry sauce and crème fraiche. Mix again, add cherries and capers and give a final good stir.

Take a baking dish that will comfortably hold all chicken-curry mixture and line the bottom and sides with the croissant dough, sealing any gaps as you go. Make sure you leave enough dough to cover the top of the dish. Put the chicken mixture in the dish. (Yes, the dough will be soggy if you add the sauce while it is still raw, but in a pillowy, dumpling-like way that is not unpleasant. Also, my man doesn't do pre-baking.) Cover the chicken mixture with the remaining dough and cut a few slits so steam can escape. Sprinkle with cheese and bake for about 15 to 20 minutes or until dough is golden and has puffed up.

Serve hot, with a side of plain ice-berg lettuce, if you're my man.

Sour 'n sweet

The scene: me, my new man and a full pan of good-for-you caponata. The first time I'm cooking him something and I'm prepared. No last-minute searing of meat, no souffle to collapse at the moment supreme, not even pasta to be boiled to al dente perfection. Just a pan full of eggplant, capers, garlic, good stuff. Some bread on the side and an awesome dessert. Nothing can go wrong. Unless, you know, someone added way -WAY- too much vinegar to the pan of vegetable mush... Chemistry's not my thing, but I'm sure the pH value of my romantic caponata was well below 7. Or above 7. You know, whichever is the sour bit of the pH universe.

Lovely.

It's a good thing I had dessert ready, or I might not have someone to build me shelves. Or re-wire my electrical system. Or buy me turtle-magnets to clip to my oven. (Can't for the life of me remember what dessert was. Could it have been... me...? Ooooh, behave.) You would think I'd have learned to go easy on the acid, but not a week later I went and added garlic vinaigrette to a batch of mangetouts. As in, oil with vinegar. Vinegar. And I like my vinaigrette on the refreshing side. Let's just say my man's salivary ducts were well clean by the end of the week.

And still I haven't learned. Tonight I cooked my little brother dinner. Chicken tagine with mangetouts on the side. And out came the vinaigrette again. Not a winner this time around either, although he did heroically crunch his way through quite a few of them before insisting he was " full" and pushing the green buggers aside. Followed by an enthusiastic dive into the bread basket to reach for more bread to mop up the tagine juices.

Well, at least the tagine was a hit. A recipe from Claudia Roden's Arabesque (only I have the Dutch version and it's called "A thousand-and-one flavours"- doesn't nearly evoke the same sense of mystery, does it?), it tasted exotic but familiar, refreshing but comforting and oh-so-summery. A pinch of saffron, some powdered ginger and a healthy dose of onion and garlic bubbled away together to form a fragrant bath for the legs and thighs of a formerly-happy (though now dead) chicken. Two chopped up preserved mini-lemons, a generous handful of parsley and cilantro and some wrinkly, aromatic olives rounded out the sauce to something lovely, lovely, lovely for us to spoon up with the chicken and dunk our Moroccan-style bread in. The only thing I forgot to add to the sauce? Lemon juice... The kitchen gods must have been smiling down on me to prevent another pH-mishap.

June at Bread, Water, Salt, Oil has the recipe: http://bread-water-salt-oil.blogspot.com/2006/06/tagine-of-chicken-with-preserved.html

(Incidentally, my man is hurtling himself down a mountain somewhere in France this week, the week of V-day. Scared I will do a re-run of the first meal I cooked him? He had better bring me back some good stuff, or I might just be tempted...)