Slow Cooker Sweet and Sour Chicken

It's Chinese New Year and the Year of the Rooster is about to begin so what better meal to cook for your family or friends than sweet and sour chicken? The great thing about this recipe is that because you make it in a slow cooker, it's really easy. Put it on and forget about it until you are ready to eat - at least if you use microwave pouches of rice like I do, you really don't need to do a lot!

The recipe comes from the Betty Crocker website - which I associate more with cakes than savoury dishes. I don't think it needs the cornstarch you add at the end though as I found most of the liquid had evaporated in the slow cooker by the time it had finished cooking.

To serve 2, you need:
200g tin pineapple, chopped (juice from the tin reserved)
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
half an onion, peeled and chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed
1/2 tsp grated fresh ginger
4 skinless boneless chicken thighs, diced
3 tbsp. soy sauce
3 tbsp. brown sugar
1/2 red pepper, seeds removed and chopped
1/2 green pepper, seeds removed and chopped
1/4 cup water
rice or noodles to serve    

Put the pineapple, carrots, onion, garlic and ginger in the slow cooker. Top with the chicken.

Mix the pineapple juice, soy sauce and sugar and pour over the chicken.

Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook on high for 2-3 hours. For the last 30 minutes add the pineapple and peppers. Serve with rice or noodles.

 

 

 

 

Sticky Chinese Pork with Spiralized Carrots

For this week's Spiralizer Saturday I cooked a meal based on this recipe from Delicious Magazine for sticky Chinese pork. But instead of having it with mangetout and pak choi I had spiralized carrot, which worked really well.

I started by marinating the diced pork in soy sauce, oil, Chinese five spice powder, garlic, ginger and honey.

If you want to spiralize a carrot, you need to choose the thickest carrot you can find - I've had difficult in the past when the carrots were too small.

Stir-fry the pork with the marinade

Add beansprouts, red pepper (I ran out and didn't realise) and the spiralized carrot

Finally I added some small florets of broccoli

Cook until the vegetables are tender then serve.

Once again I'm hosting the Spiralizer Saturday linkup - if you have any recipes that can be made using a spiralizer add them here!

F1 Foods: China roundup and the next challenge

China has had a grand prix circuit since 2004 which is longer than I realised - unfortunately last weekend's race doesn't seem to have inspired many people to cook! I made a Chinese meal for dinner -Oriental chicken from the Food Doctor book, which you can see here.

Jane from Onions and Paper used to live in the Far East and says she loved to eat Chilli Prawns. She tried many times to recreate the recipe until she discovered the missing ingredient - you'll have to check out her blog to see what it is!

The Formula 1 season continues straight away with another race this weekend, this time in Bahrain. I have a feeling that this might stump a lot of you as well but it only took me a few minutes on the internet to find a suitable recipe! You can make anything, sweet or savoury, from or inspired by the country or indeed inspired by the grand prix.

Add your entries to the linkup here

Food Doctor Oriental Chicken

This weekend's Formula 1 Grand Prix takes place in China so in honour of the event - and for my challenge Formula 1 Foods - I wanted to cook something Chinese. I hadn't used my Food Doctor cookery book in a while so took it from the shelf and found a recipe for Oriental Chicken that looked really healthy and quick enough to make for a weeknight dinner. The recipe does suggest you marinade the chicken for half an hour but I didn't due to lack of time, and it tasted fine. I did have a confession to make though, I only realised at the last minute that I didn't have any lime, so I had to use lemon instead!

To serve 2, you need:
2 chicken breasts
half a fresh red chilli, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
zest and juice of 1 lime
2 tbsp. soy sauce

Preheat the oven to 180C. Mix the marinade ingredients and make some deep cuts in each chicken breast. Place the chicken on a large piece of foil and carefully spoon over the marinade, making sure it gets right into the cuts you have made.

Seal up the foil in a parcel and bake in the oven for 30 minutes. Slice the chicken to serve and spoon over a little of the sauce. This is really good served with green veg and rice.

I'm sending this to Formula 1 Foods, the blog challenge I host, as the theme is China.

Slimming World Fakeaway Chinese New Year Meal

 

 

Happy Chinese New Year! It’s the year of the goat or sheep, which means it should be an important year for people born in 1979 such as myself!

 

I wasn’t specifically planning to celebrate Chinese new year but we were having some people over to dinner and it seemed a good opportunity to make Chinese food. At least, if you ignore the fact that one person doesn’t really like Chinese food (though he’s so fussy there isn’t much he likes, which makes dinner parties hard!), one was vegetarian, two don’t really eat vegetarian food (being big meat eaters and quite picky about vegetables) and the other two eat pretty much anything.

 

Despite all that I thought I could make a few variations on the same dish to keep everyone happy. I’ve got a great Slimming World recipe book called ‘Fakeaway’ – i.e. how to fake your favourite takeaways and make them much healthier. Chinese food isn’t as unhealthy as some anyway – there are a few dishes like duck which are fatty, and if you go to a takeaway that does deep-fried sweet and sour balls (yum!) that will rack up the calories, but a lot of Chinese restaurants do a more upmarket sweet-and-sour dish which doesn’t involve batter and the deep fat fryer. At the same time, you need to watch the oil and the fattening sauces when you are stir-frying (not to mention the prawn crackers!).

 

I picked a few recipes from the book and spent a good half hour chopping, preparing, mixing sauces and marinating meat. I lined everything up in rows so I knew which ingredients were for which dish – you can see here them all ready to go!

 

First of all I made chicken chow mein. Mix soy sauce, Chinese rice vinegar, garlic, ginger and five spice powder in a bowl and coat 1 chopped chicken breast per person. Leave to marinade for 20 minutes.

Stir-fry with Fry Light until the chicken is cooked, then add the vegetables to the pan: julienned carrot, sliced mangetout, water chestnuts and bamboo shoots (unfortunately I couldn't get hold of either of those so had to leave them out), sliced red pepper, baby sweetcorn (though the supermarket had sold out of that too), sliced spring onions, beansprouts and finally I added a whole bag of straight-to-wok noodles.

 

 

Pour over 1 tbsp. oyster sauce mixed with 2 tbsp. soy sauce and 1/2 tsp oil and stir-fry until the vegetables have softened to your liking.

 

At the same time I made a dish called speedy vegetable noodles with tofu. Again make the sauce first, mixing soy sauce, garlic, ginger and five spice powder. Spray a wok or large frying pan with Fry Light and stir-fry mangetout, mushrooms (which I forgot to buy - not doing well here!), red pepper, spring onions, pak choi (left out as the vegetarian doesn't like it so I added courgette instead) and cubes of tofu. Add noodles, 1 tbsp. sweet chilli sauce and 2 tbsp. soy sauce and stir fry until cooked.

 

 

I cooked extra noodles and also decided to do egg fried rice, though this was less of a success. I used microwave rice to make my life easier so cooked that, then placed it in a saucepan with peas and spring onions, soy sauce and a beaten egg. But I got sidetracked speaking to my guests and the rice started to stick a bit on the bottom of the pan! It wasn't too bad when it came to serving at least.

 

 

 

Finally for my boyfriend who doesn't like stir fry I made chicken satay, from a recipe on the Slimming World website. Marinade one diced chicken breast per person in a mixture of soy sauce, sweetener, garlic and ground cumin and when you are ready to cook, just fry the chicken in Fry Light.

 

 

Make the sauce in another pan: you need peanut butter, water, garlic, sweetener, soy sauce and fromage frais. Simmer until the mixture thickens and serve with the chicken - I thought this tasted really good and luckily so did my fussy boyfriend!

 

I had some lovely sets of chopsticks I bought in Kuala Lumpur and some fan-shaped paper napkins; the prawn crackers were put out in bowls for the guests to nibble on while I finished cooking and we had quite a feast!

 

 

 

 

 

 

As this is a really healthy meal I'm sharing this with the Spice Trail challenge, which has as its theme this month 'temple food'. The challenge is hosted by Vanesther at Bangers & Mash.

 

As I used courgette in the vegetarian dish I can send this to Anyone Can Cook, this month hosted by Catherine at Cates Cates as the theme is zucchini and marrows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Secret Ingredient Noodle Stir Fry (after Kung Fu Panda)

This month's Food 'n' Flix is - for a change - a film I'd already seen: Kung Fu Panda. Chosen by Heather at Girlichef, it's a Dreamworks animation with an A-list cast (Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu) providing the voices for a panda called Po who wants to become a kung fu master, and the friends and rivals who help and hinder him along the way. I like it because it has a cute tubby panda doing high kicks but it's also one of those films with a strong message.

Po is an adopted child and his father is a goose who runs a Chinese restaurant (or indeed, a restaurant, as the film is set in China). His speciality is Secret Ingredient Noodle Soup and it is only when Po is training to become a kung fu master that his father deems him worthy of learning the secret ingredient - which turns out to be nothing. The message is that if you believe something is special, it is - which helps Po believe in himself and defeat the baddie.

So when it came to making a dish to best represent this film I knew I had to make a "secret ingredient" noodle dish - but somehow wanted the secret ingredient to be both something and nothing. I hit upon an idea after attending a cookery session with TV chef Phil Vickery and the British Turkey Association. Phil explained a technique called "velveting", which he did to the turkey before cooking it in a stir fry. Velveting is a Chinese technique originally so it also worked really well as the "secret ingredient" for this recipe. Chop your turkey or chicken breast (turkey is less expensive and low in fat, people!) and coat it in a mixture of egg white and cornflour (about 1 tbsp cornflour and one egg white) and leave for up to 30 minutes. This helps keep the poultry moist and gives it a soft, velvety texture.

  

To make this dish I velveted the turkey and stir fried it, then chopped some onion and spring onion and fried those (after removing the turkey from the pan).

I then  added a selection of vegetables to my stir fry, including broccoli, carrot, bean sprouts and alfafa sprouts and some prawns. Serve with noodles.

Finally I added the turkey back to the pan and some sweet chilli sauce.

I'm sending this to Food 'n' Flix, hosted by Heather at Girlichef.

Stir-fried prawns for Chinese new year

I wanted to make some Chinese food to celebrate the New Year this weekend but just wanted a quick one-dish meal I could have for dinner when I was at home by myself. I adapted a Chinese recipe I found online to make this. I used prawns but it would probably work just as well with chicken and you can mix up the vegetables as well.

Mix 2 tsp sweet chilli sauce, 3 tsp soy sauce, 1 tsp artificial sweetener and 2 tbsp sunflower oil

Finely chop some vegetables - I used carrot, spring onion, red pepper and later added some broccoli as well

Spray some Fry-Light into a large frying pan or wok and stir fry the veg. You are supposed to add a chopped clove of garlic but I discovered I didn't have any so used garlic puree instead.

Add the prawns and cook through

Add beansprouts and the sauce

Stir-fry until vegetables are tender - how al dente you like them is up to you.