Chicken Shawarma with Garlic Sauce

 

You may not have heard of shawarma before but you’ve probably eaten something very similar in the past – it’s a lovely (and easy) dish to make yourself at home. A shawarma is a Middle Eastern dish that can use various meats or poultry – usually lamb, chicken, beef or veal – cooked on a spit and shaved, rather like a kebab. It’s then served in a wrap or in a roll and is sometimes topped with houmous.

 

It's also nice served on, rather than inside, a pitta bread for a sit-down lunch. Of course, you don’t have to cook the meat on a spit (unless you want to barbecue) and most people don’t have a kebab rotisserie at home – so you can also cook the meat in the oven. I used this recipe for oven-baked chicken shawarma with garlic sauce from the Easy Peasy Foodie.

 

 

 

 

Like her, I used chicken mini fillets to make the recipe quick, though you do need to allow an hour or two to marinade the chicken in advance. There are a lot of spices to mix but they are pretty much all ones you would probably have in your store cupboard anyway if you like cooking, and once you’ve marinaded the chicken, simply bake in the oven then shred it.

 

 

 

The garlic sauce from this recipe is also easy to make and works really well with the spicy flavour of the chicken. I lightly toasted some pitta breads on the grill and served the chicken and garlic sauce on top – I think this would even work for a pizza topping if you want to make your own pizza! It was delicious and something I’d definitely make again.

 

 

Super-Fast Chilli and Cheese Beer Bread and Vegetable Soup

Last weekend I decided to make soup and bread for lunch. I had a packet of diced vegetables that were called 'soup mix', the idea being you just bung them all in a pan with some stock. I'd planned to set my breadmaker machine the night before so we could have nice fresh bread in time for lunch - and completely forgot.

Was I going to have to give up on the idea of having fresh bread with soup (or send the reluctant other half out to buy some)? Surely there must be a quick bread recipe out there that I could make in a couple of hours from start to finish (I didn't get up very early on the Sunday morning so lunch was only a couple of hours away!). Luckily, there was: there are bread recipes you don't need to leave to prove, and this is one of them.

It's a recipe from the Telegraph for 'easy beer bread with parmesan and garlic'. I think the beer replaces yeast and all you have to do is mix everything and cook it for just under an hour.

I did change the recipe a fair bit as I didn't have buckwheat flour, polenta, fresh thyme and couldn't be bothered to go into the garden to see if I still had any rosemary (it was raining!), oh and I did't have any parmesan either! Instead I looked in the fridge to see what I did have and decided to create my own flavour of mature cheddar and chilli. I also forgot to add the little bit of butter at the end but it was fine without. So here's what I did:

Super-Fast Chilli and Cheese Beer Bread - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

260g strong white bread flour
100g wholemeal plain flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
60g caster sugar
3 cloves garlic, crushed
50g mature cheddar, diced
2 tsp Very Lazy chopped red chillis
300ml bottle beer

Preheat oven to 190C and grease a loaf tin. Mix all the dry ingredients.

Add the beer and mix in well

Spoon into the prepared loaf tin and bake in the oven for 50 minutes

In the meantime here is my soup mix, which I simply simmered with some vegetable stock until the veg was soft, then put it in a blender.

I added some more water as it was a bit thick

 

 Here's the finished loaf of bread

The garlic, cheese and chilli flavours all came through really strongly, so this is a good bread to serve alongside a simple soup - one that perhaps doesn't have an overpowering flavour of its own.

Lunch! And possibly the fastest loaf of bread I've ever made.

I'm sending this to Bready Steady Go, hosted by Jen's Food and Michelle of Utterly Scrummy.

And also to Extra Veg, hosted this month by Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary on behalf of Michelle at Utterly Scrummy again, and Helen at Fuss Free Flavours.

Irish Soda Bread with Garlic - Quick-Bake Loaf (No Proving)

This month's Food 'n' Flix challenge is the John Wayne film The Quiet Man, chosen by Joanne at What's On The List. I'd never heard of it, and since it starred John Wayne I assumed it was a Western so started mulling over some cowboy-themed dishes I could make for the challenge. I couldn't have been more wrong - the film is actually a love story set in 1920s Ireland!


The film is about an Irish-American called Sean (Wayne) going back to his birthplace to take over a farm he has inherited, where he falls in love with a woman called Mary Kate. Her brother Red won't give permission for them to start courting so they trick him into believing another woman is in love with Red but wants Mary Kate to move out of his house. Red agrees, but founds out he was duped on Sean and Mary Kate's wedding day and refuses to hand over her dowry.

As Sean refuses to stand up to Red and demand what Mary Kate is entitled to, it causes problems between them and eventually she tries to leave him, until Sean drags her back and they go to see Red, who is shamed into handing over the dowry. Sean and Mary Kate then burn the money, showing it was the principle they cared about, not the cash. Sean and Red then fight and at the end, the rift is healed and Mary Kate heads home to make dinner for her husband.


To be honest I didn't really like this film, and was surprised that not only did it win the Best Director Oscar at the time (1952) but according to Wikipedia, in 2013 the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". While there were still themes in this movie that people can identify with today, I had a problem with the way that Mary Kate was treated. I understand the tradition of dowry, and needing your father or brother (who in this case is her only male relative)'s permission to marry as that was the case at the time. However, the scene when Mary Kate is forced to walk back to the village with Sean is horrible - he literally drags her across the ground at one point, and one of the other villagers cheerfully offers him a stick to beat her with! Apparently this is a comedy but fashions and tastes change and unfortunately this film really didn't do anything for me.

I wanted an Irish recipe for the Food n Flix challenge and came across this recipe for Wild Garlic Irish Soda Bread. I couldn't get any wild garlic so I decided to crush a few garlic cloves and add to the mixture, which worked really well!

The best thing is this loaf is really quick - it contains no yeast so you don't need to leave it to prove and just mix the ingredients and put it in the oven. It tasted delicious with a bowl of soup!

Adding the buttermilk to the other ingredients

Ready to go in the oven

The baked loaf

Sliced and ready to eat

 I'm sharing this with Food 'n' Flix as mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Bridget Jones' Blue Soup Dinner Party

I love Bridget Jones. When she first exploded onto the scene – by which I mean the novel by Helen Fielding, as I’d never read the forerunner Independent column – she was a breath of fresh air. The diary style of the novel was unusual for its time (though the epistolary novel has been around since at least 1748 with Samuel Richardson’s famous ‘Clarissa’, fact-fans and literature geeks like me) and not the cliché it is now, but it was Bridget herself who was ground-breaking. Here was a heroine who was flawed, funny and fond of giant pants. She made singledom both depressing and hilarious, and made ‘smug marrieds’ into a catchphrase that I still hear today. I was in a relationship when the film came out, so while I wasn’t quite a smug married, I could read Bridget’s adventures without worrying that I too would die alone and be eaten by cats (one of Bridget’s fears). But when I suddenly became single at 30, Bridget was more of a role model – if this ‘overweight’ (though actually a perfectly standard size), chain-smoking, career in a mess woman could find true love with Mr Darcy, who likes her just as she is, then so could I.

 

Evelyne at Cheap Ethnic Eatz has chosen Bridget Jones’ Diary for Food ‘n’ Flix this month which did bring a smile to my face. I’m not going to describe the plot of the film any more than I have above, because you have almost certainly already seen it, and if you haven’t, you must DO SO NOW.

 

The idea of Food ‘n’ Flix is to cook a dish inspired by the film; it can either be a meal featured in the film or something inspired by the characters, setting etc. But as soon as I saw the movie choice this month there was really only one thing I could possibly make: blue soup. I’m sure you all remember that scene, where Bridget is trying hard to throw herself a birthday dinner party and cook an elaborate menu, which goes horribly wrong. But can you actually remember what she was trying to make?

 

Her planned menu is:

Veloute of Celery

Char-grilled Tuna on Veloute of Cherry Tomatoes Coulis with Confit of Garlic and Fondant Potatoes.

Confit of Oranges. Grand Marnier Creme Anglaise.

 

And as she says in the book, “Will be marvellous. Will become known as brilliant but apparently effortless cook.

People will flock to my dinner parties, enthusing "Oh it's marvellous to be going to Bridget's for dinner, one gets Michelin star-style food in a bohemian setting."”

What Bridget actually ends up serving is blue soup, omelette, and marmalade.

As it’s harder to quote the film here is the relevant passage from the book.

                   *****************************************************

7pm Hurrah! Just got home. Right. Soup will be absolutely fine. Will simply cook and puree vegetables as instructed and then - to give concentration of flavour - rinse blue jelly off chicken carcasses and boil them up with cream in the soup.

8.30pm Aargh aargh, just took lid off casserole to remove carcasses. Soup is bright blue. And have not even started veloute of cherry tomatoes. And fondant potatoes should have been ready 10 minutes ago and are rock hard.

9pm Love the lovely friends. Were more than sporting about the blue soup, Jude and Tom even making lengthy argument for less colour prejudice in the world of food. Why after all - just because one cannot readily think of a blue vegetable - should one object to blue soup?

Aargh aargh. Just looked in fridge and tuna is not there. What has become of tuna? What? what?

9.30pm Thank God. Magda come in kitchen and helped me make big omelette and mashed up half-done fondant potatoes and fried them in the frying pan in manner of hash browns. Tom put the recipe book on the table so we can all look at the pictures of what char-grilled tuna would have been like. At least confit will be good. Looks fantastic. Magda said not to bother with Grand Marnier creme anglaise but merely drink Grand Marnier.

10pm V sad. Looked expectantly round table as everyone took first mouthful of confit. There was an embarrassed silence.

"What's this, hon?" said Tom eventually. "Is it marmalade?" Horror-struck, took mouthful myself. It was, as he said, marmalade. Realise after all effort and expense have served my guests:

Blue soup.

Omelette.

Marmalade.

Am disastrous failure. As Tom remarked, "Michelin-style cookery? Kwik- Fit, more like."

                   ***************************************************

 So my intention was to make Bridget's planned dinner party menu for me and my boyfriend on new year's eve, but to do it properly. Unfortunately, it went wrong - though in different ways to Bridget's - so it was a complete disaster! It would have been funny but my boyfriend's family pet rabbit was unexpectedly put to sleep by the vet that day so we were all miserable and it was the icing on the cake of a terrible day!

Some of the food turned out OK and since this is my entry for this month's Food 'n' Flix I thought I'd still share with you what I did and what went wrong.

First up: Veloute of Celery aka Blue Soup.

I'm not really sure what the difference is between a veloute and a smooth soup so I made a simple celery soup recipe. I sweated some onion and celery in butter, and brought it to a simmer in a pan of vegetable stock.

Season, puree in a blender... and if desired, add blue food colouring so it looks something like this!

For the main course: Char-grilled Tuna on Veloute of Cherry Tomatoes Coulis with Confit of Garlic and Fondant Potatoes

I'd been thinking about doing steak for new year's eve before I decided to cook Bridget's menu and my boyfriend doesn't eat tuna so I was going to do that for me and steak for him, then somehow forgot that she did tuna and cooked steak for both of us!

I found a Martha Stewart recipe for roasted cherry tomato sauce which was easy to make. I had a packet of cherry tomatoes which I put into a roasting tin and drizzled over some oil, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, thyme and salt and roasted in the oven for about an hour.

Martha Stewart serves them as they come and they do look very attractive - I forgot of course that for Bridget Jones the menu is a coulis, so I should have put it in the blender. This is the sauce after being blended, which I did with the rest to put in the freezer:

 Confit of Garlic

I found this recipe on FoodandStyle.com. All you really do is heat some cloves of garlic in a saucepan, covering them with oil, over a low temperature for about an hour. After that you will have cloves of garlic that are slightly crispy or browned on the outside but beautifully soft on the inside - if you press one, the garlic inside squeezes out - and also some garlic-infused oil which you can use for another recipe.

 Fondant Potatoes

This is where things really started to go wrong. In the book, Bridget complains hers are still rock solid; mine turned to mush. Unfortunately I was so disappointed I forgot to take a photo. The recipe I used was from BBC Food.

I peeled and fried the potatoes then poured in the stock and garlic. I tried to cook them until tender but they went very quickly from being not quite cooked to being far too soft and falling apart. Also, I used a whole stock cube with the 75ml water which I think was too much for this amount of liquid as the potatoes had a strongly overpowering taste of stock which wasn't very nice. I've had fondant potatoes in restaurants so knew what they were supposed to be like, and mine were nothing like that. I decided the stock flavour was so overpowering that I threw the potatoes away and put some chips in the oven!

So instead of tuna steak, veloute of cherry tomatoes coulis, confit of garlic and fondant potatoes, we had beef steak, roasted cherry tomatoes, confit of garlic and chips. And very nice it was too!

Confit of Oranges. Grand Marnier Creme Anglaise.

Bridget's confit of oranges turns out to be marmalade, and I don't think she attempts to make the crème anglaise in the end. I'm pretty sure crème anglaise is just custard and I had an open carton of custard in the fridge so thought I would allow myself one cheat and use that instead.

For the confit of oranges the recipe I used was from Snapguide. It was easy to follow though I reduced the quantities; I didn't think it was setting enough though so I turned the heat up and boiled it for longer. I then left it to cool and when it returned to the pan, it was solid - I couldn't even get a spoon into it! The only thing for it was to reheat it a little so it would soften, and then put it into serving dishes, which I did but the consistency had changed - it was a little like sugar that has dissolved then set into crystals again. And when I did get it into serving dishes, it was rock solid again within minutes - I wouldn't recommend over-boiling it! So whereas Bridget had marmalade, I had solid orange-flavoured sugar... we gave up and had a bar of chocolate for dessert instead.

So like I said it would have been funny if it hadn't been for the rabbit being put down that day - but I can still sort of see the funny side that Bridget had a total disaster with this dinner and so did I!



 

Rick Stein's Garlic Mashed Potato

Before Christmas I went to see Rick Stein Live at the London Palladium. It was a live cookery show combined with a Q&A. Rick Stein, the celebrity chef, was being interviewed on stage by fellow chef Brian Turner, sharing anecdotes and commenting on video clips of television programs he had made. In between, he cooked a variety of dishes helped by his son Jack, who is a chef at his father's Seafood Restaurant in Cornwall. Some lucky members of the audience even got to go on stage and try the food Rick cooked!

One recipe stuck in my mind because it looked simple but very tasty. We watched a clip from a programme a few years back (several years in fact, judging by how much younger Rick looked) which may have been in Cyprus or Greece. Rick was speaking to the camera next to a local woman who was pounding potatoes in a giant pestle and mortar to mash them. Olive oil and a lot of garlic was then added - Rick commented a few times that you can never have too much garlic - and mashed into the potato. I decided to recreate this at home a few weeks later.

My pestle and mortar is only meant for herbs so instead I used the pestle with the potatoes in a large glass bowl. They were boiled until soft.

Crush with the pestle

Add a generous glug of olive oil, salt and a lot of garlic -  I'd recommend roasting the cloves of garlic first then scooping out the middle. I think I used four cloves.

Mash again until creamy. It's hard to get the potato completely smooth using a pestle so I'm not sure I would do it this way again but it's fun for a sort of rustic feel. Surprisingly, I'd never added garlic to mashed potato before, and wouldn't normally have used this much if it hadn't been for the Rick Stein show, and I thought it was really good.