Sunday, July 01, 2018

New chicken recipes

I found some new (to me) recipes for cooking chicken, so I tried them out over the weekend. In both cases, something 'went wrong', so I'm not sure that the dishes tasted as they were supposed to.

Last weekend, we ate in a restaurant in acknowledgement of 37 years of marriage. I ordered chicken teriyaki, which was very tasty; the meat came from the thigh, which is always tasty. I wondered how the meat was cooked, and discovered that the recipe was very simple: cover some chicken thighs or strips of breast with teriyaki sauce then cook in the oven for 20 minutes at 200°C. Recipes don't come more simple than that! I had some frozen chicken breasts, so I defrosted them, cut them into strips, placed them in a glass Pyrex dish ... and then discovered that I didn't have any teriyaki sauce! I did have once but must have used it. Fortunately, my wife was just about to go to the supermarket to buy a few items so she bought the sauce for me. The brand which she bought wasn't what I had purchased before, and indeed, this sauce seemed to be soy sauce with no added sugar. The result was fine, but I was expecting something slightly different.

I happened to see on the internet a recipe for chicken pieces with onion: this involves dicing two large onions, frying them lightly in a big pan, then adding the pieces (drumsticks) and cooking on a low light for an hour and a half. The onions are fried in half a cup of (canola) oil which seems to be an excessive amount as there was plenty of oil left in the final result. After about an hour of cooking with the chicken pieces, I noticed that the flame had been doused. I relit the cooker, only to see the flame light and die within a few seconds. Obviously we had run out of gas. Unfortunately, the gas cylinders outside the house are not labelled: it seems that I changed our neighbours' gas and not ours. In order not to ruin the food, I moved the chicken, onions and liquid to a large glass dish then placed the dish in the oven for another half hour at 160°C. Again, the result was fine, but I wonder how it would have been if it had been cooked for the entire period on the gas. In the evening, I changed the correct gas cylinders.

This second dish will definitely enter the repertoire, although next time I will use less oil.

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