Friday, June 29, 2012

Asian-style chicken



Page 63 Asian-style chicken 


Tonight we tried a recipe from the brand new Weight Watchers cookbook Food You'll Love

We had to go to the oriental food store to get some specialist ingredients - sichuan peppercorns, star anise and Shaoxing wine.


First you make a broth using stock, wine, soy sauce, ginger, star anise and sichuan peppercorns. Simmer for 30 minutes and enjoy your kitchen smelling like heaven! Tonight my lovely sous chef did this step for me.


Add chicken and simmer 12 minutes until the chicken is cooked.

At this stage I also started the rice which I cooked in the Thermomix, which was looking at being seriously under used tonight because the recipe was SO EASY

The recipe said to use gai lan which the oriental food store didn't have, but they gave us a big bunch of some other green stuff and we added a bunch of broccolini and went with that.

Three slashes with the big chefs knife and the veg is done! You have to love that.

So that goes into the broth after we take the chicken off and put it on a board to rest.


While that was all happening I chopped up some beautiful red chillies and some chives (from the oriental food store too) These were fried in a little oil for 3-4 minutes and smelt amazing.








Time to serve - I got out my Chinese plates (these were an engagement gift in 1982!) Rice down , chicken on top, greens on the side, scatter over chilli and chive mixture and serve!

Only 11 ProPoints per person.


Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Dinner in a hurry



Taff has to be somewhere tonight. So food in a hurry. We bought 3 pork scotch fillet steaks on special - 8 WW ProPoints of deliciousness there so the sides needed to be pretty low in points values.

I really love Jane Kennedy's book Fabulous Food minus the boombah (apparently she does apps now too - how cool is that?) So we started off our plans with her Spanish mushrooms with thyme - we have fresh thyme from the garden and these are just heavenly. Here they are ready to go in the oven. There is wine, oil and yoghurt in these too but not a lot of anything so very low in ProPoints values.



We also cooked her asparagus and cherry tomatoes - baked with garlic and olive oil this is pure deliciousness and has converted most of the monkeyhouse into asparagus lovers. (from the other book OMG! I can eat that?) The recipe is on page 132 with the salmon but we only cooked the salmon once - we do the vegetables at least weekly.


She mentions mock rice (which is actually cauliflower) in those books and I found detailed instructions on how to make it in my Thermomix here It is so easy to make - you just put your cauliflower in the TM31 like this:


And after 5 seconds (yes only 5 seconds!) on reverse it looks like this, and you steam it for 10 minutes while the other food is cooking... really so easy


That left the pork steaks - how to quickly add flavour and deliciousness to them? I had bought some sichuan peppercorns for tomorrow nights meal so I went to the Thermomix Taste of Asia cookbook and made sichuan salt and pepper. Again so easy just bung it in, roast and grind and here it is.

Before:


After:


We put the vegetables in the oven, turned on the TM to cook the cauliflower and put the steaks on in my trusty cast iron pan - don't the grill marks look pretty?


After they were cooked we rubbed them with the pepper mix and sliced them to serve. Here is the finished meal - only 12 Weight Watchers ProPoints per serve.






Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Bouillabaise and apples

Tonight our lovely friend Jen visited - we have lived here eleven years but she has never seen our house - it is so long since she left Townsville

We served an easy Thermomix Bouillabaise and a divine Sour Cream apple pie

I can assure you all diners were satisfied with their meals

Here is a photo of the delicious soup (soup is actually pretty boring to take pictures of)


And this is a close up of the fantastic creamy apples and crisp topping, almost like a brandy snap