Spiced Chicken with Cardamom Rice and Runnerbeans

I immediately tucked in to this so I had to recreate the dish on a smaller plate to take a photo.

The red stuff is a sauce inspired by Indian food, so my book tells me. It calls for onions and red pepper, then stock and chopped tomatoes. It’s a bit spicy – onion seeds, hot green pepper, cinnamon, garlic, coriander, tamarind paste and ginger make up the flavours.

I got to cook a whole chicken. I’ve never done that before. In the oven for close to two hours, with the above sauce poured over and covered in foil. The foil kept the sauce and the chicken juicy.

The rice is basmati, with cardamom seeds and broken cinnamon. Cinnamon sticks are interesting, they smell really nice and I think I might dip one in some hot chocolate some time in the future.

I cooked this for four, my sister and her boyfriend were over so I made them a meal. It took over two hours in total, but it wasn’t really hard to cook. The hot weather didn’t really help, the kitchen was uncomfortable at times.

It was worth all the time and effort though because it tasted amazing. Even my sister’s boyfriend, who said he didn’t like Indian food, enjoyed it. The rice was fragrant but not overpowering, the chicken wasn’t at all dry, and the sauce had a nice mix of flavours.

I cooked two chickens and so there is one left over, I also cooked twice the amount of rice. Both foodstuffs are sitting in the fridge right now, the former will be used in Hoisin Chicken Wraps sometime this week and the latter will be used in Stuffed Red Peppers, which I am quite looking forward to. I don’t know how long either will keep in the fridge though, particularly the chicken.

Braised Lettuce with Ham.

Tonight’s meal was easy to cook. It had two kinds of lettuce, Gem and Flat Leaf. Pretty much everything was cooked in a pan. New potatoes, peas, green beans, some herbs. The sauce was white wine and some ham stock, and the radishes turned it a nice pink colour to compliment the ham. The sliced ham I bought this morning from the butchers, ready cooked, this morning. The recipe called for roast ham but they only had boiled, but I don’t think it made that much difference.

It was a nice healthy evening meal. It wasn’t too heavy, and the sweet wine sauce went well with the ham and made it really juicy. I should have really put more of the flat leaf lettuce in; it reduced like spinach really fast and so there wasn’t that much in the end product.

The Kitchen Revolution: A Year of Time-and-money-saving Recipes.

by Rosie Sykes, Zoe Heron and Polly Russell.

So I’ve been using this cookbook practically every day for the past two weeks. I’ve just started week three. I’m enjoying it, and I can see myself using this for the full year around. I’ve never had such good food on a constant basis before. I’m not sure, however, if the book lives up to what it promises in the title.

I don’t usually use cookbooks. The most I had used previously really was printing out random recipes off the Internet or using ‘Cooking Guide’ on my DS. Both things were adequate for me to learn the basics and to realise that I really liked cooking and that I wanted to do it more. I wasn’t happy, however, with going out to the shops whenever I wanted to make some food and having to spend loads to buy all the strange ingredients needed to make just one nice meal. It was also an annoyance having to find something nice to cook every evening.

That’s why I was attracted to this book. Actually, I guess its nicely designed cover was the first reason I opened it. But the idea of giving me a shopping list to use every week to make a meal for every night was a brilliantly simple idea and I was surprised it has taken this long to come about. The meals looked interesting and well balanced, and there were all sorts of ideas that I hadn’t tried before or had foods I was unsure of cooked in different ways that I was willing to give a taste again. I liked the idea of reusing leftovers too. I liked the idea of spending less and having better foods.

The book is called ‘A Year of Time-and-money-saving Recipes’. Let’s take a look at that.

I am;

20 years old, female, living with my boyfriend, 22, Matthew. We live in a house in Urmston, Manchester. I’ve just completed my second year at University studying Software Engineering, he works in web design. I’ve got a year out now at a placement job in Manchester, working and earning for a year before I go back to Manchester Met to finish my degree with a First.

We’re both geeks, we both use the internet a lot, we like gaming. Between us we have two high-end computers, an EEE Pc, two Nintendo DSs, a Nintendo Wii, an Xbox 360, a Dreamcast, an Xbox, a Gamecube. Big TV. Two cats. Lots of DVDs. We both code.

When Matt tries to cook, he just throws everything in, experiments, and hopes it’s all ready at the same time, and that it tastes good. Since I like looking at things logically, I like step by step instructions and cooking things as it says in the instructions. It makes for some fun and contrast when we’re trying to cook together.

So about two weeks ago I bought this book.

It was called ‘The Kitchen Revolution’ and it cost £17 with free postage from Amazon.

I bought it because I had recently been teaching myself how to cook. Up until about 6 months ago the best I could manage was a tomato sauce to make with pasta. I never ate badly; I’ve not had a microwave meal in years, but I didn’t like red meats, at all, nor any kind of sea food apart from canned tuna. At about 3 months ago I was using ‘Cooking Guide’ on my Nintendo DS to make a few meals but this only happened about once a week. I learned the basics, like how to chop up an onion finely and to make stock from scratch, and to cook a joint or a steak. I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed cooking and eating what I had made. That should set the level of expertise I was at at that point.

I went out to Leeds about a month ago with my boyfriend, Matt, and I spotted ‘The Kitchen Revolution’ in Waterstones. I was a bit skint then so I didn’t buy it, but I was interested. So I ordered it over the internet instead.

I’ve been using the book for two whole weeks now, and we’ve just bought a week’s worth of shopping for the third week. I’ve never ate such good food constantly before. Next comes my review of the book, an introduction about me then hopefully frequent updates on what I’ve made day to day, and what I think.