FOOD:Fresh, tasty food to kick-start a healthy eating regime
I AM READY! You can do it! Yes we can! Blah blah blah! Next time a flyer for joining a gym comes through my letterbox, I think I might explode. I wouldn't mind, but the same old reliables arrive each week, delivered by the same youth with his satchel stuffed full of flyers that will be dumped straight into the recycling bin. I often think that flyers for gym memberships shouldn't be chucked into your house along with offers of free deliveries for 48-inch pizzas and 10-litre buckets of ice-cream. It seems a bit insincere.
But the time has come and I am so-very-ready to have a hard-working month of goodness. Both of these recipes have been real hits over the past few months. The chicken dish has become a regular fixture in my kitchen, especially when I can't think of anything to cook and couldn't be bothered making a roast chicken. Don't get me wrong: a roast chicken is dead simple, but it's the fact that I need to do spuds and veg as well that sometimes puts me off. When I'm trying to be good and healthy, buttery mashed spuds and honey roasted veg along with the roast chicken have to take a temporary back seat.
I took the this dish from a recipe by Ken Hom, an affable Chinese chef I always associate with the Delia years of the 1980s when they were both mega TV stars. There are some good Chinese restaurants, but the cheap and nasty take-outs do nothing to entice me to part with my money. A lot of them are grim, to say the least, serving up over-sauced dishes with a cloying array of cheap and nasty frozen vegetables, with the odd bit of unidentifiable chicken or beef, bobbing in a sea of gloop. Hideous.
But, reading through some of Hom's recipes, it is clear that preparation, and good techniques are very important in Chinese cooking.
Steeping is one method used, especially for fish or chicken, and it is different from poaching in that you immerse your chicken or fish in stock or water before bringing it to the boil. Then you gently poach for a while, before turning off the heat and letting the cooking process complete, in a very gentle fashion.
The result is a beautifully tender texture that is almost satiny. It is amazing how different the texture of the chicken is. If you just boil the heck out of it, it seizes up and becomes tough and rubbery. But steeping whole chickens works a treat. This is my new favourite dish, especially when served with the spring onions and ginger.
The pork balls are a little bit bold, because they do contain some sugar and salty fish sauce, but I like them because they're tasty and you don't have to fry them. Cut down on the sugar and you'll have quite a lean, mean, fighting machine of a dish.
Steeped chicken (serves four)
1 chicken
1 tbsp sea salt
bunch of spring onions
few slices of fresh ginger
black pepper
Put the chicken in a large saucepan that you can fit a lid on, and cover it with water. Chuck in the rest of the ingredients and cook on a gentle heat until just simmering. Keep the lid on and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, then take off the heat and keep covered with the lid for an hour.
Meanwhile, you can make the sauce below. When the chicken is fully cooked, remove it from the saucepan, but be careful of hot water pouring out of the bird.
Check it's cooked by slicing between the breast and the leg to make sure it's not pink, but if it is, dump it back in the water and heat up for another 10 minutes. Remove the skin and discard it.
Tear the chicken off the carcass and serve in chunks on a platter with a bowl of the spring onion and ginger sauce.
Spring onion and ginger sauce
You can really play around with this sauce. Sometimes I use sweet syrupy soy sauce and sometimes I chuck in thinly sliced mushrooms or coriander. Basically, anything goes.
100ml olive oil
3 large bunches of spring onions
big knob of ginger, peeled
3 cloves of garlic, peeled
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil (optional)
Heat the olive oil in a saucepan until it is hot, but not smoking. Have all the spring onions, ginger and garlic very finely sliced or chopped, and sitting in a bowl. Pour the hot oil over them and mix well. The heat will cook the spring onions, ginger and garlic, just enough. Add the rest of the ingredients and adjust the seasoning to your taste.
Pork and lettuce parcels (serves four to six as a starter)
500g minced pork
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
2 sticks lemongrass, very finely chopped
2tsp cornflour
1 bunch mint, finely chopped (reserve a spoonful for the garnish)
1 bunch coriander, finely chopped (reserve a spoonful for the garnish
50ml fish sauce
2tbsp caster sugar
Baby Gem lettuce
1 cucumber
1 red onion
sweet chilli sauce
1 lime
Preheat an oven to 200 degrees/gas six. Mix together all the ingredients apart from the lettuce, cucumber, red onion, sweet chilli sauce and lime, and then roll into little balls and place on an oiled baking tray. Bake for 15-20 minutes. You may want to shake them around during cooking as they tend to burn and stick because of the sugar.
Grate a cucumber, without the skin, and mix with a finely sliced red onion. Add a splash of sweet chilli sauce, the reserved coriander and mint and the juice of the lime. Serve the pork balls with some of this relish in a Baby Gem lettuce leaf.
