Mar 03

Quick and dirty chicken soup

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And back to some cooking experiments. This is what I made yesterday with our leftover grilled chicken, which badly needed sprucing up. Mostly made it through a combination of leafing through a cookbook and what I had on my shelves (it started out as some kind of Singaporean soup, but then I didn’t have the crab or the pork or the shrimps, and I tossed out ingredients of the list at a high clip while replacing them with stuff in my fridge. The final product has no resemblance whatsoever to the recipe I was reading).

I have no pictures because it was late and I was tired, and dragging a soup bowl full of piping-hot soup to my desk–where the best lamp for pictures is–looked likely to cause a local flood. Sorry.

To tide you over, and because blog posts look sad without illustrations, here’s a stock placeholder image from Wikipedia that sort of bears a vague resemblance to my final product yesterday (except for the bit where it’s Burmese and has peanuts, but you can mentally edit those out of the picture, right? :) )

(picture taken by Wagaung, used under under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

 

Quick and dirty chicken soup
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Recipe type: Soup
Prep time: 5 mins
Cook time: 10 mins
Total time: 15 mins
Serves: 2
A quick and easy chicken noodle recipe
Ingredients
  • Soup Base
  • 150g chicken, cooked, and shredded
  • 2 nests egg noodles
  • 8 cups water
  • 1 tablet instant chicken/vegetable broth (dosage for 2 cups, YMMV. I used one tab of the Knorr organic vegetable bouillon; it’s not on their website as it’s probably a Europe-only product, but the vegetable broth on the US website sounds very similar)
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 1 0.5cm-thick (0.2″) nub of ginger
  • 1 tablespoon nuoc mam
  • 1 teaspoon five spices
  • 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
  • Garnish
  • 8-10 fresh coriander stems, loosely chopped
  • 3 spring onions, green part only, chopped into rings (optional)
Instructions
  1. In a saucepan, heat the water until it boils.
  2. Meanwhile, finely grate the garlic and the ginger. Put a frying pan on the stove, some oil, and fry the mixture until it turns golden.
  3. Add the garlic-ginger mixture, the chicken, and the tablet of instant broth into the water.
  4. Adjust the heat until you have a high persistent simmering (bubbles shooting to the surface regularly, but water not yet boiling in great gouts). Mix gently until the tab is dissolved. Add the nuoc mam, the five spices. Taste and adjust; it should be salty with a kick, but not too much.
  5. Leave everything to mingle together for about 5 minutes.
  6. Put the noodles, and wait for them to cook.
  7. Add the sesame oil, mix well, taste and adjust with more nuoc mam if needed. Lower the heat.
  8. Prepare two soup bowls as follows: half the coriander and half the spring onions. Then serve half the soup in each.
 

Also, in cooking-related news… I think the H has developed a taste for sautéed broccoli. I made him some one night from the Irene Kuo cookbook–and ever since, when I ask him to bring home vegetables, he’ll come back with a bunch of broccoli and a hopeful air. Should I be worried?

Jan 05

Ga xao dam gung sa (chicken with lemongrass and macerated ginger)

Tags: blog, cooking experiments, , , , , , , 6 Comments »
(aka gà xào dầm gừng sả, lit. fried chicken with pickled ginger and lemongrass)

Lemongrass chicken

Yes, it looks gooey (that would be the cornstarch plus a liberal appliance of high heat), but it’s so very yummy. The flavours of the lemongrass, ginger and vinegar all combine for an explosion of taste right where it matters. My sis’s favourite dish when she was younger. Not my favourite dish (I tend more towards the shrimp and crab end of the spectrum), but it’s still such good comfort food.

Ga xao dam gung sa (chicken with lemongrass and macerated ginger)
5.0 from 1 reviews
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Recipe type: Main
Prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 30 mins
Total time: 50 mins
Serves: 4
A wonderful mix, tart and spicy and redolent with the smell of lemongrass (recipe from Bach Ngo’s Classic Cuisine of Vietnam).
Ingredients
  • 300g chicken
  • 1 stalk lemongrass
  • 2 tablespoons fish sauce
  • 2 tablespoons ginger, pounded with mortar and pestle
  • 2 tablespoons rice vinegar
  • 6 tablespoons water
  • 1 teaspoon cornstarch
  • 1/2 teaspoon sugar
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 1 large onion
  • Sprinkling of black pepper
Instructions
  1. Mix the ginger and the vinegar. Set aside.
  2. Prepare the lemongrass stalk: discard any dried outer leaves, discard the upper two-thirds of the stalk, and slice the remainder paper-thin. Slice the chicken into bite-sized pieces. Put the chicken in a bowl along with 1 tablespoon of the fish sauce, and sprinkle black pepper. Add the lemongrass. Mix, and set aside.
  3. Mix the cornstarch, sugar, water and remaining fish sauce, and set aside.
  4. Chop the garlic, and slice the onion into wedges.
  5. In a large-bottom casserole dish on medium fire, put in oil, and fry the garlic for ~30s, until fragrant. Add the onion, and cook until soft. Add the chicken, and fry for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Cover, and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Then stir in the ginger-vinegar mixture and the cornstarch-fish sauce-sugar one. Mix well. Cover again, and cook for 5 minutes. Then uncover, set heat until the sauce boils, and finish off by congealing the sauce (basically, make the cornstarch boil and thicken).
  6. Serve with rice.
Notes

The lemongrass stalk can be replaced with 1 tablespoon dried lemongrass, but it will need to be soaked in warm water for 2 hours and chopped very fine.

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Aug 07

Lemongrass pan-fried chicken

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And on a more cheerful topic–we had two lemongrass stalks leftover from a previous meal, and I was looking for a way to use them. Ended up making lemongrass chicken, which tasted awesome. So before I forget how I came to this result, here’s the lowdown.

The recipe is a mix between two Lemongrass Roasted Chicken recipes: one from Wandering Chopsticks’ blog, and the other from Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table. They both used a whole chicken, which I couldn’t find at this time of the year (usual provider on holiday, as befits the month of August), so I made do with chicken breasts.

Lemongrass roasted chicken

Lemongrass pan-fried chicken
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Recipe type: Main
Prep time: 1 hour 10 mins
Cook time: 1 hour 20 mins
Total time: 2 hours 30 mins
Serves: 4-5
Roasted chicken. Lemongrass. What’s not to like?
Ingredients
  • 4 boneless chicken breasts (about 400-500g)
  • 5 small onions, or 1 large onion (I used the bottom part of 5 scallions, though the ones I bought had bulbs double the size of “standard” Asian scallions, such as the ones you see in the topmost picture)
  • 2 stalks lemongrass, minced
  • 5-6 garlic cloves, minced
  • 2 tblsp. fish sauce
  • 2 tblsp. sugar (or 1 tblsp. sugar, 1 tblsp. honey)
  • 2 tblsp. soy sauce
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 2 tblsp. fresh chopped coriander (the recipe called for 2 tblsp. The only coriander I could find was at the supermarket and came in one of those little translucid boxes, pre-washed–I’m pretty sure it was 20g, but not 100%. I ended up using all of it, because I’ve found it keeps very badly in the fridge and didn’t want to freeze it. Overall, I’d definitely add more than 2 tablespoons. Maybe 3-4).
Instructions
  1. Combine all the ingredients except the coriander and the chicken. Put the chicken in the marinade–if you have time, leave it for 1 hour in the fridge. If you don’t, then skip this part.
  2. Pre-heat oven to 180-200°C (thermostat 6-7), put the chicken and about half the marinade, and let it cook for 40 minutes, until top part is starting to turn golden. Then turn chicken over, brush with rest of marinade, and cook for another 40 minutes until golden.
  3. Sprinkle coriander on top of the finished product, and serve with steamed rice.

 

There you go. Shiny and yummy.

EDIT: now with picture!