Abla's Lemon Chicken Drummettes

One of the pleasures that awaited me when I recently returned from California was that my friend Emerald was visiting from Singapore. A couple of days after my return I had a lovely breakfast with her at the Greengrocer in North Fitzroy. She came laden with lemons and my first reaction was to make lemon butter with them. However, finally today I used some of them to cook one of my variants of Abla's lemon chicken.  I am not sure what I will do with the rest but the lemon chicken is just wonderful! Maybe I will need to have the rest of the chicken for breakfast tomorrow? And the rest of the lemons?  Well, lemon butter is still a possibility.

I love both Abla's restaurant in Carlton and her cookbook, The Lebanese Kitchen. Abla's recipe is for chicken wings in garlic but I am never very good at sticking to recipes. I use them as a guide. I used little chicken drummettes instead of wings and I just used already prepared and purchased minced garlic from a jar. So the principle and the cooking methodology was Abla's but practically no ingredient remained the same! Well, that's how I like to cook: getting ideas from different sources and seeing what's at the shops.  So here is my recipe for Lemon Chicken Drummettes.

Ingredients

10 chicken drummettes
1 teaspoon coarse salt
250 ml lemon juice
1.5 tablespoons minced garlic (purchased prepared)

Mode

Preheat the oven to 220c
Place the chicken pieces in a single layer in a baking dish
Sprinkle salt over
Roast for approximately 30 minutes until browned
Meanwhile squeeze lemons and add minced garlic to resulting juice
Remove chicken from oven and pour over garlic and lemon mixture
Stir through
Cook for another 20 minutes.

These are great served with a green salad dressed with shaved Parmesan.

Festive Coriander Salmon Salad

I know that people do still seem to be a bit obsessed with pumpkins but Halloween and Thanksgiving have now passed for my U.S. friends and yesterday I noticed that the City of Yarra low key Christmas decorations had been put up in Queens Parade. Yesterday we were also having family discussions about Christmas celebrations.  So when I was thinking of making a salad for lunch today, Christmas was there in my consciousness.  This salad is a variant of one I often make and one which I like to take to Christmas events. Today I made Festive Coriander Salmon Salad.

 

Ingredients

210 gr canned pink salmon (in water)
6-8 mini Roma tomatoes
2 Lebanese cucumbers
1/2 bunch of coriander (cilantro)
1 clove of garlic crushed
1 tsp crushed ginger
1/2 tsp Sambal oelek
1/2 red pepper
Olive oil


Mode

Slice the tomatoes in half lengthwise
Slice the cucumbers lengthways and chop into rough half circles
Roughly chop the coriander
Slice the red pepper into fine strips
Place salmon (including liquid), tomatoes, cucumbers, pepper and coriander in a bowl
Add garlic, ginger and Sambal oelek
Dribble some olive oil over
Toss salad to mix ingredients

This should serve two people for lunch. If you are sharing the meal with someone who thinks that bread is the staff of life, some multigrain bread with lashings of butter would go with it nicely.