Butter chicken

I love butter chicken and used to love buying it at an Indian place close to where I worked. These days I don’t eat it very much. But just before Christmas I saw that Simon Johnson had a new line of curry pastes and it included Butter Chicken! I bought one for me and one for a present. Yesterday I made butter chicken with mine and today I ate some for dinner. Yum yum. Μιαμ μιαμ.

Ingredients 

1 kg chicken thighs

3/4 cup Greek yoghurt

100 gr Simon Johnson Butter Chicken paste

100 gr unsalted butter

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

2 tsp chopped ginger root

100 gr tomato paste

300 gr thickened cream

Mode

Roughly chop the chicken meat and place in bowl

Mix the butter chicken paste through the yoghurt

Add yoghurt and curry paste mix to chicken

Stir to cover chicken with yoghurt mixture

Put aside to marinade for at least an hour

Melt butter in large pan capable of holding chicken

Chop onion and add to butter

Crush garlic and ginger and add to butter

Stir until tender

Add chicken and yoghurt mixture and combine

Add cream and stir

Add tomato paste and stir

Bring to the boil stirring regularly

Then reduce heat and simmer until chicken is tender

Note the dish is better the day after cooking! 

Tuna, coriander and vegetable pie

On this last day of the year I thought I should try to finish 2019 as I want 2020 to be, at least some of the time. So I cooked, wrote a recipe and blogged. So I guess this means that in the New Year I want to cook, write recipes and blog them. I even thought about reviewing my online presence in #blog12daysxmas. It has been a while.

I must confess I was checking my memories on Facebook this morning when I discovered that a few years ago on New Year’s Eve I celebrated by cooking a pie with tuna and coriander. Yum I thought this morning! I will do something similar this year depending on what I find when I go shopping!  This is the result.

Ingredients

2 sheets frozen puff pastry

300 gr tuna

1 spring onion

1/4 red capsicum

1/4 zucchini

1/2 bunch coriander

2 cloves garlic

2tsp minced ginger root

Poppy seed

Mode

Remove pastry from freezer to thaw in advance

Preheat oven to 180c

Place one sheet of pastry in bottom of ovenproof dish

Place tuna in dish on pastry

Chop spring onion and sprinkle over tuna

Chop red capsicum and zucchini and place in dish

Chop coriander and add

Crush garlic and ginger root and add

Place the second sheet of pastry on top and seal edges

Sprinkle poppyseeds on top of pie

Cook in oven for 45 minutes

A variant on Eton Mess

Boxing Day is a time for playing with Christmas presents, for recovering from eating too much the day before but also for wondering what to do with leftover food. I found myself with lots of berries and a packet of individual meringues.  Eton mess came to mind and I did also have cream to spare, but I felt I had already had too much of that yesterday. However, I had Greek style yoghurt on hand, of course. The combination of the yoghurt, raspberries, blackberries, cherries and individual meringues resulted in a delicious combination of flavours and textures. And it wasn’t too sweet or too rich! This is indeed something that I will make again.

Ingredients (per person)

2 individual meringues (bought or pre-made)

3 tbs Greek style yoghurt

Cup of fruit (raspberries, blackberries and cherries) - pip the cherries in advance in you wish

Mode

Place the fruit in a individual bowl 

Spoon over the yoghurt

Add the meringues

Using a spoon crush the meringues and combine the ingredients.

Serve and  enjoy!

Pork butterfly steak with capsicum salad splash

This is another of those recipes which is barely cooking!  But I did prepare the ingredients, assemble them and then bake in the oven so I guess cooking was involved. The trigger for it was doing a big clean out of the pantry and discovering half a bottle of the Christmas gift from my nephew of some yummy Yarra Valley Roasted capsicum salad splash.  And the result was delicious!

Ingredients

4 pork butterfly steaks
4 tbs roasted red capsicum salad splash
Parmesan

Mode

Preheat the oven to 180c
Arrange the pork steaks in an oven-proof serving dish
Spoon the splash over the pork
Grate Parmesan over the meat
Cover with foil and bake in the oven for 45 minutes.

Fresh tuna and vegetable pie

Another evening another pie? Well maybe. But I use this blog to document what I cook so that’s how it is. Last week I had a delicious beef pie at a favourite pub and I can’t begin to think how I might emulate that. But I am going back next week to investigate further. However, I enjoy cooking pies with fish and can do it myself!

Today what caught my eye while shopping was some fresh tuna. Yum! Fresh tuna, some vegetables, with garlic and ginger in puff pastry was what I thought as I shopped. And so it was! The added pleasure with the tuna is that tuna always reminds me of Greek (and Mycenaean) colonization following the tunny schools to the Black Sea and my mind has been involved with the Black Sea recently. 

Ingredients

260 gr fresh tuna

2 sheets frozen puff pastry

1/2 zucchini

1/4 red pepper

2 cloves garlic

2 teaspoons crushed ginger root

Poppyseed

Mode

Preheat oven to 180c.

Remove pastry from freezer to thaw.

Meanwhile crush the garlic and ginger

Julienne the zucchini

Chop the red pepper into 4-5 pieces

Place one sheet of the pastry in the bottom of baking dish

Add the tuna 

Place the vegetables on top and around the tuna

Add the garlic and ginger

Place the second sheet of pastry on top

Fold the edges to seal

Sprinkle with poppyseed

Bake in 180c oven for 45 minutes

Pork rissoles with plum sauce

I went shopping looking for chicken mince with an idea of cooking chicken balls. But there was no chicken mince to be had and my eye caught some pork mince. Well, I thought, I am sure I can think of something to cook with that. The end result was pork rissoles made with sage and garlic and spring onion and with  plum sauce for dipping. They were lovely: crisp on the outside but soft inside and all the flavours went together well! Yummy. 

Ingredients

600 gr pork mince

2 spring onions

2 tsp dried sage

2 cloves of garlic

1 egg

Breadcrumbs 

Olive oil

Plum sauce

Mode

Place the mince in a bowl

Chop the spring onions and add

Crush the garlic and add

Add the sage

Using your hands combine the mixture together

Break an egg onto a plate

Place breadcrumbs on another plate

Form the meat mixture into rissoles using a dessert spoon

Dip them in the egg and then breadcrumbs

Heat oil in a frying pan

Fry the rissoles in batches until they are crisp on the outside and cooked to your taste inside

Serve with plum sauce

Winter tomato soup

This is a winter soup made with the saved produce of summer: ripe tomatoes that have become passata and dried basil leaves. It is very easy once you have the ingredients on hand. So plan in the summer for this.

Ingredients

1 litre passata

1 liter chicken stock

1 cup water

1/2 cup breadcrumbs

Handful of crushed dry basil leaves

2 garlic cloves

2 tsp chopped ginger root

Mode

Add the passata to a large pan and light stove 

Use the water to wash out the passata bottle and add to the passata

Add the chicken stock to tomato and stir to combine

Crush the garlic, ginger root and dried basil leaves and add to mixture

Add the breadcrumbs and stir 

Bring the mixture to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes stirring regularly 

Serve with a spoonful of Greek strained yoghurt in the bottom of each bowl