Roast Chicken with Home Made Thai Sauce 泰式酱烤鸡扒

Merry Christmas everyone! I cooked this for our simple Christmas eve dinner last night. We don't celebrate Christmas, but we do spent time at home enjoying our home cooked meal with nice cold drinks and dessert. This is so called precious family time, don't you think so? :)

Oppss, by the way, my roasted chicken was not browned properly. Hai...the old table top oven not performing well. But, it tasted good though, haha...

Roasted Chicken with Home Made Thai Sauce 泰式酱烤鸡扒

Serves 2

Ingredients:

2 chicken thighs, deboned

some baby capsicums, seeded and sliced

1 carrot, peeled and cut into thick strips

2 potatoes, peeled and sliced

1 tomato, diced

half broccoli, cut into florets

Chicken Marinades:

1 tbsp of light soy sauce

4 cloves of garlic, peeled and grated

dashes of black pepper powder

Thai Sauce:

1 and a half tbsp of Thai chili sauce

1 tbsp of sugar

5 coves of shallots, peeled and sliced

1/4 of ginger flower, chopped

1/2 lemon, juiced

Steps:

1. Marinate chicken for 3 hours, leave it in the fridge.

2. Boil potato and carrot for 5 minutes, drained. Blanch the broccoli and drain. Set it aside.

3. In a baking tray, arrange the potato, carrot, tomato, capsicum at the base. Top it with the 2 chicken thighs.

4. Preheat oven at 180 deg C. Roast the chicken for 50 minutes under 180 deg C follow by last 10 minutes under 200 deg C, or until the skin is browned.

5. While the chicken is roasting in progress, prepare the Thai sauce by mixing up all the required ingredients.

6. Serve the roasted chicken with Thai sauce, roasted vegetables and blanched broccoli.

Chocolate Bread Loaf

 I rely on the Tesco bread maker for my bread making. I’m kind of lazy to spend time in making buns, so I only make bread loaf most of the time. I have failed many times though. The dough prepared in bread maker does not raise perfectly. It happened to this chocolate bread dough as well. When the bread maker beeping to trigger the dough is done, the dough size did not doubled. I sensed something was not right and felt very disappointed. It was almost 10pm, nothing much I could do. So, I got an idea. I covered up the bread loaf pan with cling wrap and I left the dough in bread maker for over-night.

The next morning at 5am, after feeding my baby, I ran down stair to check the dough. Aha…it raised. Then, I just removed the cling wrap, and let the bread maker proceeded with the baking process while I continued my sleep. When I woke up, the bread loaf was done and cooled. Here it is, my ugly looking bread. It's rough, but not hard, still edible.

Chocolate Bread Loaf

Ingredients:
200ml fresh milk (chocolate flavored)
330gm of bread flour
1.5 tsp of yeast
25gm butter
4 tbsp of fine sugar
1/2 tsp of salt

Steps:
1. Put all the ingredients into bread maker follow the sequence of liquid, semi liquid, and dry ingredients.
2. Select "dough" program.
3. When the dough is ready, proceed for baking. Remark: I continue to let it proof for another 8 hours as the dough has not doubled in size.

Tomato Salad 番茄沙拉

This tomato salad was introduced by Chef James from Taiwan. It is very simple to prepare. Tomato is well known for its nutritional value as natural medicine to bring down the blood pressure. Hence, this salad is good for those who has high blood pressure.

I served this salad with home roasted chicken. It’s yummy!

Tomato Salad 番茄沙拉
Serves 2-3


Ingredients:
2 tomatoes
mint leaves, chopped
1 tbsp of rice wine
1 tbsp or less of sugar
a pinch of sugar
water
cold water

Steps:
1. Bring a pot of water to a boiling point. Boil the tomatoes for 1 minute. Drain and soak it in the cold water. Peel the skin and dice it.
2. Mix up the diced tomato with rice wine, sugar, salt and mint leaves.
3. Store in fridge and serve cold.

Sausages Rice 腊味饭

I learned this recipe from a Taiwanese cooking show. I memorized the cooking steps and finally tried it myself last Saturday. I omitted the soy sauce per the original recipe since the sausages were already very salty. With lots of fried shallots, leeks and juices from the sausages, the rice tastes so delicious! Beware that the liver sausage is very salty. Luckily I added just one.

Sausages Rice 腊味饭
Serves 2

Ingredients:
2 Chinese sausage
1 Chinese liver sausage
3 chicken cocktail
1 cup of rice
1 stalk of leek, use only the white portion
10 shallots
1 tbsp of oil
water

Seasonings:
1 tbsp of Shao Xin wine

Garnishing:
some chopped spring onion

Steps:
1. Rinse the rice. Pour it into the rice cooker. Add water up to 1 cup level as per the indicator. Drain water into a bowl and set aside for later use.
2. Make a few shallow cut on the Chinese sausage skin.
3. Put all the Chinese sausage in a non-stick pan. Pan-fry to remove excess oil from the sausage.
4. Add some oil to the pan. Add the shallots. Half way of doing this, add chicken cocktails to pan-fry together till you brown the shallots. Off the flame.
5. Mix the fried shallots to the rice. Arrange Chinese sausages and chicken cocktails on top of the rice. Select the quick cook mode and start the rice cooking process.
6. 3 minutes before the rice cooking is done, mix up the leek with the rice and let the rice continue to cook.
7. When the rice is cooked, sprinkle a tbsp of Shao Xin wine and stir the rice. Remove the sausages. Keep the rice warm for another 5 minutes.
8. Slice the sausages. ( I remove its external skin).
9. Serve the rice with sausage slices. Garnish with some chopped spring onion.

Sweet Potato Dessert 番薯糖水

This is a fuss-free dessert. Everyone can cook this. To cook this, you can either dump everything in a slow cooker or to cook it on the stove.  I prefer the latter. It won't take very long as the orange sweet potato turn soft very fast.

Sweet Potato Dessert 番薯糖水

Ingredients:
300gm of orange sweet potato
1 piece of ginger, about 2 thumb-sized, bruised
6 pandan leaves, tied into knobs
1200 ml water
Brown sugar to taste.

Steps:
1. Peel the sweet potato. Use "cut & tear" method to prepare the potato into bite-size. This will create uneven surface to the potatoes which will increase its surface area to shorten the cooking time.
2. Bring water to boil in a pot. Add in the pandan leaves and ginger to simmer for 5 minutes.
3. Pour in the sweet potato and let it simmer under medium heat until it turns soft.
4. Season with brown sugar about 15 minutes before the dessert is ready. Let the dessert cool down a bit in the wok (with cover) before serving.