Tag Archive for: chicken

Crispy Chicken Slow Cooker Stew

chicken skin stewFew people in the world love slow cookers more than I do. I will never be a crazy cat lady living alone with a selection of kitties, but I will be surrounded by my beloved crockpots. At the height of recipe testing for Slow Cooked, I had seven slow cookers in my one bedroom flat and I’ve never been better fed nor warmer.

The only issue was that sometimes I wanted a little bit of bite to my food. Slow cookers do make everything very tender and soft which is both their selling point and their disadvantage to some people. I’ve cheated slightly here and added a non slow cooker step to this chicken stew to further convert the slow cooker sceptics who think it makes everything brown and tasteless.

Chicken thighs were slow cooked with lemon zest, stock, black olives and potatoes. About 20 minutes before the end, I added some chopped kale to wilt it down in the slow cooker and then for my masterstroke: the chicken skin from the thighs was crisped up under the grill and served on top of the stew. When I say it was good, I mean I’ve thought of nothing else all week waking or sleeping….

Crispy Chicken Slow Cooker Stew (serves 4)

  • 6 chicken thighs, skinned and boned, skin reserved
  • 450g potatoes
  • 1/2 celeriac
  • 1/2 lemon, zested and juiced
  • 1/2 small jar of black olives
  • 2 anchovy fillets
  • 50g smoked pork sausage (optional)
  • 500ml chicken stock
  • salt and pepper
  • 1/2 bag of curly kale

This is ridiculously easy to make. If you aren’t fodmapping, an onion would work well here or some sweet potato instead of celeriac. Don’t buy skinless chicken thighs or you’ll lose the magic.

Start by pulling the skin off the chicken thighs carefully in one piece and lay each piece on one sheet of kitchen roll, folding another sheet over the top of it. This will help dry the skin out so that it crisps up better later.

Snip the bones out of the chicken with kitchen scissors and tie them together with a bit of kitchen string. You’re going to pop them into the stew to add flavour but you want them easy to fish out again.

Cut each chicken thigh into six to eight bits and put in the slow cooker crock. Chop the potatoes and celeriac into 1 inch chunks and add along with the lemon zest, lemon juice, chicken stock, olives, whole anchovy fillets, sliced pork sausage and salt and pepper to taste. I used those tinned black olives because I love them and don’t care that they are basically dyed green ones sold on the cheap.

Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook it all on low for 8 hours. About 25 minutes before you want to eat, you need to do two small steps to add crunch and texture to a good, if pedestrian stew.

Firstly, remove the centre stalks from the kale. I detest the way supermarkets sell kale all chopped up with big bits of withered stalk in the middle. Luckily I can get it as a whole leaf and just rip the leaves off the centre which makes it much less bitter. Wash you kale and add it in the slow cooker. Put the lid back on for 20 minutes to allow it to come back up to temperature while wilting the kale.

Secondly, season the chicken skin well and heat your grill as hot as you can without setting the smoke alarm off. Line your grill pan with foil and lay the chicken skin out. Grill for 4-5 minutes under a very hot grill so that the skin bubbles up and becomes crispy. Keep an eye on it as it can go from golden to charred very easily.

Use a sharp knife to cut these chicken skin scratchings into strips. You want to serve them as soon after cooking as possible either on top of the whole crock served at the table or scattered on top of individual dishes of the stew. They don’t reheat well, but you won’t have leftovers when it’s this so that’s academic really.

There’s the perfect mix of bite and crunch and beautifully tender meat and I think this is probably one of the best things I’ve ever cooked. Everything else I ate this week suffered from not being this stew. You need to make it. Trust me. I know slow cookers after all…

Slow+Cooked+Challenge

 

Asian Style Chicken Meatballs

chicken meatballs

I think anyone who bought Slow Cooked got a flavour of my love of meatballs. I am delighted to have enabled so many other people too as they are amongst the most popular recipes from it and popular as a summer dish with the slow cooker too.

However sometimes, you want a dinner you can make really quickly without much prior thinking and effort and these Asian style chicken meatballs are a good one for that. I suspect it will take longer for me to write this post than make them…

On the #fodmap diet these days, my two ‘safe’ foods are always chicken and rice and I fall back on them when I cannot risk anything going wrong. I have almost superhuman abilities to eat plain chicken and brown rice but sometimes I need my staples to be jazzed up a bit so I blitzed some leftover rice with raw chicken and all the Asian style flavours in my kitchen and voila!

Bobbed in some homemade chicken broth with courgette, carrot, broccoli and some radish and fresh herbs I had a fodmap friendly dinner that didn’t feel worthy and used up lots of odds and sods. You could chuck any flavourings in that you liked or need using up. If you go Asian inspired, don’t forget to squeeze some lime over it all. I was limeless and it suffered slightly.

This dish also allowed me to try my newest fodmap trick with a julienne peeler. This turns carrots and courgettes etc into ribbons or julienne that makes small amounts of veg go further and bulk meals up when you can’t do much fibre or need to make one lone courgette serve several people to avoid a trip to the shop. I do like a useful kitchen gadget…

Chicken Meatballs (serves 2 if hungry, 4 if decorous)

  • 4 chicken thighs, boned and skinned
  • 150g cooked rice
  • 1 teaspoon shrimp or anchovy paste
  • 1 teaspoon soy sauce (use tamari if avoiding wheat)
  • 1 teaspoon miso paste (if not avoiding barley)
  • 1 teaspoon oil (sesame would be lovely if you have it)
  • 3cm fresh ginger or 1 teaspoon ginger paste
  • 1 stalk lemongrass or equivalent paste
  • 1/2 bunch fresh coriander
  • 1/2 bunch fresh parsley

Take the chicken off the bone. I usually just snip it off with kitchen scissors and then chop it roughly. Add in the cooked rice. I used some leftover stuff I had but if you keep an emergency packet of that microwaveable stuff in the house, it works well.

Put in all the flavourings and the oil in with it all and using a stick blender or food processor blitz it all together into a thick paste. It will will look revolting and oddly reminiscent of a documentary on McDonalds Chicken Nuggets and the shrimp paste will smell vile. Resist the temptation to curse my name and trust me because they will be great.

Wet your hands with cold water and pinch off walnut sized balls of the chicken mixture and roll into meatballs. Place on a plate and repeat until they are all rolled, wetting your hands again as needed. Chill for 30 minutes in the fridge or pop in the freezer for 15.

Heat a pan and add a little oil (not sesame) if it isn’t non stick. Fry the meatballs on each side on a medium hot heat for about 3 minutes, turning to get an even golden-ness on each side. Allow them to rest for about 3 minutes before serving. They have that bouncy chewy texture like Thai fish cakes but if you serve them too hot they are a bit rubbery.

Serve in a big bowl of chicken broth and veggies, maybe some rice noodles if you are super hungry and some chopped red chilli and fresh coriander and lime juice over the top and slurp them up out of the bowl. You could also serve them as a chicken meatball sandwich in a tortilla or flatbread for some serious fusion cooking going on. They are excellent cold as a lunch so it’s worth making a batch and playing around with flavours as you fancy.

Oi muchim, courgette flowers & boiled rice

Heat me up, melt me down: cool Vietnamese & Korean chilli favourites

Oi muchim, courgette flowers & boiled rice

As you might’ve noticed, it’s been hot. Very hot. And when it gets hot, I want food which both heats me up and cools me down (as the Shirley Lites almost sang). You could plot a graph showing a direct correlation between outside temperature, and my yearnings for salads and chilli. When we were growing up (and unexposed to hot, spicy food) I didn’t fully understand the concept of hot food actually cooling you down. I’ve come to appreciate it more over the years, and now many of my favourite foods in hot, humid weather are liberally laced with chillies.

My first chilli experience was… instructive. When I was nine, I watched a chilli-eating contest on a BBC TV programme called ‘Zoo 2000‘*. They made it all look fun and easy, so I went to the fridge and took out a green chilli I’d previously spotted. Biting off a decent chunk in one go, my  reaction to the subsequent heat caused the rest of the family to dissolve with mirth.

What turned it from a minor distraction into a family legend, though, was our dad laughing in that slightly condescending way adults can do, then eating the other half in one go. He probably thought my young palate was overly sensitive… but when he turn scarlet and grabbed the milk bottle from my hands to douse the fire within, comedy reigned. I learned two things that day: to treat chilli with respect, and that milk tempers capsaicin better than water. One reason I prefer lassi to beer in a curry house.

Anyway, weather like this tends to suppress my appetite, so an array of light but spicy food is perfect to nibble on. Recently I’ve been enjoying two of my favourite different south-east Asian dishes, each with a bit of fire in them. Hope you enjoy trying them out.

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Buttermilk Brined Barbecued Chicken

buttermilk chicken

I admit it. I am obsessed by buttermilk. But why wouldn’t I be when you realise what an amazing ingredient it is. Traditionally the the liquid left behind when cream is churned into butter, it’s an astounding versatile ingredient. High in protein and low in fat and more tangy and flavoursome than whey, it has been used in cooking for centuries.

These days it is usually made from culturing milk to make a creamy liquid in the same vein as drinks such as kefir which have always been associated with good digestive health as well as a delicious flavour. A friend of mine shares by buttermilk mixed with orange juice as a hangover cure which is beyond my limits of love for buttermilk.

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Coconut Chicken Bammy Salad

coconut salad chicken

When the weather warms up, salad becomes your new best friend. Quick and easy, it can be a great way to try out new things or reinvent old favourites. A recent trip to the Nour Cash and Carry saw me impulse purchase a coconut and a packet of bammy. This traditional Jamaican delicacy is made from ground cassava. It was the staple carbohydrate before the Second World War when wheat based breads became cheaper and easier to bake commercially. Wheat and gluten free, it is soaked before being fried or toasted and I just knew it would make great croutons for the salad.

Originally published on Brixton Blog… Read more