SPICED CRAB STACK W PICKLED RADISH, FENNEL SORBET & CANDIED FENNEL

Last Sunday at our  Middle East London brunch club our guest chef James created a dish inspired by one he had eaten on a recent trip to Abu Dhabi. A spiced crab stack with tomato and an array of perfectly balanced sweet, sour and spicy flavours beside a surprisingly sweet and refreshing fennel sorbet. 

The dish was James first suggestion and helped us to decide on a theme involving exotic flavours and spices from The Middle East and Morocco. 

This was such an interesting dish we wanted to provide a recipe, whilst we have aimed to provide you an accurate recipe it does come down to a bit of this and a bit of that to create your ultimate flavour balance.

There was a fair amount of tasting and deciding on a little more spice, a little more lemon or a little more ginger until we were happy with dish.

It seems a powerful dish to serve at brunch but it was enjoyed by all but the two vegetarians at our brunch, actually one of the vegetarians tried it as well ( naughty! )

For an alternative to the crab we made a pearl barley, potato, fennel, mint and lemon stack. We tried to emulate the textures of the crab and reflect the strength of the dish so that it wasn't lost against the fennel sorbet accompaniment. 

Ingredients:


For the Fennel Sorbet
This made about 1/2 litre
1-2 fennel bulbs
White wine
5Tbsp caster  sugar (per fennel bulb)
Lime juice to taste

Method for the Fennel Sorbet

Wash a large fennel bulb (or two smaller) and cut into a small dice, retaining the tops for garnish.  Place into a sauce pan and add enough white wine to cover by 1cm. Add 5 tablespoons of sugar per fennel bulb and bring to the boil.  

Reduce the heat to a simmer, loosely cover and cook for an hour.  After an hour the wine should be largely cooked away and the fennel should be nicely squidgy and the strong aniseed notes replaced with a sweet, almost apple like taste.  

Remove from heat and blend the fennel to a fine puree. Adjust the taste with lime juice to add a tart note to the sorbet.  Pass the puree through a sieve to make as smooth a base as possible.  The remaining solids can be blended again and reincorporated to add texture.  

The puree is then ready either to go in your  chilled ice cream maker for 30 minutes or directly into the freezer stirring every 30 minutes for 2-4 hours to help avoid large ice crystals forming.

NB: Having made this a few times now it seems a little temperamental and crumbly when forming scoops or quinels.  It seems to work best when you don't freeze too much in the same container so it defrosts more evenly.  Hot spoons also seems to help. What you can do is form quinnels in advance of freezing or freeze in scoops on a tray if you have room. Make sure you give yourself 10 minutes of thaw time before plating up. 

For the Candied Fennel
This was enough for 16- 20 people
3 Fennel bulbs
4 Tbsp caster sugar
5 Cardamon pods


Method for the Candied Fennel

The trick with this is to try and find a fennel bulb that hasn't had the base trimmed too high as you need the connection across the root to hold the slices together.  Pre-heat your oven to around 100c degrees.  Cut the fennel parallel to the line of the tops into 2mm slices.  

Put a shallow pan of water on to boil adding 4 or 5 tablespoons of sugar and half a dozen cracked cardamon pods.  Poach the fennel slices in the water for 10 minutes then remove and dry with kitchen towel.
Place the slices on a piece of baking parchment on a tray and place in the oven.  The timing and temperature on this can be pretty tricky.  The idea is to dry the slices out a little and then increase the temperature to crisp them.
About 30 minutes at 100c degrees should do for the drying but keep an eye on them in case you have a particularly hot oven.  Once they start to feel drier and slightly sticky rather than wet turn the heat up to 150c, after 10 minutes the slices should brown slightly and start to crisp.  Remove the slices as they brown, larger slices will take slightly longer.

For the crab
For 16 - 20 people
1 medium crabs
3 radishes
White wine vinegar
4 tomatoes
3 Spring onions
1tsp paprika
1 inch piece of ginger
1/2tsp chili paste
Juice of half a lemon
Salt & Pepper

Method for the crab

NB: Having watched Nick "effortlessly" remove all the meat from one of the crabs we bought for this and picked bits of claw out of my hair, I'd suggest using pre-dressed!  
Slice a couple of radishes into rounds and sit in a little white wine vinegar to slightly pickle, this will take about half an hour.  Blanch 4 tomatoes in boiling water to help loosen the skins, peel, remove the seeds and cut into a small dice.  Put the white and brown meat from 2 crabs into a bowl and mix in the tomato, finely chopped spring onions, hot smoked paprika,  grated ginger, chilli paste, and juice of half a lemon. Combine these ingredients and season to taste.

NB: If you have a particularly wet consistency you may want to add a few bread crumbs to get it to hold it's shape on the plate.

To construct:

Place a tbsp of the crab mixture onto the plate, place a chefs ring over and roll it around to create a cylinder.  Place 3 slices of radish on top of the crab.  We used a Japanese ceramic soup on the side to serve the fennel.  Form a quinel or scoop of the sorbet to sit on the spoon.  Rest the candied fennel against the side of the sorbet and then sprinkle with the fennel tops.  Voila!

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SEVEN SWANS A SWIMMING RECIPE: CHOUX PASTRY SWANS FILLED WITH DUCK BREAST, DUCK LEG CONFIT, POMMES SARLADAISE & CELERIAC MASH. PART 1 CHOUX PASTRY SWANS

Hey all. We're back having taken a brief blogging holiday since Christmas, catching our breath from so much cooking and running around serving dinner.

One of the show stoppers from our holiday supper club season, which we cooked at several events was the savoury choux pastry swan filled with pommes sarladaise, confit of duck leg, slices of seared duck breast, celeriac mash and brussel sprouts accompanied with a mustard creme fraiche sauce.

A rather indulgent meal, made up of lots of components that kepts us on our toes, especially when serving it as course 7 of our epic 12 course Christmas dinner for 21 people.

As we ate the last of our confit duck legs on Thursday (preserved under fat it can lasts for months) we decided it would be a good idea to post this recipe and bit of step by step on how to create this show stopper. This will be posted in two parts, part 1 being making the choux pastry, creating and assembling the swans. This is the same sort of pastry you would use if making profiteroles for example. We made no changes to it but kept it savoury for our dish. It requires some practice and experimentation for piping and size etc, but it looks amazing once presented as a dish. 

Being the baker and pastry maker of the house I took on the choux pastry and swan making. Actually its one of the easiest pastries to prepare and there is not much to it. Piping them to look like swans wasn't too hard either, I watched a video of Michel Roux making the choux pastry then another video demonstrating how to pipe the swan heads and bodies. 

I had to make this a few times to figure out how many swans I'd get for the amount of mixture as Michel Roux Jnrs recipe wasn't specifically for swans. 

The number of swans you will get varies depending on size. I tripled this in order to make 25 swans, but it did it in single batches which is a good idea as you'll want to do a couple of practice swans first and figure out size. They will almost double in size once cooked. Traditionally these are made as a dessert and filled with cream but worked just as well for our savoury main dish.

Ingredients for choux pastry ( taken from Michel Roux recipe ) 

• 125ml milk
• 100g, butter, diced
• 1/2tsp salt
• 1tsp sugar
• 150g plain flour
• 4 medium eggs

Method

Pre heat the oven to 200c and line a baking tray or 2 with non stick greaseproof paper.

Combine, milk, butter, salt and sugar and slowly bring to boil, just as its boiling take it off the heat. 

Sieve the flour and slowly add this to the mixture, stirring vigourously with wooden spoon. It will all come together in to a nice smooth dough and pretty much clean the bowl of liquid. 

Now add the eggs one at a time, stirring each until combined. You'll notice at first as you mix in the egg the mixture seems to fall apart and starts to resemble a glutenous mess but persist with stirring for 10-15 seconds and it will come back together, repeat until all the eggs have been incorporated. Give it a final good stir and it should be smooth, glossy and able to be piped. 

I used 2 piping bags with different sized nozzles for the body and the necks. Its hard to say but around 2/3 of the mixture should be for the bodies and the rest for the neck. We wanted quite big bodies as we were filling them with lots of delicious duck. 

The best way to learn the piping method is to watch a video I found this one helpful. Its for a dessert but the piping techniques for the swan is exactly the same.

For the neck use round nozzle 2A. You will start where the head will be and pipe an S shape on the baking paper, stopping and pulling swiftly up as your finish to get a clean end. You then go back to the head and pipe a little extra and pull swiftly down to create a beak, this is clear in the video I suggested above. 

For the bodies use the large round nozzle 1A. You'll start by keeping the nozzle in one spot, pipe out a generous size, ours were around 6 cm wide and then pull the piping bag downwards to create a tear drop.  When you finish the bodies simply stop apply pressure to the bag and lift it up quickly. 

Make sure you keep a few cm space between each on the baking tray as they'll nearly double in size.

Bake the swans for around 20 minutes. Its going to vary depending on size. For ours, we baked the bodies for 20 - 25 minutes and the necks for 20 minutes as we were making large swans. It will require a little experimentation on your part. 

If you under cook them the bodies will deflate a little when you take them out of the oven. Its trial and error, we made a lot to figure out the best cooking times, consistency and size of our finished product. Try one or two different sizes first and bake a few to figure out what you prefer. 

You can store these as we did in a plastic container for a few hours and re heat them later when ready to serve. Re heating firms up the bodies a bit more which then makes it easier to cut and assemble them.

To prepare the bodies for the filling, slice across the top of the body to create a flat top. The piece you've cut should be about 1cm thick, it can then be chopped in half length ways and used as wings  (we chose not too, but for a dessert this is usual) 

Pipe a dollop of mash, be that potato or as in our case celeriac on to the top of the body where you will affix the swans neck and voilà you have your swan ready to add the pomme sarladase, confit and duck. 

Come back soon for Part 2 of this recipe by Nick where he explains the remaining components of the dish so you end up with something like this.....

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SMOKED HADDOCK, SPINACH AND POTATO GRATIN WITH SOFT EGG RECIPE

A few weeks back we had a rather tasty smoked haddock gratin for brunch at La Vie en Rose on Broadway Market. It was so delicious that we just had to work up our own version for our next brunch club - smoked haddock, spinach and potato gratin with soft egg.

Here's the recipe we cobbled together for our test run today. We did a bit of research across the web about making the ideal smoked haddock gratin - here's a few interesting things we found:

• Poaching the haddock in milk: Some recipes we found called for the haddock to be poached in milk first - others where it did not. It reduces the saltiness apparently - and you can use some of the milk in the white sauce. We liked this idea so included it. 
• Un-dyed vs dyed smoked haddock: Many recipes called for un-dyed smoked haddock but we struggled to find any that wasn't dyed a funky yellow colour. Why do they dye Haddock yellow? Apparently it's a commercial process to mimic the colour the fish goes when you smoke it properly. Never been one for faux anything - we would always choose the un-dyed if we can find it
• Experiment with your cheese mix: Whilst we used cheddar and parmesan in our gratin we think you could probably lift this dish a touch more with more complex cheese mix - gruyere springs to mind. We might try that next time. 
• Adding eggs into baking dish a nice touch for brunch: We didn't have any eggs in the larder for this test run but intend to bake a soft egg into it for our brunch. Optional but again can help lift the dish. 

Ingredients (serves 3 - 4)  
400g smoked haddock fillets
Milk for poaching
50g butter
25g plain flour
175ml single cream
1/4 tsp Cayenne

2 tsp dijon mustard

2 tsp lemon juice
Seasoning
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
1/2 cup grated parmesan 

1 cup fresh breadcrumbs
1/2 bag spinach
10 or so baby new potatoes 
Two eggs (optional)
Green leaves for salad (e.g rocket)
Tbsp Lemon juice, olive oil and mustard for dressing 

Method  
Poach / par-boil your components:

• Parboil your potatoes with skin on in gently simmering water for 12 - 15 minutes. Checking with fork until they are soft but firm. Drain and rinse in cold water to arrest the cooking process. When cool cut into 1 inch thick slices 
  
• Place the haddock in a saucepan, pour over enough milk to cover, bring to a simmer and poach gently for 4-5 minutes. Drain keep the milk, allow to cool and gently pull the fish away from the skin in large chucks and flakes, keeping your eyes open for any stray bones. 
• Blanch your spinach in boiling water for a brief moment - 1 minute or so. Then drain and rinse in cold water. Try to squeeze as much water out as possible. 

Assemble the base:

• Lightly grease a baking dish with butter and randomly scatter the potatoes and chunks of haddock into the dish and drape with spinach. 
• Dont pack it too tightly you want gaps for the white sauce to penetrate and space for your soft eggs if you want them
  

Prepare white sauce:

• Whisk in your mustard, lemon juice and spices into the cream. 
• Melt the butter in a pan. Add the flour and cook, stirring for 2 minutes. 
• Gradually stir in the cream mixture and 175ml or so of the reserved poaching milk. 
• On a gentle heat stir and simmer until thickened. Taste and season appropriately. 
• Fold in all but handful of the cheeses and when it has melted pour cream mixture over fish and potato mixture
• If you want the soft egg version - use a large spoon to create two nestled hollows to crack an egg into each of them  

Top off, bake and serve:

• Mix together the breadcrumbs and remaining cheese and sprinkle over the top. Add a few small knobs of butter. 
• Cook in a preheated oven 190C/ 375F/ Gas 5, for 15 - 20 minutes or until the top is golden brown. 
• Serve with a green leaf salad with a sharp lemon / mustard dressing

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CHICKEN THEEYAL (KERALAN STYLE BURNT COCONUT TOMATO CHICKEN CURRY)

My sister in law's family hails from Kerala in southern India and as such we have a particular fondness for Keralan food in our house. I find southern Indian to be a somewhat lighter, fresher cuisine with more tropical flavours than your classic north Indian curries - using much more coconut, mangos and seafood and the like in their dishes. We have a fantastic vegetarian Keralan restaurant Rasa just down the road from us which we visit fairly regularly (and I would urge you to do so too). Their Masala Dosa is fantastic and would have to be one of my favourite Indian dishes - I plan to make my own Masala Dosa very soon in the future. Watch this space.

But today I felt like making something a bit different. I looked in our cupboard and saw our extensive and largely under-utilised Indian spice rack. I searched around and stumbled across a few great sites including the excellent Sama.in which were great for recipe inspiration. I found a good recipe for a Theeyal which means ‘burnt dish’. Its a typical Keralan dish featuring burnt coconut, and is usually dark brown in colour. It gets its colour from browning of coconut and also from the inclusion of tamarind. 

Now strictly speaking the classic form of this dish is a vegetarian one (as are most Keralan dishes) typically cooked with eggplant, bitter melon or even baby onions. I also found a few versions with prawns / shrimp. My issue was that I had some chicken I needed to use. Not entirely authentic I know but chicken theeyal it was.

I merged two recipes which seemed pretty similar and had good descriptive methods. Both were for ulli theeyal from Samai.in and from Salkaraam.com

Chicken Theeyal (Kerala style burnt coconut tomato chicken curry)

Ingredients:

• 2 onions (1 finely diced, 1 halved and sliced)
• 500g diced chicken breast (or thighs)
• 1 x 400g tinned tomatoes
• 2 tsp tamarind paste (or small to medium tarmarind if you can get it)
• 1 cup coconut (grated preferably or soaked desiccated) 
• 1 finely diced green chilli
• 1/4 tsp fenugreek seeds
• Handful curry leaves
• 1-2 tsp chilli powder
• 1tsp  coriander powder
• 1 tsp masala powder
• 1/4 tsp turmeric powder
• Oil (coconut if you have it)
• Salt to taste

For tempering (hot oil spice infusion):

• 2 tsp mustard seeds 
• Dried red chilli if available
• Curry leaves - a sprig

Method:

Heat oil and fry your diced onions until they go golden. Add coconut, fennel seeds and curry leaves and stir well until coconut turns brown. Add remaining spices (dont accidentally add your tempering mustard seeds like I did - keep them for them end) and stir for few seconds only. Remove from pan and allow to cool. Blend this mix into a masala paste by slowly adding up to one cup of water until its a thick brown paste. 

Heat some more oil add chicken, diced green chilli and sliced onions. Allow to sizzle for a few minutes until starting to brown. Add your masala paste and sizzle in that for a few minutes. Add tomatoes and tamarind paste (If you are lucky enough to find a real tamarind - soak it in water then add a cup of the tamarind water at this point). 

Assuming you added the tamarind paste, add some more water to your sauce if it is too thick. Simmer 5 - 10 mins. Season to taste. Remove from heat and place into serving dish. 

Finally you need heat some more oil (few tea spoons). Add mustard seeds (they should start to 'pop') and add your curry leaves. Also add your dry red chilly if you have it. Allow to sizzle and infuse for a brief moment then pour this onto the curry. 

Serve with white rice. YUM!

 

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LAST MINUTE DINNER PARTY : COD EN PAPILLOTE WITH GARLIC CHILLI BUTTER

It was a long weekend in London - and due to poor weather our scheduled BBQ at a friends house had been called off at short notice. Every cloud has a silver lining so with a gaggle of hungry friends looking for a feed Bex and I decided to have an impromptu indoors dinner party. With very little time to prepare we went for fast and simple menu:

• Entree - After consulting my bro went with a simple Puy lentil, Beetroot and goats cheese salad
• Main - Cod en papilotte with carrots, capsicum and garlic and chilli butter
• Dessert - Bexy whipped up some Hummingbird style Red velvet cupcakes

After agonising over the menu we went with Cod as the main as its so fast to cook and wouldnt hold up the other courses with some kind of slow roasting meat or cassoulet which we had also been considering. We dashed out during a break in the weather and grabbed the ingredients. People started trickling in early evening and we had a great time prepping and cooking the dishes all standing around in the kitchen.

Today I'll focus on the Cod as it was the more interesting dish I think. If you havent heard of it En papillote means "in parchment" in French and is a method of cooking in which the fish is put into a folded parcel of greasepoof paper and cooks in its own steam. I've cooked this a few times for Bexy and I have found it very versatile in that it can carry infinite flavour combinations. You can go more asian with sesame oil, ginger and soy, or more french with garlic butter and parsley, or classic with lemon, dill etc etc. Any crisp vegetables that can be steamed work well as an accompaniment just make sure they are not cut too thick or chunky. Batons and julienned vegetables works best partnered with lots of fresh herbs of your choosing.

Whats good about them is if you prepare the parcels ahead of time - you can relax and throw them in right before your main course is due. Most of the recipes I found online suggested cooking times somewhere between 8 - 13 minutes at 180 C depending on the size of the fish. Unfortunately I didnt have the luxury of much prepping time for this dinner so wrapped them on the fly with my guests mingling around me. I seconded the lovely Mel who cut me the seven heart shaped parcels while I wrapped them up.

This is a very easy, satisfying and healthy way to cook - and would recommend it heartily. But one note of warning - I got caught out by undercooking one or two of my fillets in the large batch of seven. I cooked them all at the longer end of the accepted cooking time (13 mins) and across two shelves in the oven. On taking them out I had opened and checked my own parcel before serving - and it was done - if not verging on overdone. But once all handed out opened and unwrapped two of my unluckier guests got a fillet on the uncomfortable side of pink (Doh!), so we had to return for a quick blast under the grill. We could only surmise that the slight variation in fillet size and the possibiltiy that my oven has uneven heat was to blame. If you've got thick fillets and alot of them I would verge towards the 15 minute mark just to be sure.


And this is where the strength and weakness of the papilotte lies. Many recipes I found celebrated the joy or serving the parcels to your guest and letting them unwrap it to reveal the steaming goodness inside. But at the same time, for that very reason I felt I should not open too many so I was unable to accurately check each fillet was cooked apart from a gentle prod through the paper to make sure it was firm. Previously when I cooked for myself I have removed them, inspected them closely  and plated the fillet with vegetables, herbs and juices in place quite easily using an egg flip / fish slice. If I had done that on this occasion I would have avoided the undercooking issue, but also increased the workload and crucial oven to table time plating up seven plates. More importantly I would have lost some of the steamy magic. Asking around the table most agreed opening the parcel was fun and should be part of it. I'm not sure - I'd probably be tempted to try plating it individually next time.

Now some recipes suggested using foil, however most of the more serious recipes from established chefs call for greaseproof paper. Something about transfer of heat altering the way it cooks, although it probably wouldn't make a huge difference. Although I often use some foil along the seam to assist it to hold together if my folds arent up to scratch. I cant really describe the folding process of the parcels too well in writing (see below) but the general aim to to create a fold at right angles to the bottom of the parcel, then progressively build folds along the edge, each one on top of the other. Good old Gordon Ramsey demonstrates the papillote folding process here very well (skip to 3:30 for the folding) Although he suggests using a parchment paper cut as a straight square folded into diamond halves where I picked up somewhere that a heart shape actually makes it easier to fold. I've tried both and prefer the heart shape.
 
Ingredients
Serves 6.

6 portions of line caught cod (skin on or off depending on your preference)
4 carrots, peeled and cut into battons / strips
3 Mixed capsicum / pepper cut into strips
3 tblsp unsalted butter
6 clove garlic crushed 
6 tsp chilli paste
1 bunch French / broad leaf parsely
Salt and pepper to taste
Roll of grease proofe paper(some foil to assist seal if you wish)

Method
Preheat oven to 180 degrees.

Cut parchment paper - 6 sheets of 30cm x 30cm. squares. Fold in half, then trim from bottom left corner around to top left via the edge in a semi / halved - heart shape. Unfold it and would should have a symmetrical heart shape.

Combining your garlic and butter. Smear a teaspoon of the butter onto one half of each of the heart shaped parcels.

Divide carrots and capsicums and a few sprigs of parsely evenly among the 6 parcels.

Layer the single cod fillet on top of each and smear on top with garlic butter. Put a dollop of chilli paste on the top if you fancy and another sprig of Parsely. Season well with salt and pepper.

Fold each parcel, starting in one corner, fold in small triangle all the way around the packet, leaving no opening. See Gordon fold a parcel here at 3min :30

Place packets on baking tray, bake for 8 - 15 minutes (8-12 for thinner fillets. 12-15 minutes for thicker ones).

P.S The best bit about cooking this dinner was there was some nice opportunities for creative leftovers. Busted out a beer batered Cod and chips with the left over (uncooked) cod and made a Borsch beetroot soup with the left over beetroots for lunch on sunday. Lush!
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BBQ GRILLED QUAIL MARINATED IN POMEGRANATE MOLASSES AND MOROCCAN SPICES

The title should actually read: BBQ grilled quail marinated in pomegranate molasses and moroccan spices with a blood orange and tarragon sauce. Served with grilled chicory wedges and roasted vegetable couscous. 

Yep, this one was special. It was a sparkling weekend in London. Spring has definitely sprung and the BBQ was busted out. Due to an Icelandic volcano poor bexy was still stuck in Ireland so missed out – but by all accounts had her own set of gastronomic adventures in Dublin. I definitely had one here.

This is actually my brother JP's handiwork. He was testing out some new combos for an upcoming dinner party.  The pomegranate molasses is perfect as a base for a sweet, tangy marinade and was given an extra kick with the addition of Ras el Hanout (a delicious blend of over 25 spices from Moroccan cuisine).

The blood orange and tarragon sauce was there for tartness, and the chicory wedges were there for aniseedy bitterness and to offset the sweetness of the marinade. The lovely warm flavours of roasted vegetable couscous with odd bursts of parsley and mint rounded out the dish. This was an awesome meal.

Ingredients
4 Whole Quail
4 tbsp Pomegranate Molasses (could substitute with a reduced pomigraniate juice)
Sprinkling of Ras el Hanout spice mix
1/4 cup good olive oil
3 blood oranges
Handful of tarragon
Handful of mint
Handful of broadleaf parsley
Salt & Pepper
3 Red Chicory (endive), quartered lengthways
1 capsicum (pepper)
12 cherry tomatoes (on vine if possible)
100g asparagus spears 
100g couscous

Method 
Grilled quails & chicory
Remove kidneys and entrails if they still have them. Cover quails with Pomegranate Molasses and add good covering of Ras el Hanout, cracked pepper and olive oil. Cover and refrigerate and marinate as long as you can. Ideal would be 1 - 4 hours (although we only managed 30 mins)

After marinating place Quails on a hot BBQ grill for around 4 minutes a side. Drizzle with remaining marinade as you cook it. Try to minimise turning so as to preserve the attractive grill marks. Skewer legs and breast to see if juices run clear. Let meat rest before plating up.

Whilst out with the BBQ. Drizzle the the quatered chicory wedges with olive oil and grill for 2-3 minutes so they are slightly charred, softened but still crunchy. If using coal fired BBQ try not to let too much excess oil fall onto coals as the resulting oil fire ball can leave unpleasant burnt oil flavour / coating.

Roast vegetable couscous
Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Cut out stem and seeds of Capsicum - but largely keeping it whole. Add the capsicum, cherry tomatoes on vine to a small roasting tray. Roast for 10 minutes. Turn components once or twice. Add final blast under grill setting for final few minutes. Ideally will be soft and falling apart. Possibly charcoaled. Remove and allow to cool slightly. Cut into strips and large pieces for tossing into couscous.

Snap off asparagus woody section at bottom of aspargus stems. Fry in pan for 2 - 3 minutes until softened but still crunchy. You could also steam them if you prefer.

Cook the couscous according to the instructions on the packet. We like to use vegtable stock instead of water to give it extra flavour.  As a rule of thumb use twice the volume of water / stock to couscous. 

Roughly chop a handful of broadleaf parsley and mint. Add the roasted veg, asparagus and herbs to the cooked couscous. Toss all together with another splash of olive oil. Season and serve.

Blood orange & Tarragon sauce
Peel blood oranges. Carefully remove segments of the orange with knife (avoiding pithy white bits). Put aside into bowl. Squeeze juice from left over pithy / pulpy bits into bowl also. Roughly chop Tarragon and add to bowl. Add a healthy splash of olive oil, pinch of sea salt and black pepper.  (If you like you could also add splash of pomegranate juice here - we forgot to buy some on the day).

To Finish
Plate up using the three major elements on the plate and then drizzling the quails with the blood organge tarragon sauce. Lush!

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MALAYSIAN CHICKEN RICE (HAINAN CHICKEN)

My old Flatmate Natalie, who was Malaysian, used to cook this dish for us, its very simple and delicious. She used to just call it 'chicken rice', I understand its a widely popular dish across Malaysia, Singapore and parts of China. The Chinese call it Hainan/Hainanese Chicken and they tend to serve it bones and all. The rice is sticky and flavoursome because its cooked in the chicken fat and stock, this is an important element.
The chicken on its own is quite plain as the sauce is what give it added flavour and zing!
Natalie used to serve a bowl of the chicken stock/soup as a first course whilst waiting for the rice to cook and chicken to be chopped and served. I do this if I have guests. Alternatively you can freeze this for later and use it as a nice chicken stock for use in soups and other asian style dishes.

Serves 2-3

Ingrediants:

For the chicken
1 whole organic chicken - neck and cavity fat removed and kept aside.
4 or 5 spring onions/scallions (retain some for garnish)
1 thumb size piece of ginger, sliced
1tsp whole black peppercorns
punch of salt

For the sauce
1 red chilli, half sliced, half chopped
4 cloves of garlic, grated or chopped finely
1 splash sesame oil (if available)
1 splash light soy
Juice from half a lime

For the greens
3 or 4 bok choy, halved
splash of dark soy
splash of fish sauce

1 cup basmati or Jasmine Rice


Method:
1.Trim fat off chicken if you haven't already done so, specifically neck and inside cavity. Put aside for later use with the rice. Wash the chicken.
2. Chop spring onion and ginger and stuff into cavity of chicken.
3. Bring to the boil a large stock pot of water (big enough to hold the chicken) at salt and peppercorns.
4. Submerge the chicken in the boiling water, and turn down to a gentle simmer. Cover the chicken but be careful for it not to boil over. Turn occasionally.
5.Simmer for 45-50 minutes until the chicken is cooked and the juices from the leg area run clear.
6.When chicken is cooked, remove from pot and plunge in to a bath of ice cold water for a couple of minutes. This tightens the skin, stops the cooking process and keeps the chicken moist.
Retain the stock the chicken was poaching in for use with the rice (or to serve as a first course soup).
7.Remove from ice bath, drain chicken and remove excess pieces of ginger and spring onions from cavity. Set chicken aside.
8.Once cooled, slice down middle of the breast bone and and across to carefully remove the entire breast, skin and all. Slice into one inch pieces keeping the shape of the chicken breast and skin.



Prepare Rice
In a small pot render (fry) the chicken fat that you set aside early, after about a minute you should have enough oil to fry the rice in.
Put the rice in to the chicken fat and fry for approx 1min until grains start to go clear. Ladel 1 1/3 cups of the chicken stock in to the rice. Turn down and simmer for 11 minutes with lid on.
After 11 minutes turn off the heat keeping the lid on and let the steam finish off the rice.
When ready to serve, remove lid and whisk with fork. The Rice should be fluffy and slightly sticky.

Greens
Whilst you are waiting for the rice to cook you can prepare the bok choy.
In a hot wok or pan add a small splash of sesame oil or vegetable oil, add the bok choy with a dash of dark soy and a splash of fish sauce. Fry for 3 minutes until bok choy is slightly tender but still crisp.

Sauce
For the sauce, combine ginger, garlic, chopped chili and mush together in a small bowl. Add light soy, lime juice & sesame oil. Top with chili slices.

Serving
Spoon rice in to a small teacup or measuring cup until tightly packed. Place upside down on your serving plate. Lift the cup off the rice gently.
Add one sliced chicken breast 3 bok choy pieces per serving. Garnish with remaining spring onions and sliced chili. Spoon over chili sauce to taste.

Enjoy!

(Additional pieces of chicken left over can be used for additional portions or left overs.)






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