Tuesday 6 March 2012

I feel like chicken tonight…

Yes, I do love chicken. Cheap to buy, quick to make and lean to eat. Unless you're a vegetarian, you'd better have a good reason not to eat it. 

Introducing one of my favourite dishes: peanut coated chicken with sweet and sour sauce, served with rice.

Ok, now this really is a 30minute makeover; so if you're returning from work and need to turn over a quick meal or are having guests around and are really short on time, then this is ideal.

The longest part of this dish is the cooking of the rice, so you should start with this. Get a kettle boiling and in the meantime wash your rice. Then once the kettles boiled, add your water to the pan, and leave to cook. 

Now to parboil your chicken; as we are going to oven cook the chicken, we need to make sure that the chicken is properly cooked, plus it is a great way to lock in the flavours. The time for cooking will depend on the size of the chicken, but for a baby chicken cut to medium size you should need about 15mins. Add some soya sauce, ginger and garlic to your chicken and allow to cook. Once this has cooked, you should see that the chicken has expelled some of its juices, which will now be enriched with the extra flavourings you have added. Then a great tip for extra crunchy coated chicken with a bit of colour is to add some tomato puree and self raising flour. To be honest, it was a bit of a fluke discovery, but have never cooked crispy chicken any other way since then. You then turn the chicken until its covered fully in the flour and tomato puree paste, then add some crushed nuts, turn again and put into the oven for about 10mins.

Now for your sauce. Simply cut some onions, peppers, carrots and water chestnuts. Typically this recipe calls for large slices of each, but I'm not a big fan of the wide set onions, so I've opted for smaller cuts, but horses for courses- so go for whatever you like! Then add some standard sweet and sour sauce (no shame in this people), and further top up with spring onions and finely diced peppers. 

Now dish up, and dig in.



2 comments:

  1. That was seriously Delish
    Peanut butter and sweet n sour - who would have thought?

    Thankyou !!!

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  2. Glad you enjoyed! It's all about the crunchy sweet and sour bite! Next time I might try upping the satay flavour by adding some peanut butter to the chicken batter mix. I'll keep you posted!

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