yummy yummy yummy i got food in my tummy

February 14, 2009

yummy yummy yummy i got food in my tummy

Valentine Menu on a (pretty tight) Budget:

Chicken Schnitzel with Creamy Dill sauce

Rosemary & Garlic Potatoes

Chocolate Pudding

Altogether I think the meal for two cost us around 5 bucks each! Of course, not including all the painstaking manual labour that goes into the cooking and washing process. =.= Especially the washing process.

But for this, it's all worth it.

And because Dan’s parents are arriving tomorrow, he’s been going on quite a bit of a cleaning rampage (we woke up one morning and it was like… magic!). So I guess the least we can do is try to maintain the spotless-ness of the entire house.

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Recipe 1: The Chicken (adapted from Elise’s Pork Schnitzel recipe)

Crispy, succulent chicken... smothered in a warm and creamy herb sauce.

Ingredients:

• 1 large piece of chicken breast
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 egg, beaten
• 2 Tbsp milk
• 3/4 cup bread crumb ***
• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 3 Tbsp olive oil
• 3/4 cup chicken stock
• 1/2 teaspoon dried dill (or 2 teaspoons chopped fresh dill)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup sour cream

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*** How to make fresh bread crumbs

You can just substitute it with off-the-shelf bread crumbs; but the last time I had a supply of those in my pantry, a family of spiders decided to make it their home. Which was quite strange, since it was stored in an air-tight container, and was hardly ever used. =.= It freaked me out – and that was the end of my love affair with cheap, packaged bread crumbs.

So when I found out that making bread crumbs is actually a lot simpler than I had expected it to be (which was to be honest quite simple to begin with but I never gotten around doing it – I just never lived down my fear of stored bread crumbs), I whipped out my blender and got right to work.

All you need is a few pieces of half-stale bread with their crusts removed; tear them into 1-inch squares, and throw them into the blender/food processer!

4 slices of bread = 1 cup of bread crumbs

No need for first toasting the bread or crumbling them with your hands. I supposed my idea of making bread crumbs stemmed from the pre-food processer era.

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Step by step instruction (copy pasted from Elise’s recipe, with slight modifications to ingredients and, uh, utensils)

1. Use a meat hammer to pound the chicken breast as thinly as possible.  The original recipe called for the pork cutlets to be about 1/4-1/8 inch in thickness, but I don’t know if you can achieve that with chicken breast. Especially if you were substituting the hammer with a potato masher. =.=
2. Set out 3 shallow bowls.
   • One with a mixture of the flour, salt, and pepper.
   • The second with the egg and milk whisked together.
   • The third with a mixture of the bread crumbs and cayenne pepper.
3. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet on medium high heat.
4. Dredge the cutlets first in the seasoned flour, then dip the cutlets in the egg mixture, and then into the mixture of bread crumbs and cayenne pepper.
5. Sauté the cutlets for 3-4 minutes on each side, or until the chicken cooks through fully. Remove the chicken from the skillet and cover with foil and place in oven to keep warm (in other words, around 100 C).
6. Add the chicken stock into the skillet to deglaze the pan, scraping the bottom of the pan to loosen the brown bits.
7. In a small bowl mix the dill and salt into the sour cream. Stir the sour cream mixture into the chicken stock. Heat and stir until mixture thickens (do not let boil).
8. Serve the cutlets with the sauce. Serves 2.

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And the result:

Success! (/^ ^)/

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Recipe 2: Rosemary and Garlic Potatoes

Because garlic means everything to me.

Unlike the other two recipes, this wasn’t an experimental process since I’ve made it many many times in the past, and have fed it to many many people ever since.

But I’ve checked: recipe hasn’t made it to this site yet; so Imma put it up anyway.

And for the record, it’s a simple-as-hell, borderline-cheat version of any rosemary and garlic spuds recipes out there – so it’s a good last minute thing to whip up.

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Ingredients (for 2 servings of side):

• 1 large potato, scrubbed and diced to about 1-inch cubes with skin on
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, finely-chopped
• 1 tsp of dried rosemary
• 2-3 tbsp olive oil
• Salt & freshly-grounded black pepper to taste

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Method:

1. Cook the potatoes in a pot of salted water until just right (i.e soft enough for a fork to go through, but not overly mushy because we don’t want to end up with mashed potatoes).
2. On a small skillet (fuu, jargon), heat the olive oil on medium high heat.
3. Fry the garlic  + 1 tsp of rosemary till the garlic starts turning light brown.
4. Remove the skillet from the heat, as to avoid burning the garlic.
5. Drain the potatoes, and stir in the garlic/rosemary oil infusion.
6. Season with salt and pepper, plus more rosemary if you want.

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Result:

Success again! (/^ ^)/

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Recipe 3: Chocolate Pudding (from scratch)

Of course we need desserts.

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Once more, recipe was taken from here. And this website is quickly becoming my new cooking reference, because all the (simpler) recipes I’ve tried out from here have turned out a lot better than I’d expected.

Which can’t be said for Taste.com.au, my other recipe website which has heaaaps of different food and cuisine. But somehow I just phail like 7 out of 10 times when I pick recipes off this page. T.T

Granted, there were times I didn’t have some of the ingredients and tried to substitute them with what I had in my pantry; or even left them out completely if I convinced myself that it/they weren’t that necessary.

DON’T JUDGE ME. IT’S CALLED EXPERIMENTING FOR A REASON CAN?

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Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 Tbsp cornstarch/corn flour
• Pinch of salt
• 2 cups whole milk
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 cup of dark chocolate bits (I used Nestle Dark Chocolate Melts)
• Four 6-ounce ramekins or custard cups (I used 4 whiskey glasses)

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Method:

1. Whisk together the sugar, cocoa powder, cornstarch, and salt in a heavy-bottomed saucepan.
2. Gradually whisk in the milk.
3. Bring to a boil, whisking constantly, and boil, whisking, until pudding is thick, about 3 to 5 minutes. Remove from heat. (At the point it suddenly turned thick I was so incredibly fascinated)
4. Immediately beat the egg lightly in a medium, heat-proof mixing bowl.
5. Very gradually add the hot chocolate mixture to the egg, whisking constantly.
6. Whisk in the chocolate chips until they are melted and the mixture is smooth.
7. Pour the pudding into the ramekins or cups.
8. If you want, cover the surface of each of the pudding cups with some cut out wax paper (aka baking paper) to prevent a skin from forming on the top of the pudding.
9. Refrigerate, covered, until cold, at least 2 hours.

Optional: I tried adding a sprinkling of cayenne pepper into one of the cups, and the results were terrific. For anyone who has tried the combination of chilli+dark chocolate before, you’ll know how well those two go together. Other options include: serving with whipped cream.

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Results:

Could do with a few more hours in the fridge. But look at how pretty it already is! /cries

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Happee Valentine’s Day, again.

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