Teriyaki Chicken Rice

Mike made a really yummy chicken dish yesterday. He never takes measurements, so I'll just describe what he did.

Ingredients:

teriyaki sauce
honey
1 onion
4 chicken breasts, deboned and deskinned
steamed rice (cooled)
1 egg, beaten
cooking oil

Methodology:

Marinde the chicken breasts in the teriyaki sauce and honey. In a wok, sautee the onions until translucent. Add the chicken and fry until cooked through. Add the rice and egg, mix well, and continue to fry.

Serves 2.
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Korean chicken rice

There's actually no such dish, but I didn't know what to call our latest concoction. We found some Korean bean paste in Shopwise but when we opened it, it wasn't the black bean paste we'd been expecting, but the red kind (ssamjang). It looks like the red chili paste kind you find in bibimbap, and apparently, the red chili paste is one of the main ingredients of ssamjang (I looked this all up on the Internet.

It's actually a dipping paste, but Mike and I decided to throw something a little different together and here's what we came up with.

Ingredients:

sesame oil
5 chicken thighs, deboned and deskinned
2 tbsp rice wine
1 tsp minced ginger
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp pepper
1/2 onion, finely chopped
Korean red bean paste (ssamjang)
kim (Korean nori), cut into sheets measuring approximately 4" x 5"
steamed rice (one bowl per person)

Method:

Slice the chicken into strips. Marinate in rice wine, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, sugar, pepper and onion for about half an hour.

Stir-fry chicken in sesame oil until brown. Add 1 heaping tbsp of red bean paste (or to taste, depending on desired level of spiciness). When chicken is cooked through, add rice and 1 additional heaping tbsp of red bean paste. Fry, mixing well until flavors blend.

Transfer to serving bowl. Shred some kim on top. Serve with additional kim on the side.

Serves 2.

Verdict: Yummy, and super-easy.

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Chicken with tarragon and mustard cream sauce

After a long while, I decided to try something new (for the last few months we've just been cooking old favorites.

I went online for some ideas and finally adapted a recipe and came up with this:

Ingredients

4 chicken thighs, deboned and deskinned
salt
pepper
olive oil or unsalted butter
1 small native onion
1/2 chicken cube dissolved in 3/4 cup water
1 tsp mustard
1 tsp dried tarragon
1/4 cup cream

Pat chicken dry and season with salt and pepper. Cook the chicken thighs in olive oil, 2 min each side, over medium flame. Remove the chicken and set aside. Reduce flame to low. Saute onions until translucent. Add chicken broth, scraping off browned bits. Return chicken to the pan. Bring to a boil then cover, lower flame, and simmer for 20 minutes. Remove chicken. Add cream, mustard, and tarragon. Mix well and heat until sauce has thickened. Add salt and pepper to taste. Pour sauce over chicken and serve.

Serves 2.

Verdict: Tasty; a little on the salty side, so next time I won't bother adding salt, or maybe I'll put less chicken cube. The broth almost dried out, so it might be good to double check when you're simmering and add water if necessary. Mike said he thought the sauce would go better on pasta instead of rice. The original recipe has brandy in it, and I'm sure the brandy would add a marvelous touch, but I had neither brandy nor white wine on hand, so I simply did without.

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Baked orange chicken

I got a recipe from Epucurious.com and adapted it a little. Here it is:

1 pack chicken drumsticks (8 pieces)
salt and pepper
1 tsp dried thyme

Citrus Mix:
2 tbsp calamansi juice from concentrate (mixed)
1/4 cup fresh orange juice
1-1/2 tbsp honey
1 tbsp ginger root, crushed
2 tbsp melted butter/margarine or olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Combine the ingredients for the citrus mix and mix well. Baste chicken pieces generously with the citrus mix. Sprinkle chicken pieces with salt, pepper, and thyme.
3. Bake chicken uncovered in a baking dish for 30 minutes.
4. Remove from oven. Turn over chicken pieces and baste generously again, with the rest of the mix.
5. Return chicken to oven and bake for another 15 to 20 minutes, or until done.

Serves 3.

(For a slightly healthier dish, remove the chicken pieces from the sauce when cooked, and just pour a little of the sauce over the chicken to serve.)

The dish was okay, except it was a little difficult to get the chicken cooked just right (I had to put it back in twice). Also, Mike said it was a little too gingery.

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Baked Honey-Mustard Chicken

We have a relatively new oven that we haven't used much, so today I wanted to experiment with it. I also had a jar of sunflower honey from Baguio, that I hadn't opened, so I decided to try an old classic: honey-mustard chicken. Below is the recipe I came up with. I actually wanted to use tarragon instead of basil but we're all out.



7 chicken thighs, washed and patted dry
2 tbsp butter or margarine
2 tbsp mustard
3 tbsp honey
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
juice and rind from one small lemon
1/2 tsp garlic salt
1/4 tsp ground pepper
1/4 tsp dried basil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Farenheit.

In a saucepan, combine over low heat the butter, mustard, honey, garlic salt, Worcestershire sauce and ground pepper until the butter melts. Mix well. Remove from heat then slowly mix in the lemon juice and rind.

Place the chicken thighs skin-side down in a greased oven-safe dish. Brush chicken with sauce. Bake covered for 30 minutes.

Remove chicken thighs from oven. Turn them over, skin-side up. Brush chicken with the remainder of the sauce. Sprinkle basil on the chicken. Return to oven and bake uncovered for another 30 minutes. For a healthier meal, pour out and throw away the drippings before serving.

Serves 3.
Preparation time: 20 minutes Cooking time: 1 hour
Calorie count: approx. 500 calories per serving

Verdict: It was yummy but we had to keep some extra sauce on the side to dip the chicken into as we went along. Next time I think I'll actually marinate the chicken instead of just brushing the sauce on it, for more flavor. Mike also suggested adding something to the sauce to give it an extra kick; I think I'll add some chili garlic next time for a little bit of spice.

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Mesquite chicken

Mike made a yummy fried chicken dish the other day. He rarely doesn't measure ingredients when he cooks, but here, in general, is what went in the dish.

Ingredients:

5 chicken thighs, bones and skin removed
tomato catsup
mustard
vinegar
mesquite powder

Mix catsup, mustard, vinegar, and mesquite powder together. Marinade chicken in the mixture.

Fry covered until chicken is cooked through.

Extremely delicious dish.

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Korean Chicken Barbecue with Kim

It's Mike's birthday today, but he's ill (as am I) so we weren't in the mood to go out for lunch. So instead we stayed home and I finally tried my hand at Korean barbecue.

At Korean barbecue restaurants, we always have beef or pork (kalbi), but we haven't gone to the supermarket, and the only thing in our freezer was a packet of chicken thighs. We didn't have lettuce leaves either, but yesterday I had bought some kim (Korean nori) along with some Korean beanpaste at a Korean convenience store at Market Market, so for this recipe we used the kim instead.


A tub of chunjang (Korean black bean paste)

With all these ingredients on hand, I went online to look for ideas as to how to make a Korean barbecue out of the ingredients I had on hand and this is what I came up with. This recipe serves 2.

Ingredients:

5 chicken thighs, deboned and deskinned
kim (Korean nori), cut into sheets measuring approximately 4" x 5"
3 cloves garlic
2 green chili peppers, sliced into slivers
sesame oil
steamed rice (one bowl per person)

Seasoning:

2 tbsp rice wine
1 tsp minced ginger
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp pepper
1/2 onion, finely chopped
1/4 tsp chili powder

Dip:

sesame oil
salt
pepper
Korean black bean paste (chunjang/jajang)

Method:

Slice the chicken into strips. Marinate first in the rice wine and minced ginger for about 15 minutes. Then transfer to a separate bowl and mix well with the other marinade ingredients. Marinate for at least half an hour.

Put about a tsp of sesame oil on the electric grill. Grill the garlic and green peppers. When cooked, remove from grill and transfer to a plate. Grill the chicken on the same grill. When cooked, place the slices of grilled chicken on top of the garlic and green peppers.



Prepare bowls of dip for each person. In one small bowl put about two tbsp of sesame oil, a pinch of salt, and around 1/4 tsp of ground pepper. In another small bowl, put 1 tsp of Korean black bean paste.

When the chicken is done, dip a slice of chicken into the sesame oil dip, put it on a sheet of kim together with a small amount of rice, and roll the kim. Dip the whole roll in the bean paste and eat!

Serves 2.

Verdict: It all came out quite yummy, although I'm sure the rolling process would've been less messy if we had used lettuce leaves instead of the tiny sheets of kim. But we were both very pleased with our meal, nonetheless.

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Oriental Chicken Salad

We'll be having friends over in awhile, so I'm attempting a new salad recipe. I'm doing it almost exactly as described by Sarina A. Fores in the Assumption Cookbook. I just substituted the honey with syrup and added sesame seeds to the dressing. I also used salad-in-a-bag for the variety of lettuce leaves rather than the iceberg lettuce recommended in the original recipe; bagged salad tastes better and is better for your health. A doctor-friend told me that iceberg lettuce does not only, as some people already know, have zero nutrients in its leaves; to make things worse, eating iceberg lettuce is actually more harmful to your health than not eating a vegetable at all. Anyway, here's the salad recipe.

Ingredients:

2 pieces chicken breast, boiled or grilled, then cubed
1 pack salad-in-a-bag (approx. 200g)
20 wonton skins, sliced 1/2" and fried crisp
1 medium red bell pepper, slivered
1/4 cup roasted peanuts, coarsely chopped

Dressing:
6 tbsp vinegar
1 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp honey or syrup
2 tbsp hoisin sauce
1 tsp chili garlic sauce
2 tbsp sesame oil
4 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp sesame seeds, toasted

Method:

1. Make dressing: combine all ingredients and mix with wire whisk. Cover and refrigerate until ready to use.

2. Deep-fry wonton skins over medium to low fire until golden. Drain on paper towel

3. In a salad bowl, mix together chicken breast, lettuce and bell pepper. Toss with a little salad dressing. Add the wonton skins and peanuts and toss again with a little more dressing. Serve immediately.

Serves 4 - 6.

Update: Yummy salad!! I declare this recipe a success. I just crossed out the instruction to refrigerate the dressing, because when I did that, the dressing coagulated and I had to microwave it for 20 seconds to turn it back into a liquid dressing. I also cut down the number of sheets of wonton wrapper. Twenty would've been enough.

The dressing is very tasty, and you may want to keep the dressing recipe on hand for simple green salads as well.

We served this salad with Easy Stir-fried Beef in Oyster Sauce, Stemaed Fish and Chinese Sauce and steamed rice, for a Chinese-themed meal.

Chicken al'Orange

The original recipe is by Nina Lagdameo-Alba, from the Assumption Cookbook. Mike and I adapted it for ourselves.

8 chicken thighs, deskinned and deboned
salt
pepper
4 tbsp unsalted butter
1-1/2 onion, finely chopped
1 tsp dried rosemary
1-1/2 cups fresh orange juice
1/2 cup cream

1. Pat chicken dry and season well on both sides with salt and pepper.
2. Heat 2 tbsp butter in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderately high heat until foam subsides. Brown half of chicken about 2 minutes on each side and transfer to a plate. Add 2 tbsp more butter in the pan and brown remaining chicken. Return all chicken pieces to the skillet and add onion, rosemary and orange juice. Cover pan and simmer until chicken is tender and cooked through, about 10 minutes. Remove chicken, transfer to a serving dish and keep warm.
3. Boil sauce uncovered until reduced by half, about 3 minutes. Add cream and simmer, stirring constantly until slightly thickened, about 6 minutes.
4. Pour sauce over chicken and serve immediately.

Serves 3.

Total preparation and cooking time: 45 minutes - 1 hour

We've tried this with a green salad and steamed rice -- yummy!

This recipe can also be used as a pasta sauce. If serving with pasta, chop chicken thighs (or chicken breast fillets) into small strips and adjust cooking times accordingly. Use an additional 1/4 cup orange juice and an additional 1/4 cup cream so there is more sauce.