dairy-less sauce

I have nothing against cows and milk products. Gelato puts a big smile on my face as does some cheeses, and during my pregnancy I drank half a litre of milk every day. I couldn’t get enough of it. But when it comes to cooking, I prefer sauces that don’t have cream and have a lighter taste.

Sauces don’t need cream for good taste. I’ve found the combination of tasty veggies, white wine and stock to be more than enough for a light, delicious sauce that tastes great with pasta or rice. This dinner is as basic and easy as it gets. It’s a good choice for a mid-week supper, and we usually toss it with pasta. Lots of other veggies could be added to it, but I like this combination (and Small One does, too).

• Easy Chicken    Cube chicken breast and brown in a pan with olive oil until all pieces are sealed and then set aside. Add some oil to the pan and put in sliced mushrooms with crushed garlic (if I had an onion, I would have fried that in the oil first). After a few minutes, add some vegetable stock (I always add white wine at this point, but we were out, so I went straight to the stock), and add the chicken back to the pan and let it all bubble together. This is where  I would add herbs and spices depending on which direction you want to go with the dish. Yesterday I added a chopped chili for heat, but I kept it simple and left it at that. At the very end, I put in a cube of frozen spinach and let it dissolve and mixed the whole thing together.

warm weather, where art thou?

If you’re surprised by the number of winter food items that appeared here in April, I am as well. We had an unseasonably warm March, but April brought with it rain, winter temperatures and even a bit of hail. The mountains around Geneva are covered with fresh snow. It’s nice that the cold can bring with it such beauty because other than that, well, it is just plain cold. Cold as in I can’t get warm enough in the flat, cold as in the legs of my jeans are wet from freezing rain and now so my feet are wet and cold when I get inside, cold as in without gloves on my hands freeze around the shopping bag handles.

Yes, it has been cold. Way. Too. Cold. There is only one upside to this weather, and that is the continued presence of winter food in our lives, and this simple chicken and leek soup is one of them. It’s easy to make, and at the end of it, you have a warm pot of wholesome, hearty chicken, veggies and pearl barley in a delicious broth. One pot lasted several days for us.

• Chicken Leek and Pearl Barley Stew (from delicious. magazine)  I followed the recipe and skipped the dumplings. One note about the pearl barley – I made this the night before, and the next day the pearls soaked up so much liquid. In the future I will make this when we need to eat it and put the pearl barley in 30-45 minutes before eating time.

lovely legs

Is there anyone in the western world who didn’t make a food-related vow, goal or resolution this year? I doubt it. And while I could go off on a tangent here about first world problems and how gratuitous it is to talk every year about how much less we will eat while large chunks of the developing world are dying to be able to eat more, I will instead share with you my three food-related goals for 2012.

To meal plan in a way that makes my life easier. To eat and cook more vegetables. To spend less on food and to not waste the fresh food we have.

This week is the first attempt at a bit of a meal plan. I am a planner and like to have a sense of where I am going each week, but I am also not a planner and like to change my plans as I go along. So we were supposed to have a smoked-mackerel fried rice type thing for dinner on Monday night, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I needed inspiration and went to the Jamie Oliver website, which was featuring this recipe.

I love Jamie Oliver and have several of his cookbooks. His recipes are always winners in my book, but my one frequent complaint is that he is expensive to cook. Lots of ingredients. Lots of exotic ingredients. Not so easy on the pocketbook. But I had most of the ingredients for this one in my fridge, and when I went to Coop that afternoon, chicken legs were on display.

What’s that, you say? Why is it special that Coop was selling chicken legs? Well. Friends. At the risk of complaining more about Switzerland, I’ll just leave it at this – Monday was the first time where I’ve seen chicken legs for sale alone at my Coop. Normally you can get the leg and the thigh together, and you cannot get just the legs even from the butcher. I have tried.  It’s entirely possible that different grocery stores here do sell legs or that different Coops sell lone legs, but this was the first time I saw them at mine. Please pause for a moment of silence in honor of yet another first world problem.

(Husband chastised me the other day about my comments related to Switzerland. “No tasty cheese in Switzerland? Really?” he said. To which I replied, “I meant Tasty, with a capital T, cheese – it’s a kind of cheese in Australia!!!” Yesterday he said, “Are you sure the pumpkin was from Switzerland?” which is a fair point, and Husband, I will check today.)

Getting back to my point: The presence of chicken legs at my grocery store on Monday evening was a clear sign to me that this was the chicken dish on the menu for that evening. So much for my meal plan.

I assembled the roast while Small One played cheerfully in his exersaucer, and put it in the oven to bake for an hour-and-a-half. Husband and I both liked it, and I have leftovers to eat for lunch today. This recipe will go into my regular meal file because I know that I could make it with legs and thighs if I am unable to find lone legs.

• Tender and Crisp Chicken Legs with Sweet Tomatoes   I didn’t vary one bit from the recipe except I added more chicken legs. The chicken legs did not become nice and crispy as Jamie promised, and in the future I might turn the heat up a bit at the end to get the chicken to become a bit crispier or I might even brown it on a pan before putting it in the oven. But overall, it’s an easy chicken dish that is refreshing – because of the tomatoes – even though it is a warm roast.

date night

Everyone, it seemed, told me that a weekly date night was the key to a happy, long-term marriage. “It’s time you set apart for you and your spouse to just connect,” “Romance! Romance! Romance!” and “You have to prioritise your relationship” were the mantras drilled into my brain.

Husband and I had grand plans of date night-ing after we got married. He would plan one week, and I the next. It would be filled with romance, special memories and fun.

You can probably guess where this is going. Our first date nights were disasters. So disaster-like that we decided not to have date nights anymore. In hindsight it makes sense. We spent every evening except for one and every weekend together; date-nighting was too much pressure and not needed for that season of our life. We were around each other all the time, and we were living out what it meant to be married instead of working toward it.

Now that we’ve been married for almost 11 months, one thing I learned is that some of the best traditions evolve and happen naturally. They don’t need to be forced, and they work not because everyone is doing it, but because it works for us. Our Friday evenings have been some of our most memorable lately, so I started cooking a more-special-than-normal meal for it. Something that would taste good, look beautiful but not necessarily take too much time.

This week’s recipe was a hit. Taken, as always, from my favourite source – Taste. I do not know what I would do without that website. For how tasty it was and how great it looked, it really was too easy a recipe, and it had minimum preparation time and very little fiddling around during the cooking phase.

• Chicken Roasted with Red Wine and Grapes    I followed the recipe almost exactly, adding a few more bay leaves and more balsamic vinegar. There were only green grapes at the grocery store, and it was no problem to use the green ones, but I imagine that red grapes would be a better complement to the red wine. Cook the chicken for the exact amount of time the recipe recommends as it stays moist that way.

orange chicken

Monday nights can be a bit hectic as I need to cook and eat something before I rush out of the house for a few hours in the evening, husband comes home when I come home and it’s nice then to have dinner straight away. I had about 30 minutes to cook, a bit of chicken and nothing else very promising in the refrigerator. One day I will learn how to live by a meal plan.

In my head popped this idea – “Orange chicken.” Don’t know where it came from; I think it was God. I vaguely remember some orange chicken dishes in a Chinese buffet, but it’s not something I’ve eaten elsewhere. I quickly did a recipe search, and all the recipes would take too long and involved baking. So I improvised, and made my own. It was amazing, and I made it again for myself the next day (pictured).

• Orange Chicken score your chicken breasts and start them frying in a tiny bit of oil. Make a mixture of orange juice, honey, Chinese 5 spice (or any spice that you like), crushed garlic and chili flakes. I don’t have quantities because I just made, tasted and adjusted the mixture – it was a bit like a marinade – as I went along. There should be a good amount of it though, enough to cover the chicken in the pan. Flip the chicken and pour the mixture over it, cover and let it bubble. When the sauce thickens and the chicken is finished, you are done.