Quick chicken patties

Inspired by Food For Tots' chicken and apple balls, I attempted to make a chicken-based meal for my girls.  I really don’t enjoy cooking meat but I try to make sure that I make at least 2 chicken meals a week, and of course, other forms of fleshy protein such as fish appear more regularly on the menu.

I’m not a big fan of meat and have never been a big fan of meat.  Most of my family call me vegetarian but I probably wouldn’t call myself one.  I’ll quite happily eat any life form that swims or comes from the sea but as soon as it starts to walk on land, I just can’t bring myself to swallow it.  I have tried very hard however to not impose this meat-free diet on my children. 

I really struggle with the preparation stage.  I just don't like that cold soft ‘namby’ (sorry, no other words to describe it) feel that raw meat has.  I know, raw meat feels pretty much the same as raw fish…but I just don’t have that ‘internal gag factor’ when it comes to fish – who knows why?

Anyway, I saw Food For Tots' chicken and apple balls and loved how they looked.  I didn’t have any apples in the house and I was a bit lazy when it came to making the balls (haha!), so I just made squashed chicken patties.  Didn’t have all the proper ingredients so this is what I ended up using.

Ingredients:
450g (roughly) chicken thigh fillets
½ tsp turmeric
1 tsp cumin
1 tbsp coriander
1/8 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp breadcrumbs
2 tbsp wholemeal flour
No salt (I avoid adding salt to our meals)

Method:

1. Roughly cut your chicken fillets into cubes and pop into food processor (if you’re like me and really lazy, I challenged my Magimix and put the fillets straight in.  The mince came out fine). Push the button and mince mince mince.

2. Add all other ingredients in and push that button again.

3. Put contents of food processor into a big bowl and give it another quick mix with a fork.

4. Shape to your liking.  Little patties for me.

5. Lightly pan fry (or perhaps bake for a healthier option – I pan fried).  This is probably the most time-consuming part.

6. Eat!  Well, I didn’t but my girls did.

I served this with plain pasta with a dab of butter and sliced cucumber (my ‘I can’t be bothered’ vegetable).

Some days

Some days I wish I could press the reboot button.  It’s the days where I wake up at 5:30am for no reason at all on my day off.  It’s the days where I singe the ends of spaghetti by trying to cook in a too-small-pot and turning the burner up too high.  It’s the days where I burn the rice by leaving it too long (rice cooker is on the blink) for no reason at all except that I’m a danger in the kitchen.

On days like these I resort to the only thing that I can cook… fish fingers.

Exhausted

Judy from Grandmother Stories is right. Moving to the UK involves a lot of rubbish. Big mounds of garbage unfortunately. However, on the bright side, we’ve managed to chip away at a teeny tiny section of that garbage and whoohoo – we’re almost settled.

We have a roof over our heads and that roof comes with a nice warm kitchen. What more could you ask for? Um, well, that kitchen could have come with a gas cooker however, it has electric hobs!! I’m not usually best friends with electric cookers however I think I’m going to have to make an effort this time. I tend to forget that you have to take pots and pans off the hobs once I’m done otherwise it will continue to cook (and burn) while the hob cools down!

Other than that, a new and extremely frustrating and exhausting job (and life) has unfortunately robbed me of all creativity and prevented me from blogging (and also reading your blogs) more often (If only money grew on trees!).

My lack of energy has definitely been reflected in my poor attempts at cooking. I’m sure Hubs will start complaining soon about having to eat the same things night after night after night. However, I still prefer to eat my boring attempts at cooking rather than Hubs’ attempts (trust me it’s not pretty when he gets in the kitchen!). Anyway, I not only need a ‘money tree’, I also need an ‘energy tree’!

This has been our dinner for the last 2 nights running: stir fry green beans and tofu with rice…zzzzzzzzzzzz. Well, at least it’s balanced!

Ps.
Also, a big thank you to all of you for checking back here to make sure that I’m still surviving England and the English weather!

Vegetable-tofu bake crumble

I’m on a diet.

Well, at least I’m trying to be on a diet. But it’s not really working. Well, take last night for example. Having lots of carrots left over, I figured I’d make a low-fat vegetable bake.

So I started chopping away, carrots, a bit of broccoli, cherry tomatoes, onions, and garlic. I then lightly stir fried the vegetables to give them a little flavour.

I then decided I’d make it a curry vegetable-tofu bake. So I added curry power mix and about a cup-and-a-half of water to the baking dish. And then topped it all off with tofu. Only problem, I had only what was a sliver of tofu left! So the baking dish looked a little bare on the top.

Anyway, I decided to make a topping to make it look a little nicer. A crumble topping. I had wholemeal flour, butter and sesame seeds. I mixed the sesame seeds and flour, added a bit of salt and rubbed in the butter, then whacked the mixture onto the bake and stuck the whole thing into the oven. And there you have it: a vegetable-tofu curry crumble!

So much for my creativity as Hubs said it was just a curry that I stuck in the oven!
Taste-wise, it was yum although the crumble topping was a little weird. Sort of like eating pastry with your curry.

Calorie-wise, all that butter didn’t help my diet!

Ingredients:
Lots of vegetables!
Onions
Garlic
Salt

Curry Powder mix:
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tbs ground coriander
½ tsp chilli powder

Super-quick-throw-everything-in-1-pot chickpea curry

Because I often nibble on snacks that I shouldn’t really be touching with a 10-metre pole (ie. Crisps/chips and chocolate!), most of the time, I feel like I should be eating something healthy when it comes to the main meals. Only problem, I just can’t eat a salad for a main meal. No matter how hard I try.

When I try, I start off eating a salad, then 30 minutes later, raid the kitchen eating everything in sight. So I figure, it’s better to eat something that appeals to me, and try to make that healthy, than have salad as “starters” to a huge meal of junk later.

So here’s another quick and lazy meal that I whipped up in less than 10 minutes with only very very basic spices (I have nothing left in the kitchen!). I added lots of broccoli so that I felt better about having eaten a big packet of chips 2 hours earlier!

This is what I put in:

• 1 tbs curry powder (mixed in ½ cup of water)
• 1 tbs ground coriander (mixed with the curry powder paste above)
• 1 ½ cups water
• ½ teaspoon salt (or to taste)
• 1 onion diced
• 1 tomato diced
• lots of garlic (minced)
• Sliver of ginger (minced)
• 400g can chickpeas
• broccoli
• mushrooms

I first mixed the curry powder and ground coriander in about ½ a cup of water.
I fried the onion till brown, and then added the garlic, ginger, tomato and curry paste. I then cooked the tomato until soft, added the water and threw everything else in.
10 minutes later – it’s all done.

Not exactly an extremely original or creative dish but at least it stopped me from having more chips as dessert!

9-minute tuna pasta

We had friends from the UK this weekend and spent most of it sightseeing and eating out, which meant very little cooking. However, a late start to the day today meant a late breakfast and therefore, a very late lunch. We all got hungry around 3:30pm however being a Monday* in Paris meant that some restaurants were either closed, or the lunch hour was over. Not even Pizza Hut’s lunch service was still open (we tried!). And McDonalds was definitely out of the question – urggghhh.

Having only 1 hour until our friends had to leave for the Eurostar, we had to find decent food fast (and sandwiches weren’t going to do the job here!)! Hence, we headed back to our place for a speedy meal.

I have to say, I’m a lazy cook and love being able to throw everything into 1 saucepan or pot to produce something both tasty and edible at the end. (I’m also pretty crap at food presentation but that’s a whole other issue!)

Anyway, being in a rush today and not having planned on cooking a meal, I didn’t have much at all in my fridge, so tuna pasta was the quickest solution.

Here’s my solution to 4 hungry people needing sustenance immediately:

• Spaghetti or any other type of pasta for 4 people
• 4 tomatoes diced
• 1 onion diced
• Minced garlic to taste (I used about 3 BIG cloves – I love garlic)
• 2 256g cans of tuna (Don’t ask me why the cans were 256g and not something “round” like 250 or 200g!)
• Broccoli or zucchini chopped into small pieces
• 1tbs tomato paste
• ½ cup light cream (add more if you prefer a creamier sauce)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Boil water in a saucepan, add the spaghetti or pasta, cook to al dente and drain (takes roughly 7 minutes). When I was young, my dad used to tell me that if you took the spaghetti and threw it against the wall and it stuck there, it was cooked! Needless to say, my mum wasn’t very impressed when she saw spaghetti stuck to the walls of her kitchen! Anyway, I’m digressing…

While the pasta is boiling, brown the onion in a saucepan over a low fire until translucent and fragrant (2 minutes). Add the garlic and brown slightly (1.5 minutes). My French father-in-law (who’s a great cook) tells me that garlic should not be sautéed for too long otherwise it gets bitter (something like that anyway). However, I actually like my garlic sautéed until it’s brown. In Malaysia, we cooked garlic in oil until it was nice and brown, and then used the “garlic sauce” as a condiment for jook. Digressing again…

Add the diced tomatoes and cook until soft (2 minutes). Mix the tomato paste and tuna into the saucepan and cook till slightly bubbling (1 minute). Add the vegetables and heat until tender (I like my vegetables crunchy so this usually takes about 2 minutes). Lastly, add the cream and the salt and pepper. If the sauce is too dry, add a little water.
I then usually throw in the drained pasta and mix well with the sauce.

And voila, roughly 9 minutes later, a meal for 4!

* In France, some shops and restaurants close on Monday if they’ve been open on Saturday.