A simple chicken pasta in tomato sauce

Very recently, I had a friend visit. She's from Canada and she jokes that she's the whitest of white when it comes to her taste in food. What she means is that her taste buds can't handle spice and heat. Not that we're being culturally inappropriate about her ethnic background or anything like that. Plus, she's allowed to make jokes about herself. We had an afternoon where I needed to throw together a quick lunch for us before taking her to the train station to catch her train back to the city and this was the result.

Slow cooked braised garlic chicken UPDATED

My original braised garlic chicken from a decade ago has been super popular over the years and each time I make it, I get asked for the recipe. I've tweaked and updated the recipe from the original, so I thought I had better update the recipe on the website too. You won't find me blathering on an on (one of the few places I don't!) so let's get right onto the recipe.

Steak and garlic butter rice salad ... perfect with leftovers

Yes, yes, can you believe it? Blog posts weekly for a few weeks!! You know what that means? It means I've been home and I have been cooking!! Nothing super fancy or super complicated, just some simple everyday meals that we enjoy and are tasty, tasty.

We cooked a huge cattleman's cut steak for dinner recently and it was HUGE. We shared one between The Boy and I and still only managed to finish half of it. I saved the leftovers for a steak salad and this is one of my go to recipes for a tasty steak salad. I like adding the garlic rice because it makes it super tasty. Garlic and butter .... mmmm .....

Here's what I did:

Garlic, chive and dill cream cheese ... in the Thermomix

We were given some lovely smoked salmon recently and were trying to decide how to eat it. Our usual is the Feta, avocado and tomato salad with some smoked salmon on the side, but we decided not to have that as a meal right then. The Boy suggested salmon bagels and we love cream cheese on our bagels.

Small confession time: I actually never like the flavored cream cheese that we get at the store as I always feel that the flavors are rather insipid and just not quite there, so I decided to make my own flavored cream cheese. I find plain cream cheese rather bland. I just came up with this little concoction myself and all the fresh herbs are from my garden.

Here's the RECIPE for what I did:

Ingredients:

• 250g cream cheese (any brand you like)
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
• 1 tablespoon fresh chives, chopped
• 1 tablespoon fresh dill, finely chopped
• Pinch of salt

Instructions:

• Put all the ingredients into the Thermomix (or a food processor if you do not have a Thermomix - then blend until well mixed)
• Set the Thermomix on reverse, speed 6 for 5 seconds
• Check to see that all ingredients are well blended, if not, another 2 seconds on speed 6
• Scrape the cream cheese mixture out of the Thermomix and put it back into the jar that the cream cheese came in, if it had a jar, if not, put it into an air tight container with a lid
• Refrigerate and eat when ready, or if you like, eat immediately
• Enjoy!

This is super delish and the flavor really packs a punch, especially with all the fresh ingredients. The 3 cloves of garlic really gives the cream cheese a good kick and if you don't like as much garlic, just use less. We like garlic, so I thought 3 cloves would be just lovely, but with 3 cloves you can really taste the garlic.

If you do make this, be sure to post pictures for me to see either on Instagram - be sure to tag me with @langshipley or on my Daz In The Kitchen Facebook page.


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Slow cooked braised garlic chicken ORIGINAL

I've done a lot of slow cooked beef recently, so this week, I decided to slow cook chicken instead.

I once again delved into my Essentials of Slow Cooking cookbook and looked for a chicken recipe.

The first recipe I came across was the slow cooked braised garlic chicken dish and the second one was a chicken and sausage gumbo. I don't have a lot of ingredients in the fridge right now as we haven't done much of a shop and we weren't planning a huge shop this weekend, so I went with the recipe that sounded tasty and had the fewest ingredients. This was the braised garlic chicken. :-)

Here's the recipe for it:

Ingredients:

• 8 pieces chicken thigh, deboned
• Salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 4 heads of garlic, separated into cloves, unpeeled **
• 1/4 cup dry white wine
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme

** Note: 

Four whole heads of garlic might sound like a lot, but as it cooks, the garlic mellows and thickens, adding depth of flavor to the pan juices that are served over the chicken. There is no need to peel the garlic since it will be softened after cooking and then strained. The pulp of the cooked garlic imparts a wonderful flavor and helps thicken the sauce.

Instructions:

• Season the chicken all over with salt and pepper. In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, warm the canola oil. Working in batches if necessary, add the chicken and cook, turning until well browned, 7 - 10 minutes. Remove from pan and set aside.
• Pour off all but 2 tablespoons of fat in the pan. Add the garlic cloves and saute over medium-high heat until lightly browned, about 3 minutes. Pour in the wine and deglaze the pan, stirring and scraping the brown bits on the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon.
• Transfer the chicken to a slow cooker. Sprinkle with thyme and add the garlic mixture. Cover and cook until the chicken is tender and opaque throughout, 3 hours on the low heat setting.
• Transfer the chicken to a platter and cover loosely with aluminium foil to keep warm. Set a fine mesh sieve over the saucepan and strain the pan juices. Press on the garlic cloves to extract as much liquid and pulp as possible. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat and season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer the chicken to a warmed platter and top with the sauce. Serve at once.

So I pretty much followed the instructions (cooking-wise), since it was pretty straight forward. The whole sauteing the garlic with the peel still on was a bit odd but I did it anyway. It did brown up quite nicely.

I did do something a little different with the chicken. The Boy does not like bone in his meat, so I used chicken thighs instead and used 6 chicken thighs halved. This will give us 4 meals, or 2 serves for dinner, so we will eat one serve for dinner tonight and have the rest for leftovers later in the week.

I also coated the chicken in flour as well as salt and pepper, since the flour will thicken the sauce as it cooks.

I think because I used chicken thighs, there wasn't the juices or fat that the recipe talked about, so I compensated with chicken stock for sauce, and added 2 cups of chicken stock, which just covered the chicken in the pot. I decided that 2 cups was a decent amount of sauce and it would thicken up into a nice sauce while it cooks.

I cooked mine in a slow cooker, but since I always slow cook in the oven, my slow cooking method was to put everything into a Dutch oven, then bring it to a boil and put it into the oven to slow cook for 3 hours at 120°C.

While cooking, the skins of the garlic came off for most of the garlic, so I fished them out of the pot as I checked on it intermittently. As such, there was only 1 or 2 garlic that I needed to remove the peel from.

Instead of straining the garlic through a sieve, I just mushed it up in the pot with a wooden spoon.

After slow cooking the chicken for 3 hours, the sauce had cooked down quite a bit, so after I took out the chicken to get to the garlic, I also added back 1.5 cups of stock to the pot to get more liquid in the pot and the dish.

Once I got the stock into the pot, I put the chicken back into the pot and brought it back to a boil and simmered for about 10 minutes just to thicken the sauce back up again.

This turned out to be an extremely tasty dish. Not garlicky at all, surprisingly, considering how much garlic was used. Just a very mellow and rich flavor. We had it over quinoa and a side salad. Uber tasty!!!

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Garlic prawns with spaghetti

It's a horrible, pouring wet day today. It has rained non-stop all day and not only has it rained but it has rained heavily. On top of that, I've had my fair share of running around in the rain, first to our Macquarie Park office for the afternoon, and then around the city to the store because my keyboard and mouse at work decided to die and I had to get a replacement. My poor little umbrelly got a workout keeping me covered but it did not save my shoes from getting sodding wet. I won't be able to wear those shoes again tomorrow 'cos they need to dry out.

Anyway just wanted to share ....

So with all the wet and running around, I did not have time to go to the store for groceries and decided to cook what's in the fridge, pantry and freezer. This means garlic prawns with spaghetti aglio, olio e pepperoncino. I've done this dish before and posted the ingredients, but I never actually got round to posting the finished product, so here it is.

It's the exact same dish as the one I cooked here, which was sauteeing some prawns in garlic and olive oil with a pinch of salt, and serving it on a bed of spaghetti aglio, olio e pepperoncino with a side of salad in caramelized balsamic vinegar and garlic olive oil dressing (which I texted The Boy to run to the grocery store to get the greenery for the salad on my behalf, which he kindly did between meetings today).

This is a favorite for both The Boy and I.

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Getting ready to cook tonight's dinner

All the ingredients one needs for a chicken and mushroom risotto, which is on the menu tonight.

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Wot a lot of garlic

Whenever I head out to lunch with my girlfriend, Wendy, I often stop at the grocery store, Asian or otherwise to pick up a few things for the kitchen. Today, after lunch, we stepped into a little Korean grocery store next to the sushi train place where we had lunch.

Saw these bags of pre-peeled garlic for $1.50 a packet and both Wendy and I picked some up. I'm not sure what Wendy is going to do with her garlic, but I decided that my garlic can go into a jar of olive oil to be preserved and used in the future.

Keeping the peeled garlic in olive oil is a wonderful way of storing garlic for future use. It keeps for ages but based on the amount of garlic we go through, this will not last all that long. It is very handy though because it saves on the peeling and the chopping and the mincing. While the chopping and mincing is all very good for practicing my knife skills, it's much more efficient to put the garlic in the stick blender for 3 seconds.

When I'm done with the garlic in the jar, I can use the olive oil. I'll end up with lovely garlic infused olive oil that I can use in salad dressings.

Hooray!

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Some of the ingredients for tonight's dinner

We were rather low on ingredients for dinner for the night after being away and not having done any serious grocery shopping in a while. We had planned grocery shopping for the next day.

Scrounging around in the pantry I found a jar of Kan Tong Peanut Sauce and some spiral pasta. In the fridge there was garlic, half an onion, some rather sad carrots and 3/4 of a green capsicum. The freezer had some frozen chicken thighs. I decided this was enough for a rather hodge podge chicken satay dinner with some spiral pasta since we did not have any rice in the pantry either.

© This work is copyrighted to Invest-Ex and Destiny’s Fortunes Pty Ltd