Chocolate Roast Chicken Jambalaya

So I bought a chicken and thought I should try and do it in a kind of Mexican style with rice. Then I decided to do it all together to see if it'd work... the results are as follows;

1. What makes food Mexican? To me chilies, cumin and chocolate. I added some garlic, two chilies, some cumin seeds, a table spoon of cocoa and some extra chili flakes along with some oil. WARNING- this makes chilies exploded splattering your shirt with oily chocolate. You should prick the chilies or something I guess.
   
2. Now you peel the garlic and put it, along with the rest of the stuff, into a pestle and mortar to be ground up. I added some extra ground coriander seed and paprika at this stage.
   
3. Now shove half an onion in a chicken and massage the chili chocolate paste into the skin of the chicken. This is probably the creepiest step... it gets better.
   
4. Add the chicken to to pan along with some water and white wine vinegar and lime juice to make a simple stock. Cover the chicken with some foil and chuck in the oven.
   
5. Now to start on the rice. I used all the risotto rice I had left, a pepper, an onion and 3 mushrooms. I fried this in a generous glug of olive oil for a couple of minutes before adding any water.
   
6. Add water and cook until the rice starts becoming soft- not copletly done
   
7. Now after the chicken has been roasting for about 20 minutes add the rice into the pan with the chicken and spread around evenly. Baste the chicken with any excess fluid. If you do not have any add some extra water. Recover with foil and add back to the oven.
   
8. Every 15 minutes or so check this in the oven, baste and add about 1/3 a mug of water- you don't want the rice to be dry yet.
9. After a few repetitions the chicken starts looking like its being done. Stab in with a knife to see if its done. If it is, or near is, add a little more water and then put in the oven at a slightly lower temperature for about 20 minutes more.
   
   
   
   
10. When it is finished add about a quarter of the rice along with about a quarter of the chicken to a plate. Eating usually follows.
    
    
    
    
    Review
    This did not quite come out as I expected - the Mexican flavours were not as strong as I'd hoped- I guess the chicken should have been marinaded in the fridge in the paste for several hours and maybe some extra paste should have been added to the rice.  
    However the chicken came out very tender, better than dry roasting, and the peppers in particular worked very well. I'd probably be simpler and just as effective to put a normal risotto in the oven to get these benifits.

Rainbow over the paddy field (Deconstructed blueberry pork stir-fry)

I decided I hadn't put much effort into presentation in the previous posts, so I've decided to correct this, with a dish that includes all of your 5 a day and took me less than an hour to make.
Also as requested I've gone for a more experimental name.

Ingredients

• Blueberries
• Pork
• Honey
• White wine vinegar
• Pork
• Carrots
• Baby Sweetcorn
• Mange tout
• Rice noodles
• Red Cabbage
• Ginger Beer
• A red pepper

1. Put the blueberries, some honey and quite a lot of vinegar in a pan and put on a medium heat.
   
2. Cut some carrots into thin slices and put in a pan with ginger beer, just as if you were cooking with water, but keep this  on a low boil for quite a long time... half an hour or so I guess.
   
3. Chop some red cabbage along with some garlic and a chili.
   
4. I have a habbit of over-doing pork and making it chewy- the best techinque I've come up with is to partly fry the pork in a pan until the surface and then add this to the sauce to finish cooking. At this stage I add some 5-spice and more wine vinegar to the mix.
   
5. Prepare the rest of the vegetables to be stir fried one kind at a time.
   
6. Once fried start arranging in concentric semi-circles on the plate. I wasn't that good at this bit. With luck you'll have timed it right so that  the carrots and blueberry pork is also ready to be added.
   
    
7. Now quickly fry the rice noodles and add to the lower half of the plate. I kept the plates with food in the oven on a low heat at this stage.
   
   
   
   
8. Finally for added fanciness serve with left over blueberry sauce and carrot ginger beer and eat with chop sticks.
   
   
   
   
   
   Review
   Firstly my artistic skills are lacking -  poor blurry photos, only a vague rainbow shape and it turns out blueberries aren't very blue. Still at times it did look awesome and I don't think anyone will have had this meal before. The elements tasted good, I can see myself doing blueberry pork again but if so I'd probably do it as part of a standard stir fry- the separation of elements here left some parts of the meal tasting slightly bland. I'm gonna need a sous chef to look after the presentation (and photography) if I try this again. 
   
   
   BTW I'm more likely to write these blogs if I think people are reading, so comment, post, tweet whatever if you want more. Thanks.

Onion and Sweetcorn fritters, with Fried Mozzarella Balls in a Tomato Sauce

I've not been shopping for a while so had limited supplies to choose from, so this meal is more like something from ready steady cook. I had sweetcorn, some mozzarella onions and tomatoes. I think I did well, and saved myself a trip to the shop to buy more items.
Method;

1. So when frying stuff you'd usually use batter or bread crumbs. I went for both. Flour and milk mixed together made the batter, a baguette and a cheese grater made the crumbs (I added a little Parmesan as well).
   
2. Now I needed something to fry. I'd left the batter quite thick, rolled some cubes of mozzarella in it, then rolled them in the bread crumbs. I then sliced an onion into thin strips and mixed it in with the rest of the batter along with the sweetcorn.
   
3. So lots of fried stuff is great, but can be a little dry. So a basic sauce; 3 tomatoes, olive oil, basil, tomato puree, garlic, a little sugar, a chili and some water... low heat for as long as you can be bothered- you need the tomatoes to start reducing down.
   
4. Now the fritter- get a frying pan, quite a lot of oil and a lot of heat. Put the onion mix it there, spread it out evenly. After about 5/10 mins I tried to flip it. I did this by sliding it out onto a plate, putting the pan over the fritter and flipping the pan/plate combo. I'd have taken a picture but my hands were full. Fry until crispy on the outside, soft in the middle.
   
5. The process for frying the cheese balls was pretty similar- hot oil in a pan, chuck the balls in and then roll them around until golden brown.
   
6. Put the mozzarella balls on the fritters. Not much to say here but the photo shows how everything should look.
   
7. Once the sauce has reduced down a little you can add it to the top to create a complete meal
   
   
   
   Review
   
   
   I really liked this meal. I think using more than half a mozzarella ball would have helped here and maybe a slightly thinner fritter would have been better. Calling the fritter a mega-bhaji would have improved the whole process.

Kiwi and Aubergine Pasta

This one did not go as well as I'd hoped but I guess that is the risk of food experiments. I've worked out how to fix it as well.

Ingredients

• Spaghetti
• An Onion
• Half an aubergine
• A pepper
• Two of those pepperami things 
• Quark
• Two kiwis

Method

1. Sweat some onions. Chop them up small, add some oil, chuck in some garlic and leave covered on a low heat.
   
    
2. Chop up pepper, sausage and aubergine, put in a pan with some oil and smoked paprika. Put this under the grill to cook.
   
3. Once the onion is soft and transparent add some balsamic vinegar to add some flavour- if you add the vinegar too soon you boil the onion and make it rubbish.
   
4. You should have the spaghetti cooking by now by the way. Now slice up the kiwis. I read on a kiwi packet you can replace tomatoes in salads with kiwi, so why not pasta was my thought.
   
5. When the vinegar is sticky and you notice smoke coming from the grill everything is ready. Mix everything, along with about half a tub of Quark and you have food!
   
   
   
   
   
   Analysis
   
   
   This came out far too bitter, so I went through tasting each part and realized it was the aubergine that made things go wrong. I've heard bad things about aubergine but its never caused me a problem in the past, it did this time. Just remove it from the meal. The kiwi worked well, it even tried to counter the badness that was the aubergine. I'd say its worth trying out kiwi as a tomato alternative. The quark made a decent sauce in terms of texture and soaked up the flavour well, it's just a shame the flavour was aubergine bitterness.

Purple potato bread

After the pizza I had some left over dough.
A quick google suggested potato and herb bread.

Method

• I thinly sliced a pruple potato using a mandolin, and stirred this in with some rosemary, thyme, black pepper and oil.
  
  
• I squashed out some dough and arranged the potato no more than two layer thick on top. I turned the rest of the dough into 'bread sticks'.
  
  
• I added some thinly sliced garlic and cooked for about 25 minutes.
  
  
• The bread is edible but not great- it was meant for pizza. I've not tried the potato bread yet, so more to follow.
  
  

Ketchup and Quark Pizza

So my first public food experiment, Ketchup and Quark Pizza.

I've never cooked with Quark before, thought sweet chili ketchup sounded good and pizza is always good, so nothing can go wrong here.

Ingredients

1. Strong white flour
2. Olive oil
3. Yeast
4. Corn flour
5. Sweet chili ketchup
6. Quark
7. Tomatoes
8. Chilies
9. Sausage/pepperami thing
10. Mozzarella
11. Oregano, black pepper, basil

Method

• First you make some bread dough. Strong white flour, warm water, a sachet of yeast (don't bother trying to use less it doesn't keep well once open) and olive oil. Knead and leave to rise then knead again. 
  
• I've made up my own method for prepping the baking tray to give the pizza a crispier base. You oil the pan as usual, but then you sprinkle in some corn flour. Mix this in to give a kind of butter paste that covers the tray.
  
• Take a lump of dough- about the size of my fist, and using a rolling pin flatten it out to about the size of the tray. Put this in the tray, then try and spread the dough out as evenly as possible to cover the tray.
  
• Put chili ketchup on the base. I decided that the amount I've used here wasn't enough so try and add quite a generous amount- the taste gets diluted away a bit by the Quark.
  
• Add about 3 heaped table spoons of Quark and mix this in with the ketchup.
  
• Add a layer of sliced tomatoes and maybe some chilies (although the 3 Thai chilies I used here was too much).
  
• I added a sliced up posh Waitrose pepperami thing. It seemed to fit well with the other flavours.
  
• Mozzarella. It's a pizza, it'd be rude not to.
  
• Add pepper and oregano. Tastes good and makes the whole meal look fancier.
  

Oven- I think I did around 180°C for 20 minutes... just keep cooking until the base is done.

• Add basil and eat.
  

Comments

I might try doing this, or something similar in the future, its pretty good but theres penty of room for improvement.
The pizza shown above was too hot and I didn't think the ketchup flavour came through too well- more ketchup less chilies in future. Also making the base slightly thinner might have made this better, broadly speaking the thinner the better. The juice from the tomatoes might have kept the bread a bit soft- maybe scoop out the insides, or drain off some of the excess liquid some other way.