Moroccan-Inspired Chicken Dish with Couscous

I decided to make this recipe one evening when I was sick of studying and wanted to make an actual dinner for myself. The past few days I had only made easy dinners because I wasn't really felling inspired, but yesterday I looked through my cupboard and found all these good ingredients for my dish. I have always loved Northern African cuisine so I found some recipes online and added some of my own things.
Now, this is only Moroccan inspired because I don't actually have all the things required to make a real Moroccan dish, like a Tajin, but bear with me.

Ingredients:

• 2 chicken thighs, skinned
• 1/2 can of chickpeas, drain and rinse
• 2 tomatoes, diced
• handful of dried apricots, cut up into medium-sized pieces
• 100 g couscous
• 250 ml chicken broth
• juice from half a lime/lemon
• Spices: (I don´t know the amounts for each seeing as I just did it on my own.)
• ground cumin
• ground cinnamon
• ground cardamom (I only had seeds, but used my mortar to fix that)
• salt
• black pepper
• red pepper

Directions:

1. Mix all your spices in a mortar and crush/blend well. Put your chicken thighs in a bowl and rub the spices mixture on them. It´s better if the thighs are skinned so that the meat can soak up the flavors.
2. Heat some olive oil in a pan on medium-high heat, add the thighs and cook 3 minutes on each side.
3. Add chickpeas and tomatoes, let it cook together for 5 minutes.
4. Add the broth and apricots, bring to a boil. The cover with a lid, reduce heat and let simmer for 10-15 minutes depending on the size of the chicken.
5. Prepare the couscous from the instructions on the pack.
6. Add the lime or lemon juice to the pan.

Bon Appétit!

24 hours Yogurt Marinated Chicken

I came up with this idea the other day, after flipping through a new cookbook I found in London. I have never actually marinated anything before, mainly because I rarely think of what I am going to make for dinner tomorrow, so I thought I´d give it a try. It is very quick to make the marinade, and then just pop it in the fridge for as long as possible.
When I cooked the chicken the next day, it smelled wonderful. I could really smell the garlic and ginger cooking well together, and the meat turned out really moist.
I served the chicken together with "mediteranean-style" red bell peppers and wild rice.

Ingredients:

• 1 small pot (180g) of fat free, plain yogurt
• 1-2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 teaspoons lemon or lime juice
• 1 teaspoon sugar (I used brown sugar)
• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• 1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
• a pinch of salt and pepper
• a handful of fresh coriander, chopped
• 1 chicken breast
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1 portion of rice

Directions:

• To make the marinade, just mix all the ingredients in a ziplock bag and add the chicken. Close the bag and shake until everything is mixed. Put in the fridge for 12-24 hours.
• The next day, heat up a frying pan, add a little butter and cook the chicken for 2-3 minutes on each side on high heat. After this, put a lid over your pan, add the rest of the marinade into the pan and lower the heat. Cook the chicken for about 30 minutes.
• To prepare the peppers, simply rinse and quarter them. Heat your oven to 250 C, on the "grill" option. When it is heated up, pop in the peppers, laid flat (preferably) and watch as the skin starts to bubble.
• Cook the peppers for about 30 minutes, remove from oven and wait a little while to let them cool.
• When they are cool, you should be able to easily remove the skin as it has become detached from the grilling. Just peal them and drizzle some nice olive oil, salt and pepper, and even add some crushed garlic to them if you´d like. This is also delicious to add to summer salads or simply as an "aperitif".

Bon Appétit!

Perfect Roast Chicken & Vegetables (Jamie Oliver)

Happy new year to all, and I hope you had a wonderful christmas filled with cheer and lovely food.
As a tradition for the New years dinner I usually prepare the meal for 5 of my friends, and this year I decided to try out something I haven´t done before. Roasting a chicken was not as difficult as I expected it to be, it just takes patience and time.

To tell you quickly about the menu we had a delicious fois gras that my mother was so kind to give us. The main course was of course the savory chicken with roast winter vegetables and for dessert we had a raspberry mousse cake. The pictures will tell all.


Fois gras decorated with pomegranate and kumquat. Served with toast.


The recipes I used for the main course were both from Jamie Oliver´s website, I can always trust to find delicious recipes on there. Because the recipes are not my own I will only post links, but the pictures you will find are all mine.

Perfect Roast Chicken
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/chicken-recipes/perfect-roast-chicken

Just as a side note to this. The chicken I had was 2,4 kg so I had it in the oven for about 2 hours. Because the time was quite a bit longer than in the original recipe, I added the vegetables after about 1 hour. I started cooking the chicken bye laying it chest down and half-way through the cooking time (about 50 min) I turned it over, added some warm water to keep it moist, and as said previously, added the vegetables.

The lemon and the water added while cooking made the meat incredibly tender. Funnily enough, one of my friends almost refused to believe that it was indeed chicken, because he had never tasted chicken this tender before. I take that as quite the compliment.

Roasted Vegetables
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetarian-recipes/the-best-roast-potatoes

I hope you enjoyed this post, please comment if you have anything to add.

Bon Appétit!

Gorgeous Ginger Chicken

I found this recipe in a mini wok cook book I had lying around, and I played around with it to fit what I had in the fridge. I mean, what 22 year old student has sherry lying around the apartment?
Don't be frightened by the amount of ingredients and don't think you have to follow the recipe to the letter when it comes to amounts. Have fun with it.

This one is for 2 people. Serve with egg noodles or rice noodles (or any food of your choice)

Ingredients

• 2 tbs sunflower oil
• 1 regular onion cut in rings
• 3 carrots (I used about 8 baby carrots)
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 chicken filet per person, cut into strips
• grated fresh ginger (to your linking, I added some more because I didn't have any dried ginger powder)
• 1 ts ginger powder
• 2 tbs sherry (you can use any dry white wine, it tastes delicious all the same)
• 1 1/2-2 tbs tomato paste
• 2 ts brown sugar
• 1 dl orange juice
• 1 ts potato flour (regular flour works just fine)
• 1 orange

Directions

1.  Get all your ingredients ready. Start by chopping all that needs to be chopped and cutting what needs to be cut.
2. Heat the oil in a wok pan, add onion, carrots and garlic and stir on medium heat for about 3 minutes.
3. Add the meat, fresh ginger (and dried ginger if you have it). Stir for 10 minutes or until the chicken is golden brown on the outside and tender inside.
4. Grab a bowl and mix the sherry/white wine, tomato paste, sugar, orange juice and flour.
5. Pour the mix into the wok, stir and heat until the liquid starts to simmer and thickens.
6. Peal the orange, and try to remove all the white stuff on it. you can try to take away the membrane of each individual piece, but I found this time consuming and useless.
7. Add the orange and stir gently.
8. Make some noodles and eat up!

Bon appétit!