African chicken curry from recipe tin...kuku-paka

 

hey viewers, i really enjoy cooking and baking which may seem rather obvious. i also enjoy testing out recipes that i come across and follow various food bloggers, some of my faves are nagi from recipe tin and marion’s kitchen. jamie oliver’s recipes are great and of course there is always google. can certainly understand the need to save pennies as prices have gone up, interest rates have gone up. don’t know how anyone with a substantial mortgage is coping with the shock of the rates rises. i am certainly feeling the pinch and have gone back to an old-fashioned budgeting system where cash is king. once it’s gone, it’s gone. it certainly makes you think twice. and no I didn’t need those tim tams but they were half price and besides i took them into school for my work buddies. and guess what? this year you are getting home made culinary gifts, don’t worry you won’t be disappointed, we sekulic ladies are renowned for our goodies.

so back to budget cuts. chicken drumsticks/legs are definitely a budget friendly option. you can buy them in various packs. i usually go for the pack closest to a dozen which works perfectly for the following recipe. being an absolute tweaker, i learnt this essential skill from lovie, i usually add my touches here and there. for this recipe just follow it for about 11-12 chicken drumsticks. the first time I made it i also added in peas and potatoes but this time i omitted those ingredients and it will just be served with rice and maybe a side salad. spicy factor…in my books mild.

PS i also cook this a lot longer, very slowly until the chicken is almost falling off the bone.

https://www.recipetineats.com/african-chicken-curry-kuku-paka/

pickled sardines...

hey viewers are you a sardine fan? if so how do you like them, canned, fresh, grilled, crumbed? have you ever tried pickled sardines? if not and you are a sardine lover like myself then you are in for a treat. this handy and simple recipe was tried and tested during my birthday festiva and made by none other than the lovely linda herself. usually we sekulic ladies are pretty tight lipped about our recipes but am happy to share this one with you today as obviously it is not one of our top-secret ones. these are so delish and i have to confess while my little sestra was preoccupied setting up the most amazing grazing table, i, myself under the guise of being the birthday gal was quietly stealing them right before her very eyes and so was my son! needless to say she was a bit confused as to why her pile of sardines seemed to be disappearing. so good, worth stealing for sure that’s why i am pinching this recipe to share with you. as she showed me how to make them very recently. basically i followed the recipe minus the juniper berries as we didn’t have any. instead i added thinly sliced garlic and some chilli. this was the recipe requested by some of my guests so here it is folks. we used port lincoln sardines. enjoy the humble sardine because once you start you won’t be able to stop eating them.

this recipe came from SBS, click on the link and save it for yourself

https://www.sbs.com.au/food/recipe/quick-pickled-sardines-le-sardines-rapide-au-vinaigre/m0xnnxm2j

Ingredients

• 150 ml cider vinegar
• 150 ml white wine vinegar
• 100 g sugar
• 2 tsp table salt
• 2 bay leaves
• 10 black peppercorns
• 2 juniper berries
• 20 fresh sardine fillets, deboned
• 1 small cucumber, sliced into thin rounds
• 1 small red onion, peeled and finely sliced
• 1 lemon, zested and cut into wedges

Resting time 6 hours or overnight

Instructions

Place all the ingredients apart from the sardines, cucumber, onion and lemon zest in a pot. Bring to the boil and stir until all the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and leave to cool.

When the brine has cooled to room temperature, pour it into shallow non-metallic dish. Add the sardine fillets (check for bones), cucumber, onion and lemon zest. Make sure everything is submerged in the liquid. Cover the dish in cling film (not foil) and leave in the fridge for at least 6 hours, or overnight.

Serve on buttered rye bread or the apple and caraway crackers with wedges of lemon.

Les petits conseils – tips

• Ask your fishmonger to fillet your sardines for you, as it is a fiddly process.

vietnamese chicken curry

 

ok put your hand up, come on and admit it. who hasn’t stealthily ripped out a recipe from a magazine while waiting for the doctor or dentist? ha that will show your age! then modern technology came along and allowed you to take a  happy snap instead. but i miss those days when you would surreptitiously scan the room watching to make sure no-one saw you and of course perfecting the silent rip technique where you would steal the recipe in question. so how many of you actually made those stolen recipes? come on confess to your culinary crimes. are you still making them? with the internet now at our cooking fingertips we can find just about anything our hearts desire. got a fancy dinner date and want to impress someone?( is it true that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?) Lol not sure that applies to moi because i have to admit to one terrible cooking disaster. i honestly don’t know what happened, well i kind of  do, it might have had something to do with my selection of herbs, tee-hee. but who hasn’t had at least one cooking disaster in their life time?

this wonderful recipe which i have already made twice came via a stint to the hairdressers to turn back time. dave and i discussed how delish it looked and he informed me his beau would be making that for dinner at his request. so instead of stealing said magazine ( although i was tempted to) i took out my trusty phone and captured an image and then proceeded to ensure within the next few days i would have all ingredients. as i am rather economical i used 1.5kgs of chicken legs and slow cooked it. i can vouch to say that it is very tasty and i am sure you will enjoy it as much as we did.

PS i just used keens curry powder as i already have it in my kitchen and it works a treat.

vietnamese chicken curry  CA RI GA

ingredients

1.5kg chicken marylands, jointed or chicken legs

1 tbspn Vietnamese curry powder or just use madras or keens

2 tspns onion powder

½ tspn turmeric

mix dry spices and cover chicken pieces and then refrigerate for 30 mins

3 lemongrass stalks bruised ( white part) just use heavy knife handle to bruise it

3 bay leaves

1 tbspn grated ginger

2 tspns caster sugar

400ml coconut cream

2 cups of chicken stock

1 large onion cut into wedges

2 medium carrots halved and sliced

300gms peeled white potatoes

2 tbspns fish sauce

1 cup each of thai basil leaves and coriander, use left overs for garnish

oil for frying, you can use coconut or any other vegetable oil you have

method

fry off chicken until nice and golden, set aside

add some more oil and saute onion, return chicken to pan and add lemongrass, bay leaves, ginger and sugar and cook for a few mins

add coconut cream and stock and bring to boil and then turn down to a simmer,

add carrots and potatoes and cook on simmer for about 45 mins, then add fish sauce and thai basil and coriander and cook for a further 15 mins.

serve with steamed rice and lime wedges if you have them, garnish with thai basil and coriander...

 

blitva

 

if you are looking for a simple but delicious side dish then make blitva your new culinary friend.  with nutritional diversity these days it is always handy to have a few tricks up one's sleeve to accommodate for this, you are in luck vegetarians and vegans because this is for you.

blitva means swiss chard or in australia we know it as silver beet. this under rated veggie is easily grown in a patch of dirt in your garden. lovie has her own patch and insists i don’t spend a penny. but i confess i actually bought a bunch because i was curious and wanted to test this recipe in my kitchen. i suspect it would pair well with fish, cevapcici and probably a few other things. if you top it with a fried or poached egg i would say you have breakfast or brunch.

i made this for the first time today to go with our chicken burgers and it got the thumbs up from lovie and my ravenous sons who blitzed the blitva, sadly no left overs for my little sista who was not very impressed. i have promised to make it as an accompaniment for our annual good friday seafood lunch which is about as catholic as we ever get.

so if you are a silver beet fan click on the link below which will take you to the recipe i discovered while scouring the internet. i followed it pretty much to the tee and my tips as the recipe suggests is to remove the garlic so you don't burn it, i re-added it when i cooked the silver beet, then cooked potatoes at the end, seasoned with salt and pepper. i also used about ½ a cup of olive oil so a little more than the third cup stated.

https://omgyummy.com/blitva/

say cheese...

 

did anyone say cheese?

well viewers today’s recipe comes via Lovie who happened to get this on her recipe grapevine. so i am happy to share it with you unlike some of Lovie’s other recipes which will remain firmly in the Sekulic ladies vault. and ha there is good reasoning behind this but that shall remain my little secret for now…mwah ha ha ha ha!!!

well i do happen to know a few things about cheese folks, i wrapped hundreds of pieces when i first landed back in good old Adelaide town. i relinquished my professional credentials temporarily for a stint in the cheese shop and a single mother’s pension. and yes, it is absolutely true the French do it the best and of course sometimes i would just make it up (i give credit to my uni drama classes for that). nothing like a bit of confidence and a few cheesy words like washed rind, ripe, chevre, aged cheddar to dazzle the customers, hee, hee. and of course i don’t mind a little bit of storytelling either like informing you about the claw which was our code word for the dude with the longest pinky fingernails who would hover around the tasting table. that’s where i often worked covering for the supreme cheese queen eileen…where’s eileen? where’s eileen?  she’s in jail for committing cheese fraud…oh no, i never would have thought…nah she’s just on holidays i would grin, a big cheesy grin of course (yes, i do know that is lame). but i can say i was the queen of selling fondue sets, definitely my specialty, lol.

so back to this recipe folks by now you would have gathered my theme is cheese. don’t ask me why when my cholesterol is 8.2. i shouldn’t even be looking at cheese but this is a simple recipe, very easy as Lovie would say but don’t be fooled by that either folks. Lovie is a Virgo, the nit-pickers of the zodiac, she is precise as you will gather from the visual cues, a perfectionist with some things apart from her kitchen drawers (but don’t tell her i said that otherwise my food supply will be cut off). besides i am taking a few master classes and cramming in as much as i can for future reference so that i will always have some unique culinary tricks up my sleeve.

Lovie’s cheese biscuits, stolen from Lorraine who stole them from her husband’s sister…

ingredients

300gms of plain flour

250gms of unsalted butter

300gms of tasty grated cheese

1-2tbspns of yoghurt or sour cream

shaved parmesan cheese chopped very finely, caraway seed powder or sweet paprika powder

method

rub butter into flour and then mix in cheese to form a dough, add 1 tbspn of yoghurt first add another if it needs to bind more.

roll out into a rectangle approx. 30cm by 18-20 cm, 1 cm thickness. sprinkle parmesan to ensure a good covering, sprinkle caraway seed powder or paprika or both for a bit of added colour. divide into 3 even strips, cut into sticks… see photos for visual cues.

line baking trays with paper, bake in preheated oven at 180 fan forced for 20 mins…check closer to time, leave to completely cool for a couple of hours on wire racks and then put into airtight container.

Abracadabra....the magic of butterflied chook.

 

hey culinary peeps. i must confess i am a supermarket meat stalker. with two young adult men, one with an appetite of 10 i am always on the lookout for a bargain. most of those bargains come in the form of whole chicken some less than 4 bucks. my method is to pounce and then chuck the chook in the freezer until i am ready to cook it.

and nothing is quite as simple as a butterflied chicken roasted in the oven, served with a tasty salad or whatever else takes your fancy. i have made this chicken several times. my inspiration comes from lovie and the power of vegeta which you will find in any slavic household. if you don't, then they are surely imposters. this handy seasoning is the cornerstone of many a slavic dish but is handy for most savoury creations. just make sure you have your vegeta license if you are new to its powers or ask some sweet baba and she will show you how much to use.

so for my chicken  i just use some kitchen scissors to cut straight through the back and then butterfly it which will ensure that the cooking time is reduced. for the seasoning i use about 2 tspns of salt which i rub all over the chicken, i rub about a tbspn of vegeta all over the chicken and in the cavity and then dollop 2 big tablespoons of garlic, no garlic shaming here, it can come straight out of the jar or finely crush about 6 cloves. follow that with 1 heaped tablespoon of cracked pepper and then a generous coating of olive oil. zest one large lemon and squeeze the juice all over the chicken. pop onto a tray lined with baking paper and slash the legs, thighs and breasts to the bone and then put into an oven at 180 degrees celsius, check after 45 mins and then increase temp to 200 for another 10-15 mins for crispier skin. you can check by slicing into the thigh to ensure that it is cooked. 

 

red lentil, pumpkin and veggie soup...

 

Ok folks talk about a downpour and decline in temperature. what has happened to spring?

spring, spring where have you gone?

here is a very easy soup which can be made in about 45mins, including cooking time, leave it in the fridge overnight and its flavours become even more enhanced.

i had my gorgeous vres ( we are a secret group of highly trained professionals, if i tell you what we do then i am afraid...lol) for lunch yesterday and had a request for this recipe and so here it is. i re-checked my blog and was surprised to see i had not already included it. i got this recipe from a colleague many moons ago  when i was living In WA and have done as Lovie always does, have of course tweaked it, a little addition here and there and you end up with a delicious red lentil coconut curry soup laden with a few extra veggies.

red lentil curry coconut soup.

ingredients.

1 cup of red rosy lentils…i get mine from gaganis but you can also purchase them from coles

1medium onion quartered and sliced

1 large clove of garlic crushed or a tspn of crushed garlic from the jar…no garlic shaming here viewers

oil whatever you prefer, i just use olive

1 heaped tablespoon of keens curry powder

1 tspn of salt 1 litre of chicken stock plus some extra stock powder, i use a tspn of vegeta ( yes you heard me) or you can just use chicken stock powder…plus another litre of water

1 medium carrot peeled and diced

1 medium potato cubed

1 wedge of pumpkin…i usually just buy a wedge of kent which is probably about a quarter of a medium sized pumpkin, peeled and cut into chunks

1 can of coconut milk

method

pour a few glugs of oil into a pot, when hot add lentils, curry powder, salt, stock powder or vegeta plus garlic and onion and sauté

add all your veggies and liquid stock plus water, bring to boil and then simmer until lentils are cooked and veggies are soft

i do not blend this soup as i prefer a chunkier texture so i just use a potato masher and smash the veggies

add your coconut milk and season to taste, sometimes i will add a little more curry powder, if your soup is too thick then just thin with some water and adjust seasoning…done and enjoy