It's Nothing Like - Gallette de Pomme de Terre

I was feeling rather hungry one Saturday morning in the days before I starting watching my carbohydrate and calorie intake. The fridge was fairly empty as we hadn't done the weekly shopping. So I came up with a filling variation of a gallette de pommel de terre.

It's Nothing Like a Gallette de Pomme de Terre

Ingredients

A couple of large potatoes

Half a red onion

A chunk of cheddar cheese

A large knob of butter

An egg

A wholewheat tortilla

Method

Peel and thinly slice the potatoes.

Melt the butter in a wide, flat-bottomed pan until it starts to foam.

Carefully place the potatoes in the pan overlapping the slices lightly. Try to keep to a single layer, two at most.

Cook the potato slowly so it softens and cakes before it browns. Then carefully turn it over to brown the other side.

Cooking the Potatoes

Before the bottom of the potatoes starts to brown, grate the cheese over them. Once the bottom is browned and the cheese has melted, sprinkle a little sliced onion over the gallette. Let the onion cook for a short while until it has lost its rawness but is still crunchy.

Melted cheese and onion garnish

Finally, serve on a warmed tortilla and to with a lightly fried or poached egg.

Flat Chicken Sandwich

Sometimes you want something quick to eat. I find this simple flat chicken sandwich fits the bill. It's pretty healthy too.

Ingredients

Half a skinned chicken breast

Two squeezes of lemon

Two splashes of olive oil

A dusting of paprika

A mean pinch of dried oregano

A mean pinch of salt

A wholewheat tortilla

A few lettuce leaves

A ripe tomato

A small lump of cheese

American mustard

I use American mustard because of its mild taste, its natural sourness and its consistency which makes it easy to "dribble" over the finished sandwich.

Equipment

A heavy bottomed grill pan

Method

Slice the chicken lengthways into "fingers".

Dust the chicken with paprika and sprinkle the oregano on top. Squeeze the lemon and splash the olive oil over the chicken. Rub the marinade into the chicken.

Heat the grill pan until it is very hot. Warm the tortilla quickly on both sides and then transfer straight to the serving plate.

Sprinkle the salt over the chicken then quickly grill the chicken so that it is brown on the outside but still moist on the inside.

Whilst the chicken is cooking, tear the lettuce leaves and place them on the tortilla. Roughly slice the tomato and spread it over the lettuce. A squeeze of lemon and splash of olive oil will nicely dress the salad.

As soon as the chicken is cooked, lay it on top of the salad.

Before the outside of the chicken has time to cool, finely grate some cheese on top so that it melts.

Finally, drizzle the mustard over the open sandwich, roll and eat.

Rare Blends - Almost Indian Fajitas

I'm one of those people who like a little variety in their food. Sometimes, we have the ingredients ready to cook and I just feel like something different. One evening when I had originally planned to cook It's Nothing Like Chicken Fajitas I wondered how I could make it a little different

I had some left over Almost Indian-style pumpkin in the fridge so I came up with this Rare Blend - Almost Indian Fajitas. I offset the sweetness of the pumpkin with some chopped onion and a little yogurt.

Almost Indian Fajitas

Ingredients

A chicken breast

A pinch of chilli powder

A squeeze of lemon

A splash of olive oil

A pinch of salt

A couple of dollops of pre-cooked pumpkin

A small red onion

A tub of Greek-style yogurt

A couple of wholewheat tortillas

When cooking the pumpkin, I simply sautéed it in some mustard oil with a pinch of cumin and a little chopped red chilli.

You could use white tortillas but, not only do they not look so much like chapatis as the whole wheat ones, they aren't so healthy.

Equipment

A heavy bottomed grill pan

Method

Slice the chicken breast into "fingers" and then marinade them in the lemon juice, olive oil and chilli powder.

Heat the grill pan, once it is hot sprinkle a little salt over the chicken and grill quickly until the meat is fully cooked whilst still moist.

Remove the chicken from the pan and a let in rest for a couple of minutes.

Chop the onion.

In the meantime, chop the onion and spread a dollop of pumpkin on each tortilla.

Once the chicken has rested, place a couple of fingers on each tortilla and sprinkle a little onion on top.

A couple of spoons of yogurt nicely tops the dish off.

Fold and eat!

It's Nothing Like - Chicken Fajitas

One of our favourite mid-week meals is It's Nothing Like Chicken Fajitas. We enjoy the mix of tastes and textures that you get when you bite into a filled tortilla. It's pretty healthy and quite quick to cook too.

Nothing Like Chicken Fajitas

Ingredients

Two skinless chicken breasts

Two medium onions

A green pepper

A red chilli

Two ripe tomatoes

A juicy lime

A couple of stalks of coriander

Pinch of paprika

Sprinkle of oregano

A good glug of olive oil

A squeeze of lemon juice

Two pinches of salt

A splash of Worcestershire sauce

A glug of dark soya sauce

A small chunk of cheddar cheese

A tub of sour cream

You can use any onions though I usually use one red onion and one brown-skinned one.

I always prefer to use plum tomatoes.

You might know coriander as cilantro.

A glug is about the same as a tablespoon full. A good glug is somewhere between two and three tablespoons.

If you don't have a lime, you could use a lemon but a lime definitely tastes better.

Equipment

A good quality, heavy bottomed grill pan.

I use a large Circulon frying pan that has very low ridges. I can use it both with and without oil. It was a wedding present.

Method

Cut the chicken into finger-sized strips and but in a shallow dish.

Add a splash of olive oil, the squeeze of lemon juice, the paprika, and oregano then mix well.

Cut off about a quarter of the red onion and save it. Thickly slice the remaining onions.

Heat the glug of olive oil in the grill pan using very low heat. Once the oil is hot, add the onion and cook slowly. The aim is to soften the onion and bring out it's natural sweetness.

Now finely chop the onion that you saved and add it to a small bowl. Squeeze the juice of the lime over the onion.

Halve the tomatoes lengthways and discard the seeds. Similarly de-seed the red chilli unless you enjoy the hot chilli taste.

Finely chop the tomatoes, the chilli, and the coriander. Add them and a pinch of salt to the onions and lime juice. Stir and set the bowl aside and give time for the ingredients to cook.

Half, de-seed and chop the green peppers and them to the onions cooking in the grill pan. The onions should be nice and soft and starting to caramelise. 

Quickly grate the cheddar cheese into a serving dish and pour the sour cream (or part of it) into another serving dish.

When the peppers have just lost that completely raw look. Turn the heat up high so that the peppers retain a little crunchiness. Add the Worcestershire and soy sauces, stir and cook until the onions turn dark brown and the dish is almost dry. (This should be a couple of minutes at most.) Turn the peppers and onions into a serving dish.

Quickly clean the grill pan and heat it over a high heat. Once the pan is very hot, reduce the heat a little but not so much that the pan's temperature drops. Add the chicken strips one at time. Don't overcrowd the chicken strips in the pan. Cook the chicken strips on all sides until they are just fully cooked through uit no more or they will dry out. One a strip is done, transfer it to a serving dish.

Let the chicken stand for a few minutes before serving.

We eat these Nothing Like Chicken Fajitas with wholewheat tortillas.

Rare Blends - Moroccan Greek Salad

We often serve something that resembles a Greek salad as an accompaniment to our meals at The Chubby Chops. They're quick to prepare and compliment many dishes. I always add a few ingredients that you wouldn't normally find in a Greek salad such as apples and sultanas.

One evening, I thought I'd go a step further and came up with my Moroccan Greek salad. It looks quite interesting but, to be honest, it tasted a little bit flat. Still if you don't try, you'll never know. 

Perhaps the orange wasn't as juicy as it could have been? Perhaps a little rose water sprinkled over the orange would have helped? A pinch of cumin? A few quite minor changes could make this into a family favourite. See what you can come up with.

Moroccan Greek Salad

Ingredients

A tomato or two

A small cucumber

A small dessert apple

A chunk of feta cheese

Some black olives

A few sultanas

An orange

A handful of mint leaves

The juice of half a lemon

Some olive oil

Honey to taste

When it comes to the volume of olive oil, I usually squeeze the lemon first and use somewhere between two and three times as much olive oil.

Good quality black grapes, sliced in two, are even better than sultanas.

No need for salt, the feta cheese has plenty of it.

Equipment

A salad bowl

Method

Squeeze the lemon into the bowl, poor in the olive oil, add the honey, and stir vigorously. (You could use a whisk, I usually use a fork).

Very roughly chop the tomato, cucumber and apple. When chopping the apple it is best to discard the core. Add them to the bowl.

Throw in the olives and sultanas.

Cube the feta cheese and add it to the bowl.

Now stir gently so that everything in the bowl get nicely coated with the dressing.

Next peel the orange, cut it into small cubes, and add it to the bowl.

Give the salad one more very careful stir so that the orange mixes with the other ingredients.

Finally, tear the mint leaves and spread them over the salad.

It's Nothing Like - Cassoulet

I'm normally a last minute cook, by which I mean that I wait until it's almost time to eat before I decide what to cook. Only once I have decided what takes my fancy do I worry about whether I've got the correct ingredients. Usually I don't have them so I have to improvise. Some of my improvisations are better than others. Thankfully Mrs Chubby Chops rarely complains and Little Miss Chubby Chops can be so fussy that it makes no difference.

This recipe has its roots in Cassoulet and some similarity to one cooked by Jaime Oliver during one of those "a complete meal for four in twenty three seconds" TV programmes.

It's Nothing Like Cassoulet

This makes a great supper dish eaten with some good rustic wholemeal or rye bread.

Ingredients

A couple of skinned chicken breasts

A pinch of cumin powder

A pinch of coriander powder

A pinch of salt

A splash of olive oil

A squeeze of lemon

Some frozen broad beans

A can of cooked foul medammas

A can of tomatoes

Two cloves of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced

A brown-skinned onion, peeled and thickly sliced

Two pinches of paprika

Another pinch of salt

A good slug of olive oil

I've used canned chick peas instead of foul medammas and have managed to remember to buy a can of butter beans for the next time that I cook this dish. I'm hoping the use of butter beans will make the dish even better.

Equipment

A heavy bottomed frying/grill pan

A heavy bottomed large sauce pan

Method

Slice the chicken breasts longways so that you end up with slices the size of a thin sausage.

Rub the cumin, coriander, salt, olive oil, and lemon juice ono the chicken pieces and leave to stand for 15 minutes or so. (Less if you're in a big hurry).

In the meantime, sauté the onion and garlic in a good slug of olive oil until they are soft.

Add the canned tomatoes (I prefer to liquidise them first), the broad beans, and drained canned beans. Season with salt and paprika. Then bring to the boil and leave to simmer.

Heat the dry frying/grill pan to a high temperature and quickly cook the chicken strips so that they are cooked through, crisp on the outside but still moist inside. I usually cook them for about 5 to 7 minutes and never more than 10 minutes.

Once the chicken is cooked, leave it to stand for a few minutes. Then add it to the tomato and beans for a few minutes.

The dish is now ready to serve.

"Snowman"

Little Miss Chubby Chops has a couple of kids's cookery books. One has a recipe for a meringue snowman. One day, just before it was time to eat, she came to me and said "Please can I have a snowman for dessert?". There wasn't time to cook the meringue (even if I did know how to do it) and the recipe used ingredients, such as marmalade, that we didn't have.

I didn't want to disappoint her so I came up with a simple biscuit snowman using the sour cream that we had in the fridge. Little Miss Chubby Chops loved it.

Today, Little Miss Chubby Chops wanted dessert after her lunch, not just any dessert, she wanted a snowman. We had some gorgeous fresh, thick cream (naturally thick not thickened) in the fridge. So I started to make the snowmen using fresh cream instead of sour cream. I gave Little Miss Chubby Chops a taste of the fresh cream. The cream had hardly touched her lips before she decided that she didn't like it and it wasn't getting anywhere near the back of her mouth, let alone her throat. So it was back to sour cream.

A Snowman

Ingredients

A digestive biscuit

A ginger nut

Three teaspoons of sour cream

Five chocolate buttons

Method

Spread the sour cream on the biscuits.

Arrange the biscuits so it looks a little like a snowman.

Use the chocolate buttons for the eyes, mouth and buttons for the snowman. 

Variations

I've successfully used full milk, greek-style yogurt instead of the sour cream. Real cream would probably be popular with most kids, just not Little Miss Chubby Chops.

As you can see from the photo, we didn't have any chocolate buttons so I used Hundreds and Thousands. 

Brie, Mustard, and Onion Beef Rolls

I was preparing dinner recently and, at the last minute, realised that the meal needed a starter to make it complete. I had some thin slices of beef which we normally eat in the morning for breakfast. I was able to come up with this tasty, light dish to fill the gap.

Brie, Mustard, and Onion Beef Rolls

Ingredients

Topside of Beef, 10mm thick slices

A quarter teaspoon of mustard for each slice

A decent slice of mature Brie for each slice

An onion, cut into wedges and tempered

A little olive oil

I use French mustard with whole mustard seeds. A smooth mustard should work equally well provided it is vinegar rather than water based.

The brie could be substituted by other cheeses but I would recommend using a cheese that turns gooey when heated rather than one that turns stringy (such as mozzarella). The cheese needs to be mature so that its taste doesn't get overpowered by the mustard.

As the dish will be cooked quickly, the onions need to have their rawness taken away but not lose their crispiness. Sauté them lightly in a little olive oil until the rawness has gone but they retain a little bite.

Equipment

A heavy bottomed grill/frying pan

Cocktail sticks

The dish needs to be cooked very quickly at a high heat. Our cooker has a double gas burner that provides comparatively high heat for a domestic cooker. A thin bottomed pan will quickly warp and cause food to cook unevenly and stick to the pan.

Method

Lay out the slices of beef on a plate, slightly stretching them as you do so.

Spread the mustard on the side facing upwards. Place a slice of cheese on top of the mustard and a wedge of onion on top of the cheese.

Ready for rolling 

Roll the slices of beef and secure them with a cocktail stick.

The Beef Rolls waiting to be cooked

Place the pan over a high heat source and wait until it becomes hot. 

Whilst the pan is heating sprinkle a little salt over the rolls.

When the pan is nice and hot, splash a little olive oil around the pan. Place the beef rolls in the pan. Keep the heat high. Turn the rolls so that they brown evenly until you can see that the cheese has melted inside.

Turn them out onto a serving dish or plate and leave them to stand for about five minutes before serving.

Olive drenched, smashed tomatoes

An attention grabbing name for a very satisfying, inexpensive dish. Simply cooking good ingredients usually results in good tasting food of which this is a classic example. Subsistence food for many people, it's great comfort food for me. 

Ingredients

A can of tomatoes

A few good slugs of olive oil

A good pinch of salt

One of the things that I've found out about food is that there is little correlation between cost and quality. Whilst this is especially true of eating out, it is also true of some of the humblest ingredients such as canned tomatoes. In England, you can hardly go wrong with a tin of own brand tomatoes in tomato juice from one of the major supermarkets. 

The situation is much, much different in Malaysia. Supermarkets don't have their own brands with the exception of Tesco (and they have a very small range). There is a choice of American and Italian brands. I find that La Valle, one of the cheapest brands, has the best taste, texture and juice. The only additive is ascorbic acid so they should be pretty healthy.

When La Valle is out of stock, I go for one of the other Italian brands. I try to avoid the American brands. The American brand tomatoes are so stiff it's as if rigor mortis has set in before they were canned. It must be down to all the preservatives in them.

When it comes to olive oil, I always use an extra virgin oil. The price difference in Malaysia between extra virgin oil and plain old olive oil is relatively small. It doesn't seem worth the hassle of buying and storing two different oils.

Equipment

A 15-20cm diameter saucepan

A desert or serving spoon

I use a copper-bottomed stainless steel pan but any old saucepan will do. There's no need for a non-stick pan, the smashed tomato will not stick unless you forget the oil or you actually burn it so badly it turns into charcoal.

Method

1. Make sure the pan is completely dry by placing it over a high heat.
2. When the pan is getting hot, add a couple of good slugs of olive oil so that the bottom of the pan is covered.
3. Whilst the oil is warming, quickly open the tin of tomatoes.
4. When the oil starts to release it's fragrance, plunge the tomatoes into the pan. Leave them whole at this stage. Don't reduce the heat yet.
5. Sprinkle a good pinch of salt over the tomatoes.
6. When the tomato juices are heated, take the spoon and gently cut the tomatoes so that the juice inside them is released.
7. Once the tomatoes are nicely bubbling, turn down the heat so that the contents of the pan are nicely simmering.
8. After five minutes, take the spoon and crush the tomato flesh against the side of the pan until that all the lumps are gone.
9. Continue to simmer until the tomatoes thicken a little and the oil glistens on the surface.
10. The tomatoes can now be served.

Eating

Olive drenched, smashed tomatoes are best enjoyed with a few slices of hearty, crusty bread. 

The loaf pictured is a rye sour dough loaf from a Hiestand franchisee in Malaysia. It's decent bread but doesn't stay crusty for long due to the humidity. (It isn't easy to find good bread in Malaysia).