On a chilly nighttime good-for-nothing warms you up like blisteringly red-hot Chinese-style chicken, served with a cooling line-up of herby salad, supposes Nigel Slater
There was a bit of a spurt of aniseed, soy and ginger-scented cooking in the kitchen last week, as there often is when I have had one of my irregular errands to Chinatown. These are the expeditions where I return home with armfuls of bottles and containers, predominantly red.
I only required, almost implored, the smell of oyster sauce to warm up a kitchen moved ice-cold by a dodgy thermostat. Leafy light-greens, bok choy and mustard commons are regularly steamed and pitched with dense, glossy oyster sauce at home, but meat and fish rather less so.
I tossed fat, free-range chicken thighs with crushed garlic, honey, chilli and oyster sauce and baked them on a solidify night when simply something blisteringly, eye-wateringly red-hot would hit the spot. It wasnt something that could sunbathe under the label of legitimacy it was just what I needed at that moment. The chicken rose shiny, gently crispy and very hot. It sizzled as we devour, moving our lips tingle. We made the flaming out with a sour citrus salad.
There was a big pudding, extremely, the kind of broiled butterscotch sponge circumstance, with ointment, butter and carbohydrate, that only ever comes out in the extremely depths of wintertime. Disaster cooking for the coldnes and hungry.
Oyster sauce chicken with citrus heap salad
Check the chicken regularly, treating it with foil if it is browning too much.
Serves 3
chicken thighs 6
For the marinade:
garlic 3 big cloves
onion 1, medium sized
oyster sauce 100 ml
ignited soy sauce 4 tbsp
sugar 3 tbsp
chilli sauce 3 tbsp
For the salad:
fish sauce 2 tsp
caster sugar 1 tbsp
lime juice 2 tbsp
spate leaves 10
coriander leaves a large handful
chilli 1, medium-sized
pink grapefruit 1
cashews 2 handful, roasted and salted
To represent the marinade peel the garlic then suppresses the cloves to a glue use a pestle and mortar and a pinch of salt. Employ the paste into a large mingling bowl. Peel the onion, cut it in half and chopper it very finely. Mix with the garlic.
Put the oyster and soy sauces, the honey and the chilli sauce into the mixing bowl and incite exhaustively. Push the chicken pieces into the marinade, revolve them over and leave in a cool home for an hour or two.
Set the oven at 180 C/ gas mark 4. Place the chicken pieces into a nonstick bake tin, spoon over half the marinade and plaza in the preheated oven. Roast for 45 minutes, basting once or twice with the remaining marinade, and regularly checking their progression. Extend the cooking tin with foil if necessary.
To realize the salad, combine fishing operations sauce, caster carbohydrate and lime juice in a small container. Roughly chop or weeping the heap needles and add to the bowl, together with the coriander leaves. Finely chop the chilli and add to the dressing.
Slice the ends from the grapefruit, lieu it flat on the chopping board then slice away the peel and white-hot pith a sharp-worded kitchen bayonet. Remove the segments of flesh from the skin. Apply the grapefruit into the apparel and leave for 10 instants before including the cashew seeds and serving.