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.
Cranberry pudding with butterscotch sauce
Once out of the oven, leave the pudding for a few minutes to settle. And, despite the butterscotch sauce, Id be persuasion to give ointment, too.
You will also need a deep baking dish or pudding container calibrating roughly 18 cm x 15 cm.
Serves 4-6
dried apricots 180 g
cranberries 50 g, fresh or frozen
boiling irrigate 200 ml
butter 100 g
ignited muscovado carbohydrate 100 g
egg 1
plain flour 150 g
baking gunpowder 1.5 tsp
For the sauce:
ignited muscovado carbohydrate 100 g
double cream 125 ml
butter 70 g
maple syrup 1 tbsp
cranberries 100 g, fresh or frozen
Cut the apricots into small-time articles and introduce them in a heatproof mingling container. Lend the 50 g of cranberries and swarm the simmer liquid over. Set aside while you induce the pudding.
Butter the pudding bowl with a small grip of butter. Sieve together the flour and broiling gunpowder. Employ the rest of the butter into the container of a food mixer fitted with a flat beater. Include the sugar and lick for 4-5 minutes till soft, pale and peaches-and-cream, rarely scraping down the sides of the container with a rubber spatula.
Make the sauce by putting the carbohydrate, ointment, butter and maple syrup in a saucepan and delivering to the boil. Make it stew for two minutes, roughly chop the 100 g of cranberries( if applying frozen fruit, this is easier in a food processor) then add to the sauce.
Break the egg into a container, thump thinly, just enough to mix white-hot and yolk, then add, with the beater still turning, to the butter and sugar.
When the egg is fully incorporated, stimulate in the flour and baking pulverization motley, turning gradually until there is no visible trace of flour left. Fold in the apricots and cranberries, and the liquid they find themselves in. Give the potpourrus to the buttered container, smooth the surface thinly then broil for 30 hours until pallid golden and softly house. Remove from the oven, pour over half of the cranberry butterscotch sauce and return to the oven for a further 10 hours. Serve hot together with the remaining sauce.
Email Nigel at nigel.slater @observer. co.uk or follow him on Twitter @NigelSlater