On a chilly nighttime good-for-nothing warms you up like blisteringly red-hot Chinese-style chicken, served with a cooling surface of herby salad, announces Nigel Slater
There was a bit of a commotion of aniseed, soy and ginger-scented fix in the kitchen last week, as there often is when I have had one of my irregular trips to Chinatown. These are the trips where I return home with armfuls of bottles and cups, principally red.
I exactly requirement, nearly prayed, the smell of oyster sauce to warm up a kitchen became ice-cold by a dodgy thermostat. Leafy dark-greens, bok choy and mustard dark-greens are regularly steamed and flung with dense, glossy oyster sauce at home, but meat and fish rather less so.
I flung paunch, free-range chicken thighs with crushed garlic, sugar, chilli and oyster sauce and broiled them on a freezing nighttime when merely something blisteringly, eye-wateringly red-hot would hit the spot. It wasnt something who are able to sunbathe under the label of authenticity it was just what I needed at that moment. The chicken developed lustrous, lightly crisp and very hot. It sizzled as we ate, realizing our lips tingle. We applied the volley out with a sour citrus salad.
There was a big pudding, too, the sort of broiled butterscotch sponge circumstance, with cream, butter and sugar, that merely ever comes out in the exceedingly depths of wintertime. Emergency cooking for the cold and hungry.
Oyster sauce chicken with citrus plenty salad
Check the chicken regularly, comprising it with foil if it is browning too much.
Serves 3
chicken thighs 6
For the marinade:
garlic 3 large-scale cloves
onion 1, medium sized
oyster sauce 100 ml
illuminated 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
plenty leaves 10
coriander leaves a large handful
chilli 1, medium-sized
pink grapefruit 1
cashews 2 handful, cooked and salted
To form the marinade peel the garlic then subdues the cloves to a paste expending a pestle and mortar and a pinch of salt. Introduce the paste into a large mixing container. Peel the onion, cut it in half and chopper it very finely. Compound with the garlic.
Put the oyster and soy sauces, the sugar and the chilli sauce into the mixing container and stir exhaustively. Push the chicken pieces into the marinade, revolve them over and leave in a cool region for an hour or two.
Set the oven at 180 C/ gas mark 4. Place the chicken pieces into a nonstick roast tin, spoon over half the marinade and region in the preheated oven. Roast for 45 hours, basting once or twice with the remaining marinade, and regularly checking their progress. Report the roasting tin with foil if necessary.
To form the salad, combine fishing operations sauce, caster sugar and lime juice in a small container. Roughly chop or weeping the plenty leaves and add to the container, together with the coriander leaves. Finely chop the chilli and add to the dressing.
Slice the ends from the grapefruit, region it flat on the chopping board then slice away the peel and lily-white pith a sharp-worded kitchen spear. Remove the segments of chassis from the scalp. Introduce the grapefruit into the bandaging and leave for 10 hours before adding the cashew seeds and serving.
Cranberry pudding with butterscotch sauce
Once out of the oven, leave the dessert for a few minutes to settle. And, despite the butterscotch sauce, Id be invited to present cream, too.
You will also need a deep baking food or pudding container assessing approximately 18 cm x 15 cm.
Serves 4-6
dried apricots 180 g
cranberries 50 g, fresh or frozen
steaming water 200 ml
butter 100 g
illuminated muscovado sugar 100 g
egg 1
plain flour 150 g
roasting gunpowder 1.5 tsp
For the sauce:
illuminated muscovado sugar 100 g
double cream 125 ml
butter 70 g
maple syrup 1 tbsp
cranberries 100 g, fresh or frozen
Cut the apricots into small-scale patches and make them in a heatproof mixing container. Include the 50 g of cranberries and swarm the simmer water over. Set aside while you form the pudding.
Butter the dessert container with a small knob of butter. Filter together the flour and roasting gunpowder. Introduce the rest of the butter into the container of a food mixer fitted with a flat beater. Include the sugar and overpower for 4-5 minutes till soft, pallid and creamy, sometimes rubbing down the sides of the container with a rubber spatula.
Make the sauce by putting the sugar, cream, butter and maple syrup in a saucepan and accompanying to the boil. Give it stew for 2 minutes, approximately chop the 100 g of cranberries( if expending frozen return, this is easier in a food processor) then add to the sauce.
Break the egg into a container, overpower lightly, just enough to mix lily-white and yolk, then add, with the beater still turning, to the butter and sugar.
When the egg is fully incorporated, stir in the flour and roasting gunpowder concoction, revolving slowly until “they dont have” visible find of flour left. Fold in the apricots and cranberries, and the water they find themselves in. Transpose the concoction to the buttered container, smooth the surface lightly then broil for 30 hours until pallid gold and lightly conglomerate. Remove from the oven, pour over half of the cranberry butterscotch sauce and return to the oven for a further 10 hours. Serve red-hot along with the remaining sauce.
Email Nigel at nigel.slater @observer. co.uk or follow him on Twitter @NigelSlater