(Viennese) Chicken in Apricot Sauce

So, you'll all be glad to hear I got Vienna safely this Thursday, and now that I've had a chance to buy some supplies, back to a more regular service of recipes. This first one is basically a variation on beef in plum sauce, but was so tasty, I thought it too needed its own post.
For 4:
6 Chicken Breasts (sechs Hühnerbrusten)
6 Apricots (sechs Aprikosen)
5 Small Onions (fünf Zweibeln)
2 Peppers (zwei Paprikas)
4 Garlic Cloves (vier Knoblauchzehen)
1 Saucepan (kochtopf)
1 Frying Pan (Bratpfanne)
Olive Oil (Oliveöl)

1. Chop onions finely. Fry in saucepan with olive oil on a low heat.
2. Chop garlic finely. Add to the onions.
3. Remove the stone from the apricots and chop into sixths or eighths, depending on size. Add to onions and garlic.

4. Almost cover these in hot water, and bring to the boil.

5. Chop chicken breasts and fry on high heat in frying pan.
6. Once lightly browned, add chicken to saucepan.
7. Mix chicken into sauce, and simmer/boil liquid until thickened.
7. Chop peppers into strips and fry in frying pan used for chicken.

8. Once peppers are cooked, add to saucepan for a minute or two, then serve.

Volumise: Mix some spinach into the sauce. Serve with cauliflower mash.
Add carbs: Use more peppers, use more apricots.
Add fat: Mix in some more olive oil or some coconut oil. Serve with roasted avocados.
Add protein: Mix some pieces of bacon in with the chicken.

P.S. If anyone wants to correct my German, leave a comment.

Short Hiatus

The blog won't be getting any posts for a little while.
I've moved to my parents from my Oxford digs for a week or so until I fly out to Vienna for the summer. Hopefully, I'll be settled there soon (as in start of July) and I'll be able to post some more new recipes. Until I'm sorted out in Vienna though, there will be no new recipes going up.
See you soon I hope,
Dan

Five spice pork marinade

Needed to make something quickly today (again due to exams), so I marinated some sliced pork overnight last night in olive oil, Chinese five spice (a mix of star anise, cinnamon, fennel, black pepper and cloves) and ginger.
For 2:

5 Pork Loin Steaks
1 Broccoli Head
2 Carrots
1 Clove of Ginger
Spinach
Chinese Five Spice
Ginger
Olive Oil
Wok

1. Mix 40 ml olive oil, some Chinese five spice and ginger in a measuring jug.
2. Chop pork into strips (as per picture) and marinate in above overnight.

3. Peel carrots. Chop carrots and broccoli into thin strips. Chop garlic into small pieces.

4. Place wok on heat, add pork to wok first, then other ingredients.
5. Stir-fry ingredients in wok until pork is browned. Add spinach to wok and wilt. Serve.

Volumise: Add more carrot and/or spinach.
Add carbs: Add peppers.
Add fat: Add coconut oil to stir-fry.
Add protein: Add some nuts to the stir fry just prior to serving, perhaps walnuts.

Warming Beef Stew

I struggled with a name for this. It was never meant to be a spicy dish, but it is full of spices, like cinnamon and cumin, so I went with something that sounds good given the current weather in the UK.
For 3:
3 Casserole Steaks
4 Onions
3 Cans of Chopped Tomatoes
2 Carrots
1 Clove of Garlic
Ground Cumin
Dried Coriander
Ground Nutmeg
Ground Cinnamon
1 Saucepan

1. Peel and chop the onions and garlic. Fry in saucepan until almost browned.
2. Chop casserole steak into pieces about a cubic inch (2.5 cm) in size. Fry the beef in the saucepan until brown.
3. Add the spices and mix into the onions and beef.
4. Once fully mixed in, add the tomatoes and carrots.

5. Simmer for about 1 hour and/or until the sauce is sufficiently thickened. Serve.

Volumise: Add more carrots. Add some spinach about 2 minutes before serving.
Add carbs: Use more tomatoes. Add some peppers roughly ten minutes before serving.
Add fat: Mix in some coconut oil, almond or coconut flour.
Add protein: Serve with bacon. Use more beef. I imagine everyone is sick of hearing "use more bacon", but unfortunately, it is a universal trueism that bacon improves pretty much everything.

Also, this will be posted to Fightback Friday at Food Renegade on Friday. Feel free to head over there and check out more recipes and food related articles.

Coq au vin

Classical French dish. I made it in my slow-cooker, which I know that not everybody has, but the size of the dish means you need a big container for it all, so it's a slow-cooker or a casserole dish. I needed the bottle of wine to make the dish, and I went to Tesco to get it. Annoyingly, I got ID'd and didn't have any on me, which meant I couldn't get some alcohol that I wasn't even going to drink, but evaporate into the air.
For about 4-6:
4 Large Chicken Legs
500 g Bacon
6 Onions
2 Carrots
8 Medium Mushrooms
1 Bottle of Wine (minus 3 Glugs for the Plum Sauce recipe of earlier)
Thyme
3 Bay Leaves
Frying Pan
Saucepan
Slow-Cooker

1. Fry the bacon in the frying pan until crispy.
2. Pour all but one glug of the bottle of wine into the slow-cooker. Add the bay-leaves and thyme.
3. Chop the onions and carrots roughly and add the onion, carrots and bacon and some thyme to the slow-cooker.
4. In the pan used for the bacon, fry the chicken legs until brown on both sides. Place the chicken legs into the slow-cooker.
5. Add water until all the ingredients are covered with liquid.

6. Cook for 6-8 hours.

7. Strain all the liquid from the pot into a saucepan and boil down into a thick sauce. Return the solids to the warm pot, but do not apply heat, to maintain temperature.
8. While this boils, chop the mushrooms into quarters and fry in butter. Once browned, add the remaining glug of wine. Boil this liquid down to a thick sauce also.

9. Once the mushrooms and sauce is ready, serve. Be careful of bones from the chicken legs (they can be reserved for stock).

Volumise: Use more carrots. Mix in some cauliflower, it may dissolve and thicken the sauce.
Add Carbs: Serve with roast sweet potatoes.
Add fat: Mix some coconut oil or coconut flour into the slow-cooker prior to 6-8 hour cooking.
Add protein: Use more bacon. Use more chicken legs.

Roast beef in plum sauce with mashed cauliflower

Good God! I thought I mightn't post this week because of exams and whatnot, but this was genuinely too good not to share. I really enjoyed this meal. The sauce was amazing.
Let's get straight to it.
For 2:
4 Small Beef Steaks
2 Plums
3 Glugs of red wine (yes, that's a unit!)
3 Onions
1 Cauliflower Head
1 Beef Stock cube (Knorr)
Coconut Oil
Roasting Dish
Frying pan
Saucepan

1. Heat the oven to about 150 degrees C. Once hot, put the steaks in with some coconut oil.
2. Slice the onions finely. Fry in the pan on a low heat with some oil.
3. Cut down to the plum stone, run the knife all the way round, then twist the plum apart and remove the stone. Chop each half plum into four pieces (so 16 plum pieces in all). Add them to the frying pan with the onions.
4. Put a saucepan of water on the boil.
5. Chop the cauliflower up into bit and start boiling it once the water is boiling.
6. Add two glugs of wine and the stock cube to the frying pan and one glug of wine to the beef in the oven. Stir the frying pan until the stock cube dissolves.

7. Once the sauce is thickened up and the beef has had roughly 40 minutes, add the liquid from the baking tray to the frying pan.
8. Once the cauliflower is boiled, drain it, then mash it.

9. Once the beef has had 1 hour total and the sauce is thick, serve.

Volumise: Use more cauliflower, boil or steam some broccoli.
Add Carbs: Boil and mash some sweet potato instead or as well.
Add fat: Add coconut oil to the mash.
Add Protein: Wrap the steaks in bacon and with cheese.

PS Most of these recipes are now going up on Chowstalker. Two points come to mind:
1. They have a ratings system. If you enjoyed the recipe, let them know.
2. They have a butt-load more good recipes.
Enjoy.

Vinegar-Poached Salmon Stir Fry

Given a choice between revision and cooking, it's pretty clear which one I pick!

For 3:
6 Salmon Steaks
100 g Spinach
2 Red Peppers
1 Chilli
1 Garlic Clove
Vinegar
Coconut Oil
1 Wok
1 Saucepan
1 Baking Tray
Slotted Spoon
Paper Towels

1. Heat the oven to 200 degrees C. Chop peppers into 4 pieces. Put peppers and some coconut oil in baking tray and baking tray in oven.
2. Fill saucepan with vinegar to height of thickest piece of salmon, heat to simmering.
3. Submerge three salmon steaks in vinegar and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove salmon steaks with slotted spoon and place on paper towels to dry. Repeat with other three salmon steaks.

4. Chop chilli and garlic clove into small pieces. Melt some coconut oil in the wok. Sweat the chilli and garlic in the wok.
5. Add the salmon to the wok and stir fry. While frying, break the salmon into small flakes.

6. Once salmon is cooked, quickly wilt spinach in wok.

7. Take wok off heat. Remove peppers from oven and place in plastic container with the lid on. Shake vigorously. The heat and shaking will loosen the skin from the peppers, allowing the burnt skin to be peeled off.

8. Serve.

Volumise: More spinach in the stir-fry.
Add carbs: Use more peppers.
Add fat: Roast some avocado with the peppers.
Add protein: Mix some bacon into the stir-fry.

Orange Chicken and Sweet Poato Mash

I thought I'd make a variant on the lemon chicken from a while back.
A quick congratulations to my friends who have just finished their finals here at Oxford! Can't believe we've all been here for 4 years!
This recipe is going up in a blog carnival over at Food Renegade, so go check it out over there for more recipes and food-based discussions.

For 3:
3 Chicken Breasts
4 Clementines (I know, not oranges)
1 Bunch Spring Onions
1 Chilli
2 Medium Sweet Potatoes
Ground Ginger
Butter
1 Frying Pan
1 Saucepan
Paper Towels
Slotted Spoon

1. Slice the chicken into small strips.
2. Skin the clementines.
3. Boil some water in the saucepan along with some clementine skin. Remove the skin from the water.
4. Poach the chicken strips in the water briefly (30-60 s). Remove the chicken from the water with the slotted spoon and dry on the paper towels.
5. Chop the spring onions and chilli. Sweat these in the butter in one of the frying pans along with some ginger.
6. Skin and chop the sweet potatoes into small chunks and add to the boiling water.
7. Increase the heat on the frying pan and stir fry the chicken into the mix.
8. Once the chicken is browned, juice the clementines (or squeeze the juice out with your hands if you lack a juicer, like me) and add the juice to the pan. Simmer this slowly.

9. Once the potatoes are boiled, drain them then mash them with some butter.

10. Serve

Volumise: Boil some cauliflower with the sweet potatoes to make cauliflower-sweet potato mash. Serve with some stir-fried broccoli and cabbage.
Add carbs: Add some honey to the orange sauce and/or to the sweet potatoes while mashing.
Add fat: Mix some coconut oil or more butter into the mash.
Add protein: Add bacon bits to sweet potato mash.

Pork and Sweet Potato Stew

It's less than a week til my final exams start here in Oxford, so obviously, it's time for comfort food. What better way than a nice thick stew?
I came up with this recipe a while back, an experiment with a beef stew would not thicken in time, so I saved the beefy tomato-y sauce in the freezer, then I used this as the basis for the original of this dish.
As failing to make beef stew to make sauce for another dish seems a little wasteful, I just used stock cubes and tomato puree this time.
For 3:
6 Pork Loin Steaks
1 Large Sweet Potato
250 g mushrooms
2 Beef Stock Cubes (Knorr)
Tomato Puree
Chilli Powder
Cumin
Cinnamon
Rosemary
Thyme
20g butter
300 ml Water
1 Saucepan

1. Melt the butter in the saucepan.
2. Chop the pork into roughly 1 cm wide strips across the loin steak. Fry the pork strips in the butter until lightly browned.
3. Peel and chop the sweet potato into large chunks. Mix them into the pan, coating them in any fat remaining in the pan.

4. Add 300 ml boiling water, tomato puree, stock cubes, chilli powder, cumin and cinnamon to the pan. Mix and heat until the tomato, spices and stock are dissolved into the water.

5. Cover the pan with a lid, bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes.
6. Remove the pan lid. Crush/mash the sweet potato pieces (I used a spoon) into the water, so it is a thick paste.
7. Chop medium mushrooms into quarters, any others to roughly the same size pieces. Add the mushrooms, rosemary and thyme to the pan and mix in.

8. Continue to simmer for 10-15, mixing frequently to prevent anything sticking to your pan bottom.

Volumise: Add some onions to the mix at roughly the same time as the mushroom.
Add carbs: Use more sweet potatoes.
Add fat: Add some coconut oil or more butter. Use fattier pork.
Add protein: Use more pork. Add more mushrooms.

I hope the extra pictures come in handy and give you a better impression of how I cook and what to do, I'm hoping to incorporate more pictures into the blog from now on. Also, here are some bonus pictures of it served up and the table where I prepare everything.

Finally, some link love for Modern Paleo Blog, who published me in their blog carnival this week. Lots more recipes and interesting discussion there.
Any questions, leave a comment.

Stuffed Peppers

I made these ages ago. They worked quite well.
I just had another go at them, they were delicious and very easy to eat.
I imagine that, with some dressing (like replacing the lids) they could be used as a (relatively) fancy starter.
On the other hand, you can eat them like a (rather messy) apple once they've cooled down a bit:
For 3:
800g Beef mince
6 Peppers
Chilli Powder
Roasting Tray

1. Cut the centre out of the peppers.
2. Mix the beef mince with as much chilli powder as you want.
3. Stuff the peppers with the mince.
4. Roast the peppers at 200 degrees C for 30 minutes.

Volumise: Add shredded spinach to the beef mince.
Add fat: Use fattier mince.