Cooking with F.R.I.E.N.D.S

I think I have a bit of a problem, most people before they go to sleep would read a magazine or check Twitter, or read a normal novel, but all I keep doing lately is poring over cook books, pictures of cakes and pies and soups and sauces which is not so ideal because I have to try and drop asleep with images of warm plates of food rolling around in my head.

My most recent cook book gem is the hilarious cook book based off the TV show 'Friends' I hate writing it as F.R.I.E.N.D.S but it seems to be the only way to type it without people assuming that it is a cook book about cooking in groups with a generic set of friends, no no no, every dish is based on some 'Friends' reference from the show, and they quote it along the side of the recipe to prove it!

It is such fun if you have seen every episode and really get every single reference, so for me it has made for some very light reading before I drop asleep too. The only real down side is that instead of having pictures of the dishes, it has pictures of scenes from the TV show, so that's a shame, I think.

So far I have made:

Brocolli stir fry with Lemon-Garlic sauce, which was really really good, I made my own egg fried rice to serve it with.

Mrs Gellars Simple spaghetti, it was indeed simple and tomato based, but tasty.

Mr Gellars Pasta with sun dried tomatoes, I added olives to try and differentiate it from Mrs Gellars dish above and it was a lot more smokey and interesting in flavour but generally a drier sauce.

I am really enjoying working my way through it, although I think that the sad part is that the book was produced too soon. It came out long before the series ended so there are a lot of missed opportunities for some great dishes and ingredient references in the later episodes.

Some dishes that could have been really fun to include!:

Joeys Peanut Butter Fingers - TOW Cheap Wedding Dress
Not-Rachel's Salmon au croup - TOW Rachels new dress
Rachel's Surprise Sneezers - TOW the joke
Phoebe's 5am Chinese Food - TOW Chandler gets caught
Chan-berry sauce - TOW the late thanksgiving
Jam Good, Custard Good! trifle - TOW Ross got high
Greatest Meatball Sandwich in the World - TOW the ride along
Monica's Get-a-room cake - TOW Chandler gets caught 
Fried stuff with cheese - TOW the truth about London
Chandlers #3 macaroni with cut up hot dogs - TOW Unagi


Buckets of brownie points to you if you 'got' all of my references!
I had probably more fun than I should have thinking up references and fun names for all of these!

Extra Sweet and Super Sour chicken recipe

This recipe is a 'win' for taste
but a 'fail' for health

The recipe is as follows:

Chicken Breading:
3-5 chicken breast
salt and pepper
1 cup cornstarch
2 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup canola oil

Rinse chicken, trim off fat or extras and then cut into 1 inch cubes. season with salt and pepper. Dip chicken into cornstarch and coat all the way and then into eggs. Heat oil in large skillet. Cook chicken until browned. Place in baking dish. 3 chicken breasts can be in a 9x9 but 5 chicken breasts fits better in a 9x13.

Sauce:
3/4 cups sugar
4 Tablespoons ketchup

1/2 cup white distilled vinegar

1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon garlic salt

Whisk until smooth. Then pour evenly over chicken. Turn chicken so the sauce gets on both sides and then put in the oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. turn chicken and then cook for 15 more minutes.

recipe courtesy of: http://madeitateitlovedit.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/sweet-and-sour-chicken.html

It's super straight foward and doesn't really require anything at all, I was excited to try it because I'd made sweet and sour chicken before that was just super bland, with a thin lifeless sauce- The picture sold it to me:

So I followed the recipe as best as I could, but my errors were this:
Thinking that beating one egg instead of two would be enough to coat the chicken - it's not and all the breadcrumb crusting falls off if you don't have enough egg

Not having a skillet so shoving all the chicken together in a little sauce pan- the chicken merges into a big chicken lump and the cornflour coating ends up mostly on the bottom of the pan

Halving the sugar in this recipe- I began to pour out the sugar measurement and suddenly realised that this would all be going into me- I freaked out a little bit so poured half back in the bag which then made for a rather thin sauce... which you see me try to resolve later... Next time I will use brown sugar and maybe get away with using half since it would make a thicker sauce.

I bought an onion for the recipe too to chop up and add in, and that worked a treat.

You can see how watery the sauce is, and the onions added in

 15 minutes before the end of cooking time i was frustrated that the sauce wasn't especially sticky so I decided to thicken it up with a bit more sugar, then flour... well I had a bit of a flour-tastrophe and accidentally poured in more sugar than i anticipated, so much more that the sauce got sticky... a bit too sticky! Thicker than wallpaper paste, so I boiled a kettle and added hot water slowly in an attempt to thin it out a little, the result looks nothing like the picture, but I've given up trying to make mine look like the picture anyway...

My goodness, it tasted fantastic, despite the thick sauce, despite the fact that the chicken isn't all crumbed. The recipe really does taste like the local chinese restaurant, it was pure indulgence and next to no nutritional value whatsoever.

When I make this again (and I will, it's in my top 3 favourite things to make) I willl...
Skip the coating in cornflour step, it's less healthy and a bit faffy for nothing
Use 1/4 cup less vinegar, the vinegar was amazing at adding the 'sour' but I think I overmeasured
Add more onions and red and green peppers to give it a bit more nutritional value
Add flour again if need be despite using brown sugar but be more careful to add it slowly

Dumpling Delight!

Dumplings are a huge indulgent food that my nan makes, I love love love them, being away from home and all I decided to recreate that comfort food and it was a surprising success and super duper easy
The recipe itself is called a lamb cobbler, but essentially it's a case of making a spaghetti bolognase sauce, if you don't know where to start with that my recipe here will help you out
http://alexiaesque.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/got-15-minutes.html

Then, take a mug of self raising flower and half a mug of water and add the water slowly to the flour until its a kind of gloopy but wet texture, but dry enough to hold it's own shape.

Spread the bolognase type mixture into a baking dish and pull off lumps of dough and roll into balls, this recipe makes about 6 dumplings in total. Lightly coat the dumplings with egg, or much less waste use milk so that they go a pretty golden colour, and put them in the oven at 200 degrees celicus for 25 mins- 30 mins
and then you get lovely fluffy dumplings!

I'm pretty certain this is the simplest way to make dumplings, if you want to get fancy you can add herbs and spice and all things nice!

Waga-Yumma

My sister and I went to Wagamamas for dinner and it was scrum-diddly-umptious
I only ever went once before and I had the Ramen which I thought was as good as it got, but oh no no no no...
I introduce to you the:

Cha han

stir-fried rice with chicken and prawns or fried tofu, egg, mangetout, mushrooms, sweetcorn and spring onions. Served with a side portion of miso soup and pickles

 

It was serisuoly good, I swapped out the prawns for double chicken portions and it tasted uh-mazing, even those weird yellow looking things tasted like spare ribs somehow? Even though it looks like it would taste citrusy. Then the rice was kind of like egg fried rice but way less greasy than your average chinese takeaway, the miso soup was pretty good too, the pickles were a little spicy for me...

My sister usually has the chicken katsu but wanted to go for something healthier, and healthier she got!

 

Teriyaki chicken donbur

grilled juicy chicken glazed with orange teriyaki sauce, sticky white rice, with thinly sliced carrots, pea shoots, spring onions and sesame seeds and a side of spicy kimchee

 

We ate with really cute wooden cutlery, much better than plastic cutlery and feels more 'authentic'

So we give our Wagamama night in 5 Waga-thumbs up!