423 words on Food
Jan-Philipp and myself had planned to do some 'exciting' cooking for a while – and we finally got round to doing it! So we made up a little four course experimental menu which worked out rather nicely.
As essentially the only hot dish we started with a soup. We aimed for a clear soup but didn't quite end up making one. The result being Thai style, meaning that we used a recipe for some Thai broth, but stopped following it at the point where everybody agreed that our dislike of fish sauce outweighs any pretense of open-mindedness for foreign foodstuffs.
The soup itself was based on chicken broth which we made ourselves, boiling chicken carcass in the afternoon. Removing the fat from the broth was quite fun for lack of equipment to this but eagerness to try silly methods. It's not sure this was worth the effort as we didn't really taste the broth in the end.
Then we cooked some ginger, lemongrass and chillies in the broth and eventually added lime juice, spring onions and coriander. It was quite nice – though not painfully spicy enough to be authentic.
Next was a salad. We wanted to use thinly sliced (lengthwise) asparagus for this, making it look like carpaccio. We tried the asparagus both raw and slightly cooked. By accident we left the raw asparagus sitting in the dressing for a while before serving, which gave a rather nice marinaded result which we placed on a bed of rucola leaves and topped of with slightly fried mushrooms.
The meat is then cut into thin slices – which look gorgeous – and served on rice with some cut red and spring onions. Extremely delicious.
To finish the meal we made a grapefruit sorbet with Campari. The grapefruits we got weren't very nice. Not very sour and not very bitter either. Meaning we needed more Campari of course for added bitterness. For some extra taste, we infused the fruid syrup with some fresh mint before freezing it. The mind taste went surprisingly well with the Campari.
All in all a very enjoyable meal.
Just thought I would let you know - boil all the chicken bones for a while with flavoring in the water…and then chill the liquid. The fat floats to the top and hardens in a nice white layer - SOOOO easy to skim off afterwards!
That sounds like a clever trick, Anne. Thanks for sharing, I’ll try it the next time.
