Fast food and a thai inspired chicken curry

Hubby is away travelling and I’ve been handling all the errands this week. The result is I’ve been ordering in for dinner 😦
While I do actually enjoy fast food, it’s heavy and it’s a drain on the wallet too.

Yesterday, coming home after my son’s play day, I was dead hungry! Call up delivery again? I felt sick to my stomach and honestly I was too hungry to wait for 45min!

And then it hit me, I could probably make a delicious dinner quicker than what it would take to order & wait for a pizza or KFC! & that’s exactly what I did! Stormed into the kitchen and made a curry!

In a fix, I guess most of us think fast food is the quicker option when really most simple pasta dishes and a curry like this one take less time and are much, much better in both taste and nutrition. So think about that the next time you’re in a hurry and want to order in 🙂

The steamed rice and thai inspired chicken curry took exactly 30min to make from scratch. Well almost scratch, I had a tub of ready made green curry paste in the fridge. That’s the only short cut!

And if you follow the shesimmers blog or Kasma Loha-unchits site you’ll understand that ready made shop bought curry paste is completely acceptable if you can’t source all the right ingredients to make your own paste! In Cairo that’s impossible anyway!

We don’t have fresh shallots or galangal or kaffir lime leaves for example. Gourmet sells dried galangal and kaffir lime leaves but expensive and dried, not fresh 😦

And when I do make my own paste, I rely on produce that my husband gets me when he’s travelling and I freeze them until ready to make a batch.

Maybe there’s a hidden thai store somewhere in Maadi, but I have yet to find it! So until we do have a real Asian grocery store here in Cairo, shop bought is perfect!

Quick & easy Thai inspired chicken curry

Cheers!

The Ghorayeba recipe…Egyptian shortbread

Finally its here…the ghorayeba recipe! Taken a bit due to my technology handicap but now its done!

So in a nutshell, ghorayebas are a smoother textured cousin of the scottish shortbread and are silly easy to make! Amazing to eat a long with your evening tea or morning coffee…

‘Nuf said!

Melt in your mouth ghorayebah

But you need to use ghee, not butter. Ghee is 100% fat while butter is about 85% and also ghee gives a richer flavor than butter.

Try it and tell me what you think,

Egyptian Ghorayeba

Cheers!

Chocolate Torte with coconut, pecan & caramel filling

I have finally written up the recipe for the torte!

I currently hate my iPad and am crying for my laptop which is being fixed but it’s taking ages.

The result; it took me 2 days on the damn iPad which kept crashing to finally get the recipe written, pics uploaded and bullets and numbering correct!

I took a day off to calm down and actually made 2 more chocolate test cakes which turned out yummy!

So here you are…intense, rich and moist chocolate torte with a coconut, pecan and caramel filling!

Enjoy!
Cheers!

Mom’s birthday. …The cake, the truffles & the verdict!

It worked! It worked! It worked! The cake came out beautifully. …moist and dark and chocolatey! Tasty! The crumb tight and moist (but I’ll make it a tad moister next time) Can’t tell how much of a relief it was when it was sliced! Stood grand 🙂

The caramel coconut pecan filling worked beautifully with the cake and the ganache. And the ganache itself wasn’t sweetened so balanced everything out!
And my mum loved it and that’s all that matters 🙂

The leftover caramel filling and ganache, I turned them into truffles rolled in crushed roasted almonds.
The almonds gave the crunch and the caramel some sweetness but as the centres were small & the chocolate was very dark, it needed more sweetness so next time I will add a tad of sugar to the chocolate ganache itself. Other than that it was heavenly.

But hey it was a party and it ran late so I want to sleep…

So recipe updates tomorrow 🙂

Cheers!

Mums birthday and day 7 baking…

It’s mum’s birthday tomorrow and I’m baking the birthday cake!

And I decided to put what I’ve learned in my cake baking quest to the test!

I’m making a Germans chocolate cake but using my own recipe calculations!

I used to make Aliyyah Baylors cake recipe and Bobby Flays cajeta recipe sans the goat milk.

It took ages and usually the cake batter would be too thin and the cajeta took hours to get to a thick filling consistency. The results were great, don’t get me wrong, and everyone loved it, but I needed to make it simpler.

So I used the base cake recipe I used before with a few modifications for quantity & to account for the amount of cocoa I was putting in.

For the filling I just made Dulce De Leche in a can and mixed it with brown sugar and coconut milk. It took all in all about 40 min.

The cakes are out of the oven and look chocolaty and nice 🙂 the batter tasted great but I have no idea how moist the final product is…more on that when we actually eat it tomorrow.

Will get cracking on finishing the pecan caramel coconut filling…This I’m where I’m at…

Still missing the pecans and a bit more caramel…

Keeping my fingers crossed that my experiment works in the end!

More updates tomorrow and if it’s a success the recipe will follow !

Wish me luck:-)

Cheers!

The wedding…Anthony Bourdain & Spicy “Bisque” Fettuccine

My lovely friend Yomna just had her wedding a few weeks ago! It was amazing and she was a gorgeous bride! Thing is, hubby & I had to leave early and I was starving, so he took me to a lovely Italian restaurant for dinner.

What I always order there is their beautiful pasta rose sauce with shrimp. It’s actually not on the menu, but when you ask nicely they will make you anything you want and it’s always delicious! Not just cause of the perfectly cooked shrimp but because of the sauce! It’s not just any old sauce, it’s mellow, creamy and not too tomatoey and most importantly tastes of shrimp!

Now how could I replicate that sauce at home? Get all that shrimp flavour in the sauce? Not from the shrimp itself unfortunately 😦 It cooks real quick and I don’t want heads and shells in my pasta dish either!

Then it hit me! The answer is Bisque! Or at least a close approximation of it!

Anthony Bourdain, whom I love and adore! I adore everything about him including his tongue in cheek approach to everything!
I have his Les Halles cookbook and it’s amazing! True, he assumes everyone trying to cook is a moron but who cares! His recipes are meticulous and fully detailed so you can’t go wrong!

He has an amazing lobster bisque recipe. Extremely time consuming and extremely delicious.

Also back when I was a restaurant owner our chef used to make an amazing crab and shrimp bisque too (lobsters are quite pricey here!).
He’d use it as a base for any dish requiring a seafood sauce and it made quite the difference!

So I’ve adapted (and cheated 🙂 ) what I’ve learned from both into making a shrimp “bisque”-style sauce for my shrimp fettuccine dish. And with a few herbs and spices added to jazz things up!

The result is a pasta sauce full of shrimp flavour thanks to the shrimp heads! With less hassle as I skip the blending step since I’m not making an actual bisque!
The other thing I do is I cook the pasta al dente and take it off the boil a bit early and dunk it into the sauce to continue cooking and absorbing more of that wonderful shrimp flavour!

The shrimp itself is marinated in olive oil, chilli and thyme and then roasted quickly in the oven with cherry tomatoes, garlic and more thyme.

I use milk instead of cream to make it lighter and thicken with cornstarch instead and it still tastes creamy without the heaviness that the cup of cream would add. But hey if you want the richer version use cream instead of the milk 🙂

I love it’s taste and I hope you will too!

Spicy “bisque” fettuccine with roasted shrimp, garlic & thyme

Cheers!

Day 4…Shortbreads?????

Well day 4 baking didn’t go the way of the cake!

Somehow it morphed into a shortbread bake-off! Up until I actually made them I was a firm believer in that shortbread is a strictly Scottish affair. Low and behold turns out we Egyptians make shortbread too…The Ghorayebah!

Sweet sandy Scottish shortbread

Melt in your mouth ghorayebah

There are some differences between them.

Butter vs Ghee

Sugar vs icing sugar

Those are the key differences that make the Ghorayebah dough much softer.

Both are made in exactly the same way but Ghorayebah are always shaped into round thick cookies with an almond at the centre.

And both are cooked till pale blond and not allowed to colour.

But it’s the taste that matters in the end, right?

So I made 3 batches:

Semolina shortbread

Rice flour shortbread

Ghorayebah

The results were crumbly crunchy semolina shortbread, sandy rice flour shortbread vs the melt away in your mouth Ghorayebah…

The three were simply fantastic. .. And silly easy to make so try them and tell me what you like!

Ghorayebah recipe coming soon

Scottish shortbread recipe

Cheers!

4.3.2.1…Let’s bake a cake!

Hi all!

I missed you!
Now there’s a reason for my disappearing act…I was studying up on cake science. Yup, not cake making but cake science.
My mum has an awesome recipe for butter cake. Sometimes she makes it up to be an orange cake or a chocolate cake or her favourite a sweet cornmeal cake! A bit dense but always yummy, moist and always sticky on top which I love!
It always works and it’s damn easy. So where’s the problem then you ask?
Well it’s great if you have a huge 30cm rectangular cake tin which I don’t. I end up making a 25cm round tin and a smaller 18 cm round tin which always comes out flatter 😦

Trying to adjust cup size portions is also a nightmare!

And bakers come out with cakes all the time so surely there must be a way of understanding “cake” and then play around to get the size and results you want, right?

Also there’s a great Germans chocolate cake recipe that I want to make. I made it before but the cake recipe itself is tricky, extremely thin batter and time consuming so if I get the understanding cake bit right then maybe I can make an easier chocolate cake for my Germans chocolate cake too!

Germans chocolate cake: My first attempt

So here are the pics from my first endeavour and I’ll be sharing how my next steps go!

Day 1 was the ratios part and it’s here in tips and tricks.

Day 2 was sweet cornmeal and orange cake. I’ve posted the Orange tea-time cake & soon to come the sweet cornmeal cake!

Sweet cornmeal cake

Orange tea-time cake

Day 3 was tasting :))))) They were yummy!!!!

And day 4 (i.e today) will be….I’m not sure yet!!! I’ll Keep you posted!

Cheers!

Grilled Egyptian Style Moussaka (Messa2a3a Mashweya)

I hope I’m not stepping on a hornets nest here! But yup, we Egyptians consider moussaka “mesa2a3a” an Egyptian, not a Greek dish! I guess with the historic mingling of Greeks and Egyptians and that we both are Mediterranean many of our dishes are similar like our Mahshy or Wara2 3enab which is their Dolmades & stuffed vine leaves.

Well back to the moussaka…there are differences between Egyptian and Greek, oddly enough the Egyptian is lighter as we don’t include the potatoes and the beshamel sauce.

Mine is lighter still as I oven “grill” my aubergines and peppers as opposed to frying in oil.

Why grilled? Because it’s a lot lighter for one thing! Aubergines are like sponges and when fried in oil they really soak up a lot! So the grilled Moussaka doesn’t leave you feeling heavy and doesn’t need to be pushed to the side as an occasional meal. The only drawback is grilling in the oven takes more time than frying though I believe the results are worth it. And the taste, the critical component is still lovely.

The below nutrition profile includes 140gms of steamed basmati rice as a side. I know the 18gms of fat per serving looks much but that assumes you will use up all the oil in the recipe for the grilling. Using a pastry brush to lightly brush the aubergines & peppers usually means you won’t use it all. I also think its not too bad given its a main meal and overall calories are still low. In general the adult body needs between 20 to 35% of daily calories as fat translating to 44 to 78gms based on a 2000 cal/day diet or 25 to 43gms on a 1100 cal/day diet (mine 🙂 ).

And it still remains a hearty and warming dish for these cold cold days! Working in the kitchen with the oven on is a treat, for me at least 😉

One request though. Please use a middle eastern mixed spice blend. It really does make a difference!

Grilled Moussaka Egyptian Style

Belhana wel shefa & Bon Apetite!

Cheers!

Falling off the food wagon & the Sweet & Sour Chicken comeback!

Well it was Xmas and New Year and Mooled Elnaby…an all round season, right?

Indulge and splurge in gorgeous food. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve seen my previous posts! Between the roast rib and roast potatoes, trifles & tiramisu’s, the seafood fests of Alex and, Mooled Elnaby sweets and treats, small portions and calorie counting really took a back seat!

But now we’re back in the normal world and I need to get cracking on with still tasty yet calorie friendly dinners.

Which brings me to Asian cuisine…I just love Chinese and Asian food. The flavors are complex, the dishes are beautiful and a lot of recipes are quite easy to make. Sweet & Sour Chicken happens to be one of them !

One of my favourite quick and easy dinners, and way way way more tasty than any Chinese takeaway here in Cairo! I mean unless you’re going to a really authentic and expensive Chinese restaurant, there really isn’t any comparison!

Added bonus to several of the Chinese and asian meals is they will usually contain vegetables, hence healthy (healthier!), and I found that I can cut down on the fat content without impacting on the flavor.

This recipe is adapted from my favourite Asian recipe site and that is Rasa Malaysia! Her recipes are great!

The main difference is that mine doesn’t have the fried battered chicken. I sauté the chicken until browned lightly on the outside yet half cooked on the inside. It’s lighter than the original version yet still tasty.
I also add ginger along with the garlic as I love it’s taste. The final change is in the sauce quantity and proportions, I like a bit more sauce and more sour. You can find the original recipe here.

Calorie wise it’s great too!

The nutrition data below is for 1 serving (the recipe makes 3) plus 140gms steamed basmati rice.

Nutrition Data Per Serving
Calories (kcal) 655
Protein (g) 53.0
Carbohydrate (g) 77.8
Fat (g) 14.7
Fibre (g) 2.8
Fruit & Veg 1.6

So check out the recipe and I hope you enjoy!

Sweet & Sour Chicken

Cheers!