Tag: ginger

Chinese 5 Spice Ginger Chicken

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I tell ya, after a big Thanksgiving re-cap week on the blog, it’s time for something a little less ‘North American’ on the blog here, and you can’t get much farther away from here than China!

While doing some surfing I found the following recipe and it just so happened to call for a number of ingredients that I still had on hand in the veggie crisper, and more importantly, called for a protein that wasn’t turkey!  (I love you turkey, we’re just on a break for a while…)

Chinese Five Spice Ginger Chicken

This one was very quick and easy.  The most time consuming element here was the rice.  That’s a pretty hands-free thing to go about making, it just takes time – roughly 45 minutes from start to finish for that to properly cook.  Everything else here went pretty fast.  Warm up a pan with some oil, chop up on onion that you saute down before you start adding the other ingredients.  I picked up a bottle of Chinese 5 Spice the other week and hadn’t quite figured out what to do with it yet.  This works.  All told, the kids all enjoyed it.  My “picky eater” even said they enjoyed it although in her words “I’ve had chinese food before, and it’s better at the chinese restaurant”.  Yup.  I should hope so!  If there ever comes a day one of my dishes bests that of a paid chef or line cook at a restaurant?  Well, I guess that’s the day I can start selling ads on this blog or something.  Haha.

For the recipe, I followed the link pretty closely.  Chinese/Asian cooking isn’t something that’s really in my wheelhouse or that I’ve had much experience with so I still need some more practical hands-on time with the flavours before I start experimenting.  My one notable adjustment…I didn’t have fish oil on hand.  From the sounds of it it’s a very salty/briny flavour, so I subbed in a spoonful of the brine/juice from the feta cheese in the fridge and just a little dash of lemon juice for good measure.  It worked.  I also was missing a dried red chili, so a very small pinch of dried chili pepper flakes went in early on to add just a minor touch of heat.

Other than that, I followed along the recipe as written.  It’s a pretty flavourful dish, you’ll want to salt/pepper to taste.  I found it didn’t need too much of that.  I could have gone for a bit more sweetness overall.  I was wondering about some brown sugar into the mix to accomplish that, or perhaps just a bit more honey?  My only real complaint is there isn’t a lot of ‘extra’ sauce when it’s all said and done.  I’m a big fan of drenching my rice in sauce, you might be the same.

Budget wise?

Chicken – $4.50 for a pound of boneless skinless (on sale and frozen)
Onion – $0.70
Green Onion – $0.50
Rice – $0.50
Peas – $1.00

The rest was honey, soy sauce and some spices I’d say it would be about $1.00 worth, if that.  At the least, we’re looking at $7, at the most, about $8.  Fed 4 of us at dinner with a decent portion of leftovers for the fridge.

Maybe it’s this cold that I’m fighting off, but I’ve been really enjoying dishes with ginger infused as of late.  Watch for some more of those in the future!

-g

Carrot, Red Lentil and Ginger Soup

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I have a bad habit of shopping for the ‘sale’ stickers when wandering the aisles of the grocery store.  A good deal is a good deal, right?  That’s what I tell my wife.  She reminds me of course, that a bargain is only a bargain if you were planning on buying that item anyway.  If you’re buying something that wasn’t on the list…you’re just spending more money than you intended!

Such a buzzkill, right?  Well, I saw a good deal on lentils the other day and picked up a bag of red and green.  I do after all live in the Province that accounts for 95% of all lentil production in Canada, which as a whole, accounts for 51% of all lentils produced worldwide!  That’s not too shabby.  I guess I should try and familiarize myself a bit more with this domestic crop.

After a bit of google searching I discovered that green lentils are the ones that hold their form more when cooked, while red lentils soften a fair amount and are therefore used more for soups and such.  With our first snowfall hitting late last week, a nice hearty soup sounded like a great idea!

Carrot, Red Lentil and Ginger Soup

While I already had the lentils in hand from a previous trip, I made a special trip to the store to pick up the fresh produce to be used in this recipe.  One thing I learned?  Scallions is just a fancy name for green onions.  I couldn’t find scallions in the store no matter how hard I looked, so I split the difference and picked up some green onions (which LOOKED like the picture of scallions I found on my phone) and shallots (which sounded like a better match).  I went with the shallots in pot when I made this.  Honestly, I think you’re just going for a bit of an ‘onion’ flavour in the soup, and I already had some green in the mix with the jalapeno.  There’s a fair bit of chopping and shredding with this.  After that, it’s really a matter of tossing everything in the pot to simmer.  On the whole?  The recipe is a bit bland as outlined.  The ginger sticks give you a real kick when you hit one, but I wound up stirring a bit of chili powder into my bowl after a few spoonfuls as it felt like it would pick things up a bit.  My wife went for the salt.  In defense of the recipe it DOES say ‘season to taste’.  Just a heads up, you’ll want to do that before serving because IT NEEDS IT.

With all that said, this is a very warming and healthy soup.  Lots of veg in here and the lentils pack a protein punch.  Very filling.

Budget –

There’s a fair amount of fresh veggies in this.  That said, lentils are a very affordable source of protein and I barely touched what was in the bag I bought.  I’m going to guess that this one ran about $7 all tallied.

But oh!  We’re not done yet.  If there’s one thing I enjoy more than busting up some crackers into a bowl of soup, it’s a nice warm ‘fresh-out-of-the-oven’ biscuit.

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Easy Homemade Biscuits

Look at the lamination on those babies!  While the lentil soup was simmering on the stove top, the oven was feeling a bit neglected.  I stumbled across this recipe for a quick and easy biscuit, and I AM KEEPING IT!  They’re fluffy with a great rise, the lamination worked out great.  I think I really just need to follow the instructions better and make them circles, as, you can plainly see…if they start expanding with one side still ‘crimped’ they’ll just puff up and fall over.  Hey, that’s why you’re reading this right?  Learn from my mistakes!  As explained in the recipe…the key is to keep your butter cold and not overwork it.  You could probably chill the dough after a few folds and before cutting.  I folded it until things were starting to warm up and get a little sludgy.  That probably resulted in a few more layers than required, but I’m not knocking it.  After baking the layers just peel apart.  Again, not a lot of salt of ‘flavour’ built into these biscuits, but they’re designed to sop up the soup or stew, so that’s probably a good thing.

As for the family score-card?  Kids weren’t exactly sold on the soup.  The adults loved it.  The biscuits were a 5 thumbs up from the entire clan.

-g

Ginger Glazed Pork Roast

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When you’re working on a budget, you grab the deals.  So yes, when you have the chance to snag an entire pork loin for relatively little cash, you grab that deal, you chop it up into meal sized roasts and you go with it.  One thing I’ve noticed when you’re working with a particular cut of meat is getting into a rut with how you prepare it.   For me (and I’m shaking my head as I write this) the ‘old standby’ is a bbq pulled pork (I’m shaking my head as I presently have one in the crockpot…).  Sometimes you just need to shake it up, and with a little help from Google and some more seasoned bloggers, sometimes you stumble upon something quite amazing.  I give you…

Ginger Glazed Pork Roast

Now the usual words of warning I’ll give when doing anything in a slow cooker.

  1. Make sure you have plenty of time…it’s called a slow cooker for  a reason.
  2. Try to make sure your meat has been thoroughly thawed overnight if you’re working from a recipe and checking out their cook times.

# 2 is where I ran into an issue on this one.  I didn’t take the roast out and let it thaw overnight, so I went straight into the slow-cooker and had to crank it up to high to finish in time for dinner.  Bad move.  I have a little chart that shows pork roasts should hit at least 145 degrees F to be considered done.  I went WELL beyond that.  Still edible, but almost to the point of crunchy.  What can I say?  Rookie move.  But that’s why we eat every day, right?  Plenty of chances to learn, adjust and excel on the next attempt.

That’s the roast.  I had about a 1.5 lb cut…I would trim back the amount of rub as there was PLENTY left that really just went to waste.  Now for the star of the show.  There’s a pizza place in Regina that has the marketing slogan “The Sauce Is Boss”, and that is definitely an adage that is in play with this meal.  It works, it is the spotlight and dang is it tasty.  I’m not just saying that as I completely over-cooked the roast and the sauce was the only thing that turned out, this glaze just ‘works’ and it is quite easy to do.  A notable change I made to the linked recipe?  I found that my glaze was just a bit too runny and the cornstarch wasn’t really having an impact on thickening things up while it was on the burner.  I added some more and it sorted itself out.  One quick reminder on that – NEVER add cornstarch directly to a sauce without first making it into a paste with a very small splash of water.  Straight cornstarch just turns into little clumps you’ll wind up straining out before using (unless you’re a fan of some little flavour powder shots in your meals – just like Grandma used to make!).  A little water, a little whisk and you’re good to go.  And when you DO start adding some cornstarch to thicken, do it a little bit at a time.  You can very quickly go from a rather runny sauce, to straight up pudding.

I followed the glaze recipe verbatim with the exception of substituting white vinegar for rice vinegar (it’s what I had on hand) and using powdered ginger rather than fresh (again, I had it on hand).

This one is going in the rotation.  And the slow-cooker a little earlier next time so I can roast it on “low”.

-g