Chicken Shish… not just for drunks on their way home…

Now, I forgot to photograph this, so I apologise… but I picked up the following five items that were reduced:

Chicken pieces (free range of course – I DO live in Crouch End)

A bag of spinach

A nearly too-ripe avocado

Cayenne peppe (how can spices be reduced to clear I don’t know)

A lemon

Sour cream

Not wanting a curry and instead feeling like I wanted something hearty, healthy and tasty, I decided to go for the Turkish plate mix of a overly green salad, chicken shish and rice.

The salad, I added some tomatoes, bell peppers, spinach, spring onion and avocado to a bowl before dousing it in lemon, a tablespoon of oil and pepper. There’s something quite satisfying about almost kneading the dressing into the salad with your hands, get the food all over your fingers, that tactile relationship that I had with food before knives and forks were imposed on me.

For the chicken, I asked on twitter and facebook for advice on how to shish it up, but got the usual pithy responses about barbecuing it to within an inch of its former self, adding rat etc, and instead, had to try and remember those years I lived on Green Lanes, when a nice hearty chicken shish from a non-kebab shop was par for the course.

Into a bowl, I added:

3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne

Added the chicken pieces in and uses my tactile food-loving (clean) hands to cover everything in marinade. Leaving this for an hour and realising I couldn’t be bothered to fire up a barbecue, got the grill going. Deep pan covered with tin foil, the pieces all laid out individually (not on top of each other) and the grill fire up, they were under for 20 minutes in total, turned frequently.

Served up with a handful of rice, a lot of salad and a dab of raita (sour cream, lemon, chilli powder and cucumber), the chicken shish was tasty, hearty and surprisingly healthy, despite its reputation preceding it.

Re-steamed Rice and Chilli Shrimp with Spinach and Avocado

What I bought:

1. Baby Spinach (reduced to £0.95)
2. King Prawns (reduced to £2.35)
3. Avocado (reduced to £1.55)
4. Mixed Chillies – Medium (reduced to £0.39)
5. Organic Spring Onions (reduced to £0.63)

What I added from home:

1. Leftover rice
2. Three tablespoons of coconut milk
3. Soy sauce
4. Garlic powder
5. Lemongrass

Evolution of the cooking method: The way I cooked this dish was dictated a little bit by the fact that I wanted to re-steam leftover rice so I evolved a sort of oven bain marie process. Anyway, you probably want to know what I made and how I made it.

The Dish: I’ve called it Re-steamed rice and chilli shrimp on a bed of blanched and fresh spinach with avocado on the side; say it quick enough and you’ll win an Oscar. Total prep time was about 25 minutes.

Preparation (per portion):

• Chop half a medium heat chilli and a spring onion into fine shreds and sauté for about a minute with a handful of king prawns, some garlic (to taste), a shred or two of lemon grass and a dash of soy sauce. (Pre-heat your oven to 210 c while you’re doing this)

• Transfer the mix into a Ramekin dish and add one tablespoon of coconut milk.
• Put a portion of leftover rice in a Ramekin dish and spread two tablespoons of coconut milk on top of it.
• Place the two Ramekins in a bain marie of sorts (I used the dish I usually use for making the family crumbles) and cook in the oven for 15 minutes.
• While the Ramekins are in the oven, quickly blanche half of the spinach (this is to add moisture as there is not much sauce, but also gives you a lovely contrast of paler and darker green on the plate) and chop a few slices of avocado (put some lime juice on the avocado if you don’t want it to oxidise/brown).
• Remove the Ramekins, plate and serve. Depending on how you handle the rice you might have a bit of crunch on the exposed side which just makes for textured eating 🙂

How it tasted: Considering I just made this up, it tasted quite balanced. MissMissus (who took the pictures with some Android thing) loved it and my mother, who is visiting, said she wanted to taste it and ended up eating half of it. I think it works because the chilli in the prawn gives you a nice kick, which the spinach and avocado help neutralise. Also, in addition to adding moisture, the blanched spinach undercuts the intensity of flavours from the prawn/chilli/soy/lemongrass… In a word, it was good; simple, but good.

Leftovers: In case it’s of any interest I used my leftover prawns to make a basic tumeric-coconut milk-shrimp paste-lime-lemongrass-ginger-chilli-onion-fish sauce curry soup. I threw in the last few leaves of spinach for good measure.