How I make oven fried 'Monday Chicken'

I love fried chicken. I really do. As an illustration of my love, I offer the fact that at the age of 24 I had my first ever kebab only a few short weeks ago. 

It wasn't as good as the chicken. For me, it's a texture thing as much as a flavour thing. Crispy chicken skin taken to the nth degree. Plus, I get to feel all caveman eating this hunk of meat. It's overseasoned, crunchy and juicy and it always drips down my arms and face. It's delicious and disgusting in about equal measure. 

Fried chicken is what I eat when I've been drinking and just need to have a little something on the roll home. Fried chicken is what I eat on the rare (I promise it is rare) occasions I get fast food, at an airport or motorway service station. Fried chicken, however, is not something I eat at home. Ever. 

The reasons are twofold:

a) I'm not going to make it

b) There is no where near me that makes it in any form I'm willing to munch on sober.

It's a sad state of affairs, let me tell you.

My mission (and, oh yes, I do choose to accept it) is to make something that brings together my love for 3am-on-saturday gobbets of fried madness and my love of functioning coronary arteries. 

Lightened up fried chicken. 

Fried chicken for a monday, if you will.

Bookmarked! Guacamole with baked (in bacon!) tortilla chips

Bookmarked! 
Only three posts in on my 'bookmarked' series and I'm already cheating a little bit. Yes this recipe was bookmarked but really, only to remind me to hurry up and make some guacamole!
I really love The Food Lab, found on food website/leviathan seriouseats.com. It take two of my favourite things, namely food and scientific method and combines them. I imagine most people would learn a few new techniques from reading through, even if you think you've got your recipe sorted. I'll probably be posting more off The Food Lab, as my method for frying steak, making chicken tikka masala and more all borrow heavily from those pages. 

In this case the way I make guacamole was only slightly modified. Apparently the best way to get a good mix of chunky and smooth in your avocado it to use a whisk (who knew?) but as I already had my trusty but bloody heavy pestle and mortar out for the other bits and my washing up bowl is a pit of despair which I prefer to visit as little as possible I smashed it up in there too. Mostly what I got from the post was the importance of pounding your add-ins with salt before mixing in the avocado for all of the flavour!

In which I stuff 'shrooms and baconate my vegetables

Imagine this with toasty browned cashews on...Good, right?

If I lived alone all the time, my weeknight dinner rota would read something like this; baked mushrooms, stirfry (might include mushrooms), pasta (mushroomy potential there), risotto (a few lonely dried porcini in the stock at least) and a friday night empty-fridge-panic induced takeaway. 
So yeah, I like my fungi. My insides probably look like a fairy grotto. Actually they probably look gross, 'cause they're insides. But metaphorically, at least, they're all pixies dancing round 'shroom rings.

Buuut I don't live alone, I live with a man who considers mushrooms a strange and unusual, nigh on suspicious ingredient and their very use in dinner is tantamount to a poisoning attempt. You must see my predicament. 
When I do cook for just me, one of my absolute favourites is a stuffed mushroom. My stuffed mushrooms have five components, each endlessly customisable but all utterly delightful and each contributing something to the plateful.

Un-ridiculous mini cinnamon rolls with sweet coffee glaze

I have two problems with cinnamon rolls. One of these is admittedly a problem with the people who make them rather than an impediment to my thorough enjoyment of a luscious, buttery and cinnamon sugar laden bread snack. 
That problem is that for some unknown but endemic reason, they all use the words 'ooey gooey' to describe them. Ooey? Is that even a real word? A quick google seems to suggest not. 
So if it doesn't even mean anything, I suppose I'm to conclude it's onomatopoeic. But for me it just doesn't conjure up an image of butter and unctuousness and sweet indulgence. It sounds like my bratty seven year old self might have said, but I would have meant something gross. Like eww-y. So you see why I might have the teeniest problem clicking on a recipe with the words 'ooey gooey cinnamon buns' in the title. So I sort of made one up a little bit.

And that leads me rather neatly to my second problem, which is rather more an impediment to my enjoyment of a luscious, buttery and cinnamon sugar laden bread snack, namely that a cinnamon roll by its nature is luscious,  buttery and sugar laden. Which is a fine and beautiful thing, but let's be realistic here; in my house of me and one cinnamon hating boyfriend I'm probably not going to be recreating a recipe which contains quite as much fat and sugar as some of the recipes freely available on this here internet. No matter how 'ooey' the results are promised to be. 

Which brings me to 'I made it up a bit'. For the quantity I made, which necessitated 500g of bread flour, a very popular and, for the sake of not being bitchy, anonymous blog post would have me use nearly 500g sugar, 120g fat (oil or butter) and 270ml of full fat milk. 
I used an enriched dough recipe from the Great British Bake Off (which I'm obsessed with, by the way, expect lots more from this bastion of brilliant Brit TV) which I found on the BBC website, to which I added the traditional cinnamon roll filling of sugar, butter and cinnamon (though not quite as much as the sugar fat bomb offender mentioned above) and topped with my take on a lighter coffee glaze. Then I served them small and baked in a cupcake tin so each serving packs less of a hyperglycaemic punch. They're not by any stretch of even my mind 'healthy'. But they are certainly un-ridiculous. And when we're measuring in cinnamon rolls, isn't that they next best thing?

Bookmarked!- Breakfast Risotto

Bookmarked! No, not risotto for breakfast. Even I'm far from that bonkers and I'm certainly not the sort of person who is up, ready and raring to fry, add wine and stir, stir, stir before work. This is a risotto inspired by breakfast. Or more accurately, inspired by this bacon, egg and leek risotto made by Smitten Kitchen.

Bookmarked! - Tuscan fries for the fryer-phobic

 

Bookmarked! From BBC Food by Nigella Lawson, these are the Tuscan Fries from her latest Italian food series. The idea is hob-top skinny fries, started in cold oil, with garlic and herbs thrown into the boiling oil for that extra thrill of white hot fat spatter. 

I bookmarked this recipe because it looks like a fryer-phobic friendly gateway project. I blooming love fried food but had never before taken the greasy plunge into making it at home. And the sort of oven chips I can buy in supermarkets I can walk to (so not the big ones) are just nasty.

What I changed: I scaled the quantities down to suit a two person portion. Then I ate it all myself. I have no shame. I also used a fresh basil and dried thyme mix and less garlic than vampire-slayer Lawson. And my frying method was definitely the wimp's way out, using a saucepan and small batches instead of the recommended heavy frying pan. I think it worked very nicely though so I'm sharing it here. 

Bookmarked!

If you read food blogs (and why else would you be here, welcome as you are), then you probably also have a bookmarks folder bursting at the seams with delicious, beautifully photographed and ambitious recipes of other people's creation. Hopefully you're a little more successful than me at transforming your bookmarks from pixels to plate- I think that out of my nearly 200 bookmarks I've probably actually made somewhere more in the region of two. Just an order of magnitude of 100 off then. Clearly, my bookmark folder is just a very pretty way of using up hard disc space. 
So, in an effort to challenge myself and revisit pages that I want to emulate (or at least did at the time, on a quick relook the sight of cuppa cuppa cuppa cake* just brings a slack jawed sense of 'why, dear god, why?'). 
So I bring you "Bookmarked!" Over the next few weeks/months/until I get bored and frustrated, I will attempt to bring you my version of a page I have bookmarked sometime in my browsing past. 

*You'll have to Google it, I'm afraid. I fear the Pioneer Woman's propaganda machine too much to actually link to it 

The Rules: 

1. Pages must have been bookmarked already- no adding new bookmarks because someone posts egg on toast and I'm too lazy to cook anything fancier
2. Recipes can be changed, but must still be recognisable as the original. I'm not going to plough on with a Maldon sea salt-containing-chocolate-anything. I probably meant to sub out the fancy ingredient when I bookmarked it and so that's what I'll do now. 
3. I'm (probably) not going to have any bookmarks for boiled carrots and I might go mad if I try and make a whole meal out of interesting and save-able components. So generally speaking, I'll freestyle the side dishes.

Coming up in a matter of minutes- my first "Bookmarked!"- Nigella Lawson's Tuscan Fries x