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I finally got round to trying something a tad more difficult on the food front.
Which is complete bollocks, because pretty much all food is a piece of piss once you know how. I mean, learning how to roast stuff took about 15 minutes of actual work, tops.
Anyway, I decided to experiment with sauces, so I wandered to recipesource.com and checked out some of the different recipes. None of them were quite what I wanted, but I got a general idea of what they had in common. A couple of them started with a soup base, so I went and looked at some different soups, which gave me the impression that most of the sauces I was seeing were basically soups with cream or milk or something similar in them to lighten them slightly and thicken them up.
So I wandered to Sainsburies, picked up some parsnips, carrots and celery, sliced them into strips/chunks and made soup with them (and onions and butter and water, plus some bay leaf and parsley, I seem to recall. Oh, and some sweetcorn, because I came across it in the freezer). I then slow-fried 2 chicken breasts (very slow, I put the heat right down and took about 25 minutes over it, to leave them as tender on the outside as possible). I also put the basmati rice in cold water to soak.
When Erin got back from work (sub-editors assistant at the Scotland on Sunday for 5 hours every Saturday, helping put together the news section), I put the rice on to boil, added some onion strips and pepper strips in with the chicken, added some water and cream to the soup base and basically left it alone for ten minutes. The sauce wasnt' quite thick enough, but a teeny bit of flour sorted that out. Simultaneously, the steamer was busy getting some broccoli and green beans to a reasonable level of cookedness.
Place rice on plate, chicken breast on top, brocolli/beans on one side, peppers/onions on the other, sauce over the top of the rice. Sorted!
(Then realise you completely forgot to do anything with the box of mushrooms you picked up. Aah well, there's always things to improve).
Which is complete bollocks, because pretty much all food is a piece of piss once you know how. I mean, learning how to roast stuff took about 15 minutes of actual work, tops.
Anyway, I decided to experiment with sauces, so I wandered to recipesource.com and checked out some of the different recipes. None of them were quite what I wanted, but I got a general idea of what they had in common. A couple of them started with a soup base, so I went and looked at some different soups, which gave me the impression that most of the sauces I was seeing were basically soups with cream or milk or something similar in them to lighten them slightly and thicken them up.
So I wandered to Sainsburies, picked up some parsnips, carrots and celery, sliced them into strips/chunks and made soup with them (and onions and butter and water, plus some bay leaf and parsley, I seem to recall. Oh, and some sweetcorn, because I came across it in the freezer). I then slow-fried 2 chicken breasts (very slow, I put the heat right down and took about 25 minutes over it, to leave them as tender on the outside as possible). I also put the basmati rice in cold water to soak.
When Erin got back from work (sub-editors assistant at the Scotland on Sunday for 5 hours every Saturday, helping put together the news section), I put the rice on to boil, added some onion strips and pepper strips in with the chicken, added some water and cream to the soup base and basically left it alone for ten minutes. The sauce wasnt' quite thick enough, but a teeny bit of flour sorted that out. Simultaneously, the steamer was busy getting some broccoli and green beans to a reasonable level of cookedness.
Place rice on plate, chicken breast on top, brocolli/beans on one side, peppers/onions on the other, sauce over the top of the rice. Sorted!
(Then realise you completely forgot to do anything with the box of mushrooms you picked up. Aah well, there's always things to improve).
