This week’s photo is only a rubbishy snapshot of “Harry the Cat” fast asleep in the paper recycling box by my desk. I don’t understand what it is about cats and boxes; or dogs and water come to that!
Cat Recycling
6 March 2013
All posts by Keith
A Little Tonic for the Weekend?
This one is for Sue …
Masala-marinated Chicken
OK, so it’s recipe day today!
This one is a Hairy Bikers original recipe from their Hairy Dieters book. I have to thank my friend Katy who said how excellent it is, so of course I had to try it. But as always I didn’t follow the book, so I’m giving you the original recipe with my variations.
First things, first. You really want to start marinading the chicken the day before you want to cook it. As a minimum it should have fours hours marinading.
Masala-marinated Chicken (with minted yoghurt sauce)
Ingredients
For the marinade
6 cardamom pods
2 tbsp cumin seeds
2 tbsp coriander seeds
4 whole cloves
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tsp ground fenugreek
2 tsp ground turmeric
1 tbsp paprika
1-2 tsp hot chilli powder (the more you use, the spicier the dish)
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
I used a mixture of whole and ready ground spices according to what I had to hand
1 tsp flaked sea salt any salt will do!
I added the juice and zest of a lemon
4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
40g/1½oz piece fresh root ginger, peeled and finely grated
100g/3½oz low-fat natural yoghurt I used about half a 500g tub of full-fat Greek yoghurt
For the chicken
1.65kg/3lb 8oz chicken I had a 2.2kg bird
1 lime, quartered omitted
freshly ground black pepper
fresh watercress or baby leaf salad, to serve or veg if you prefer
For the minted yoghurt sauce
200g/7oz low-fat natural yoghurt I used the rest of the tub of yoghurt
1 tsp ready-made mint sauce this I replaced with chopped cucumber, onion and garlic
Preparation
- To make the marinade, split the cardamom pods and remove the seeds I used pods as well. Put the cardamom seeds in a dry non-stick frying pan and discard the husks. Add the cumin and coriander seeds, cloves and black peppercorns and place the pan over a medium heat. Cook for 1-2 minutes, stirring regularly until the spices are lightly toasted — you know they’re ready when you can smell the spicy aroma. I didn’t bother toasting the spices, but it doing so may give a better result
- Tip the toasted whole spices into a pestle and mortar, or an electric spice grinder, and pound to a fine powder. Transfer to a mixing bowl and stir in the fenugreek, turmeric, paprika, chilli powder, cinnamon powdered spices and salt. Add the garlic, ginger lemon juice & zest and yoghurt, then mix well and leave to stand while you prepare the chicken.
- Place the chicken on its breast on a sturdy chopping board and cut carefully either side of the backbone with good scissors or poultry shears. Chuck out the bone keep it and cook it with the rest or use it for chicken stock! and cut off the foot joints and wing tips.
- Strip all the skin off the bird I didn’t, but it’ll be better if you do apart from the ends of the wings (which are easier to remove after cooking). You’ll find this simpler to do if you snip the membrane between the skin and the chicken flesh as you go. Cut off and discard any obvious fat — it will be a creamy white colour. Open out the chicken and place it on the board so the breast side is facing upwards.
- Press down heavily with the palms of your hands to break the breastbone and flatten the chicken as evenly as possible. This will help it cook more quickly. Slash the meat with a knife through the thickest parts of the legs and breast. Place the chicken in a shallow non-metallic dish — a lasagne dish is ideal — and tuck in the legs and wings that depends how much you’ve broken the chicken!.
- Spoon over the marinade and really massage it into the chicken on both sides, ensuring that every bit of bird is well coated — get your hands in there and really go for it. Cover the dish with cling film and put the chicken in the fridge to marinate for at least four hours or ideally overnight.
- Preheat the oven to 200C 190C with fan. Take the chicken out of the dish and place it on a rack inside a large baking tray, breast-side up. Squeeze over some juice from the lime I didn’t and season with ground black pepper and any remaining marinade.
- Roast for 1-1¼ hours I found it needed longer than this but I did have a bigger bird until the chicken is lightly browned and cooked throughout, tossing the lime quarters omitted on to the rack for the last 20 minutes to cook alongside the chicken. They’ll be good for squeezing over the meat later. The juices should run clear when the thickest part of one of the thighs is pierced with a skewer. Cover loosely with foil and leave to rest for 10 minutes before carving.
- While the chicken is resting, make the sauce. Spoon the yoghurt into a serving bowl and stir in the mint sauce cucumber etc. in my case until thoroughly combined. Transfer the chicken to a plate or wooden board and carve into slices, discarding any skin. Serve with the sauce and some watercress or salad and enjoy!
And yes, it was as good as Katy said it was. In fact we had another serving of it cold for lunch today, when if anything it was even better!
Bacon & Cabbage
Another easy, quick and cheap meal this evening: bacon and cabbage. I know this is an Irish speciality, but as always I did it my way. It is good hearty peasant food, and none the worse for that! I give you the recipe in case you want to try it!
Bacon and Cabbage Leftover Somehow
You will need (adjust the quantities to suit):
Enough bacon. I used part of a large pack of bacon offcuts (hence cheap) but you can use any bacon you like.
Leftover potatoes
Leftover cabbage, or any other green veg
Spare soft tomatoes
An onion
Some cloves of garlic
Olive oil and black pepper
Do this:
Shred the cabbage, if it isn’t already.
Cut the potatoes, tomatoes and bacon into bite-sized pieces.
Finely slice the onion and the garlic.
Fry the onion, garlic and potatoes in a drizzle of olive oil for a few minutes, until the onion is going translucent.
Add the bacon and continue cooking until it is starting to cook (longer if you like it well done).
Add the tomatoes, put a lid on and get everything up to temperature; cook for a few minutes.
Now add the cabbage and a good grind of black pepper, bring it back to temperature with the lid on but stirring occasionally. Continue cooking for a few minutes until the bacon is cooked through and the whole has melded together and is good and hot.
Serve and eat greedily, washed down with a beer.
If you’re short on potatoes you can serve it with good bread.
And if you’re short on bacon you can always top each plateful with a fried or poached egg.
Will Save Lives
I’m getting really totally fed up with the rubric that
Doing A will save X lives
Just this morning the Daily Telegraph has given us
Minimum alcohol pricing would save lives, says Tory MP
FFS, once and for all … NO IT WILL NOT!
Let’s get this one straight — for better or worse, none of us is immortal, hence lives cannot be saved.
What you mean is: Doing A may postpone X deaths. Which is rather different, innit.
Weekly Photograph
This is a miniature Phaelenopsis orchid of my mother’s which I’ve been looking after and which has come back into flower in the last week. Seen here enjoying the sunshine on our study windowsill next to the scented geranium cuttings being rooted for this summer’s patio planting etc. The orchid was returned to my mother when we went to see her yesterday; we also took a collection of catkins for her to paint.
Mini Orchid
4 March 2013
Word: Fud
Fud.
For a small, emphatic word it is surprising that this is one which appears to have little if any use. That’s possibly because it is largely Scots and northern dialect. So what does it mean?
- The backside or buttocks.
- The tail or scut of a hare, rabbit, etc.
- Woollen waste for mixing with mungo and shoddy. [Although the OED isn’t certain about this]
- The pubic hair (especially of a woman) and hence the female genitals. [Now scatological]
The last of these meanings is the earliest quoted by the OED in the 1771 poem The Hen-peckt Carter by James Wilson Claudero
Each hair of her fud is the length of a span,
What fud can compare with the fud of Joan?
Yes it is surprisingly little used given its scatological possibilities.
[Found in Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon]
You Might also have Missed …
Our regular round-up of link to stories you may have missed, and will probably be glad you had. 🙂
Now just what are they doing beneath the streets of London? Oh, yes, doing a marathon dig to create the tunnels for Crossrail. Here are some mind-boggling photographs.
Worried recently about getting hit by a meteor? You’re not the only one, ‘cos the little green men need to start worrying too. Apparently next year Mars may take a hit from a comet, or more likely its tail.
In other astronomical news, here’s a piece on how other objects dance around Earth in our orbit round the sun.
Closer to home, apparently British couples argue twice a week about the mess they live in.
Well who would have guessed? Dieting makes you feel guilty not thinner.
And while we’re all feeling aggrieved, here’s a rant about the lack of) science behind the idea of trying to determine someone’s ancestral origins from a simple DNA test, as many direct-to-consumer ancestry companies do.
And here’s one for the thinkers out there. Physicist Sean Carroll considers the relationship between science and morality, with diversions into what science and philosophy actually are and how they aren’t mutually exclusive.
After which we probably need to settle into bed with a good erotic story — if we can find one. Rowan Pelling, former editrice of the Erotic Review, reckons really good sex scenes are hard to find.
Never mind, here’s a story about a visit to Iceland’s infamous Penis Museum. It doesn’t sound all that entertaining really.
Continuing one of our recurrent themes, here’s one girl’s thoughts about whether to shave her pubic garden or not.
Finally we bring you an interactive map of (some of) the vaguely rude place-names of the world.
The Friday Cartoon
Book Review
Dr Geoffrey Garrett and Andrew Nott
Cause of Death: Memoirs of a Home Office Pathologist
For over 30 years Geoffrey Garrett was the senior Home Office pathologist for NW England. This means he got all the juicy jobs, like working out how some notorious murders (like one of the Moors Murders) were committed and the actual cause of death.
Most of it would have hardly been routine, even for an experienced pathologist, but you would never think so from reading this book. Garrett makes the job sound absolutely mundane and boring most of the time. And that’s a reflection on the book, because clearly the job wasn’t at all routine on the ground and Garret says this in a few places.
But I found the book dull. So dull I almost gave up reading it. The style is to me very flat and lifeless — like the corpses Garrett is so often examining. Not that we get much detail of those examinations, beyond a few bare medical facts: so many wounds, such and such internal damage, a few broken ribs and skulls. And a lot of it obfuscated in medical terminology which is hardly ever explained.
Indeed the book is so bland it is not at all gruesome. Surely it should be gruesome? OK we don’t need great detail of the basic autopsy method every time (Garrett covers that once in the introduction, though even that is a bit sketchy) but we would benefit from more on the methods specific to the cases. For instance, what is the test done on blood to determine the level of carbon monoxide present; and how is it done? We’re never told. As a scientist, I wanted to know.
Yes, I wanted a lot more. More on the tests which are done, but also more on the forensic investigative process; more interesting puzzles to solve and how they were solved. I had expected this and that I didn’t get it left me feeling somewhat short-changed.
This should have been an interesting book, illuminating a world which, thankfully, most of us are never involved with. But sadly for me it failed.
Overall rating: ★★☆☆☆