Last night I cooked my usual Pork Vindaloo, but thought I’d give it a bit of a tweak for a change.

Nothing dramatic, just cut back on the dried chillies from 20 to 12, and added 1 heaped teaspoon of Garam Masala.

It turned out quite nicely, mellower due to the reduction of the chillies and with a deeper flavour due to the addition of the Garam Masala.

 It will be interesting to see how it freezes (I froze 4 portions), as typically the chilli heat diminishes in the freezer and a richer flavour develops.

Time will tell.

It’s hard to get bored with food if you always tweak the recipes you use. I do that, even with my own creations. If the result is great, I’ll share it as an update, which is what I am doing today.

In May, I posted an article and recipe for Fusion Duck Curry. At the time I was eating the curry, I made a note that I would like to try it with the addition of curry leaves and garam masala.

Well, some time has passed and I was asked if I would cook the dish again. As I did that, I saw my note to try the variation. So I added 3 sprigs of curry leaves at the same time as the sliced onions, and ½ teaspoon garam masala together with the other spice powders. I also reduced the water to 1 cup, and reduced the heat to get the barest of simmers. Cooking time was the same.

It worked wonderfully, with a thicker, more flavourful gravy. Try it, you will not be disappointed I assure you.

I mentioned in the post that I would give an update on how well the dish took to freezing.

Well, I’m pleased to report that it does keep well and taste and texture do not suffer as a result of freezing.

I defrosted only in the microwave, as I am not a huge fan of microwaving vegetables and the like. Then to complete reheating, I put the thawed braised pork and cloud ear fungus into a shallow bowl, which I then put in the electric rice-cooker. The one I have includes a steamer insert, so once the rice is cooked and it switches to keep warm mode, I put in the insert and the bowl. It heats through in about 20 minutes.

If you do not have the steamer insert, you can also put the bowl directly onto the cooked rice. In any case, just be sure that you use oven mitts to handle the bowl when removing, as it gets very hot. 

And if you do not use an electric rice-cooker at all, or if you are reheating a large portion, you can always reheat gently on the stove top.

Only two points are firstly, I wish I had more gravy, it is delicious and more would be nice. Secondly, there was a very slight powdery feel to the mushrooms, which only I noticed, and this is perhaps because there was not enough gravy to submerge the mushrooms in the freezer. Nothing too obvious, as I was the only one who noticed it. And the overall taste was great, just like curries and stews which improve with freezing.

So, all told a good candidate for bulk cooking and freezing.

This was going to be an article about using chicken parts in chicken stews and curries, but somewhere along the line it became a bit more than that. A while back, I was reflecting on how we cooked chicken in the old days. We’d cut up a whole bird and cook it, bones and all.

Then supermarkets came into being, and we started to have the option of buying chicken parts. I thought that was great. I have always preferred breast meat, and being able to buy only this was a boon.

Today, it is almost difficult to find whole chicken in the supermarket. And yet, something has changed in the taste of the dishes I love. That wholesome, full-bodied flavour was gone. A curry or a stew with only breast meat just lacks something.

So, I have started mixing breast and boney pieces in chicken stews and curries. It would make no difference in a stir-fry or deep-fry, but when you simmer long enough, the bones make a difference. Try making a soup without stock, and you will know exactly what I mean. Sure, you’ll taste the vegetables and whatever else, but it will not be the same.

And so, Spicy Chinese Chicken Stew, a dish that I haven’t cooked in ages. The Chinese style sauces give it the base, the somewhat un-Chinese dried chillies give it the characteristic bite. The combination is heavenly, as the many Straits born cooks in Malaysia know very well.

The mix of sauces gives this chicken stew a sweet and salty flavour, the ginger adds a nice tang to it, whilst the dried chillies add spice. If you want more heat, by all means increase the dried chillies. Ten chillies give it a nice undertone, fifteen a more pronounced heat - by my standards at least, so please adjust to suit your palate.

The list of ingredients is short, and probably the most difficult part of cooking this dish is measuring out those ingredients. It needs so little attention when you cook it that I’d say it basically looks after itself.

The result? Everything I remembered about one of my childhood favourites.

Recipe : Spicy Chinese Chicken Stew

After several weeks of Fridays and Saturdays out in the sports bars watching Super 14s rugby, I had to take a break last Saturday. Felt too lazy to even make a lateish trip into town.

Sitting home, idling. Finished reading the papers. As one of my primary school teachers used to say, ‘the idle mind is the devil’s workshop’, so what happened was definitely not my fault, though I happily took the kudos.

I decided if I was going to stay home, I might as well make myself happy and cook something a little unusual. Looked in the freezer, and saw I had a pack of duck breasts, skin on.

Scoured through all my recipe books. South-western French was immediately eliminated. Too long winded. A Balinese duck rendang fell by the wayside - I didn’t want to make my duck taste like chicken or beef rendang. Thai duck curries were promptly eliminated too - they called for 2 tablespoons red curry paste, the recipe for which made ¾ cup. I didn’t fancy mental gymnastics working out proportions (told you I was feeling lazy), nor did I want to make a larger batch.

Finally settled on a duck masala because it was pretty straightforward. Now, when I read through recipes, I visualize what is going to happen with each step. The way it was written, sure enough, I came to a step that said ‘scoop out excess oil’. Duck skin, as you probably know, is like an oil well. And if it’s not crispy, I cannot eat chicken or duck skin. Just something that’s been with me since childhood.

So, I decided I would get the oil out of the way early, and have crispy skin to boot, by doing a little fusion cooking.

I removed the skin, sliced it into 1 inch x ½ inch (about 2 cm x 1 cm) strips, salted it and rendered it by putting it in a small pot over very low heat. Took about 30 minutes to get to a golden brown, and gave out enough oil to make third world nation wealthy. If you’ve never tried this, do it once in your life for the experience. It is astonishing how much oil comes out from that little skin.

Anyway, when it was done, I drained the skin and set it aside. I saved 2 tablespoons of the oil, and made the main dish. It was pretty simple, just reheated the oil, fried the whole spices and onion till the onion was golden, added the spice powders, then the duck breast which I had cut into bite sized pieces. Fried it till the duck browned slightly, then added water, covered the pot and simmered for about 45 minutes.

Meantime, as I was sipping beer as I cooked, I also nibbled on 3 or 4 of the crispy bits of skin. OK, OK, it was probably more like 5 or 6, these things are hard to stop once you get going and the saltiness goes well with beer.

When the main dish was about done, I poured in a cup of peas and once these had softened, added the crispy skin.

We had it with rice and a vegetable soup. It was fabulous, and it wasn’t me that said that.

There are probably as many Thai Grilled Chicken recipes as there are shops selling this food. Actually, probably even more. So if you are starting from a recipe, it does not hurt to look at more than one, and be willing to experiment.

I did just that last night and it turned out to be pretty nice. A couple of weeks ago I was at the Villa Supermarket on Soi Thong Lo in Bangkok, and I can across this pack of 2 chicken legs, that instantly caught my eye - it must have been a pretty big chicken! Checked a bit and there were 2 packs similarly sized, so bought both of them.

Anyway, back to the food. One recipe calls for marinating in coriander root, lemongrass, ginger, pepper, curry powder (???), sugar and enough light soya sauce to drown anything. The other calls for coriander root, garlic, sugar and a reaonable amount of light soya sauce. Bit bland.

So, I combined the 2, and had coriander root, ginger, lemongrass, garlic, pepper, sugar and a reasonable amount of soya sauce. Plus I added a tablespoon of oil into the marinade to be safe. Used a fork to stick many holes into the still slightly frosty chicken leg - that way the hole remains open as the tissue does not spring back right away. Put the legs plus marinade into a large ziploc, rubbed it well in and held in the fridge for 6 hours.

Grilling took about 5 minutes longer than normal - these were big legs.

Taste was great. We had it with some left over Malaysian style chilli paste that I had made for another recipe last weekend, raw vegetables (tomatoes, carrots and cabbage), and steamed rice. It tasted so good we forgot about the Thai style sweet sauce that usually goes with this.

Comment as the bones were being picked clean - “Wow, I can get the taste all the way down to the bone”.

That was a nice meal.