Jerk Chicken with Spicy Guava Sauce

I wanted to try a jerk chicken recipe combined with Sambal Oelek. Both flavors are among my list of favorites. Sambal Oelek is an Indonesian Chili Pepper sauce. The primary ingredients are Chili, Salt, and Distilled Vinegar. Jerk seasoning has a whole other set of seasonings and spices, and is quite different to the Sambal Oelek. I knew therefore that I would need a bridging pepper sauce to link those two diverse tastes so that the result would be a pleasing blend and taste. I opted to use Korean Red Pepper Paste (Gochujang) which, by itself, I really do not like but when combined with other, more spicy pepper pastes, the sweet smoky taste tends to tame them and blend the flavors well. In fact, the resulting flavor is quite different to the individual sauces/pastes used to make it. In addition, because Gochujang contains sweeteners, it helps to thicken the final sauce. This Jerk Chicken with Spicy Guava Sauce is the result. It pairs well with Indian Sweet Lime Pickle.

Ingredients

2 lbs chicken thighs, skin on, bone in

Marinade

1 tbsp wet jerk seasoning

1 tbsp Grace Caribbean Chicken seasoning

½ tsp salt

½ tsp black pepper

1 tbsp vinegar

1 tbsp Worcester sauce

½ tbsp Jamaican Pickapeppa sauce

Sauce

2 tbsp cooking oil

2 tbsp Sambal Oelek

1 tbsp Gochujang

1’ piece of ginger root

1 medium yellow onion

3 cloves garlic

3 tbsp guava jam or jelly

Method

Sauce ingredients in chopper

1. Make 2 cuts in the chicken thighs down to the bone. Do this on both sides. Season the chicken thighs with salt, pepper, Jamaican Chicken Seasoning, Worcester Sauce and Pickapeppa sauce. Put seasoned chicken in a plastic Ziploc bag and marinate in refrigerator overnight.

2. When ready to cook, prepare the sauce. Put sauce ingredients in a small chopper and blitz to a puree.

Puree

3. Heat 2 tablespoons cooking oil in a frying pan. When hot, quickly sauté the pureed sauce ingredients until it starts to bubble. Simmer for about 3 minutes and put aside.

4. Put seasoned, marinated chicken thighs in a small baking dish so that the pieces are close together.

Uncooked chicken in baking dish

Place just under the broiler and broil, turning once, to get a light char on both sides of the thighs.

Chicken just under the broiler

The chicken is NOT cooked at this stage so handle as you would any raw meat.

Chicken after first broil (uncooked)

5. Make sure that the thighs are placed skin up in the baking dish. Cover the baking dish with foil and bake in oven set to 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour.The oven rack should be set to the center.

6. Remove the dish from the oven and take the foil off the dish. At this stage the chicken will be cooked but the sauce may appear a bit watery.

7. Turn the oven off, and start the broil element. Leave the oven rack in the center of the oven. Do not put it close to the broiler. Broil for 3 minutes until the skin chars and the sauce starts to bubble. Remove the baking dish from under the broiler, turn the chicken pieces over and broil again for another 3 minutes. Repeat again so that the skin is now facing up and broil for 3 minutes more until the skin is charred in areas and the sauce has thickened.

 

 

Mahi Mahi Stir Fry with Sauce for Black Pepper Chicken

Mahi Mahi Stir Fry with Sauce for Black Pepper Chicken

We are all busy people who are always looking for time saving ideas to come up with a great tasting but quick to prepare meal, especially one that does not have to involve calling for "take-out". Enter the “food hack” concept. This is pretty much like any other hack where an item is not used for its original purpose but instead is used for some other purpose. For this recipe I used Lee Kum Kee Sauce for Black Pepper Chicken but paired it instead with fish! The result is a great tasting Chinese meal that’s ready in minutes. I changed the suggested veggies as well as I thought this combination would be better with fish. The suggested combo on the pack is celery and carrot. I used young corn and carrot instead. 

Ingredients

1 envelope of Lee Kum Kee Sauce for Black Pepper Chicken

1 8oz Mahi Mahi Filet, defrosted and cut in cubes

1 medium carrot and 6 spears of young corn, sliced as shown

1 tbsp Chinese cooking wine (optional)

2 tbsp cooking oil

 Method

1. Heat the oil in a wok until smoking then add the fish cubes. Quickly stir fry the fish then add the sliced carrots and young corn when the fish is almost cooked.
2. Add the Chinese cooking wine if desired. If not pour the contents of the Lee Kum Kee Sauce over the fish and vegetables and continue stir frying until fish is cooked (about 3-5 minutes).

   

   Mahi Mahi Stir Fry paired with Blanched Chinese Broccolli

Tamarind Date Bread

This is a recipe for people who enjoy a good challenge in the kitchen, and who like serving their guests something that leaves them scratching their heads and asking, “What flavors are in this? How did you make it?” Although it has a long list of ingredients, it really is not that difficult to prepare (once you have everything ready). You will see that the recipe has a lot of spices but all are in small quantities, almost like you might see when following a recipe for Indian Curry. I guess all that measuring of ingredients will not be appealing to some people but for those who are looking for something different, this is what you will find here. However the preparation time, and the long list may put some folks off even trying. The result is, however, really worth the effort!

I looked at other date bread recipes on the net, even remembered one from my childhood called 3 Minute Date Cake. Date breads are usually very heavy and moist, or dry, and without much flavor! It was difficult to find any recipe that seemed to offer anything in between those two extremes. None of what I saw or remembered matched the concept I had in mind. What I wanted was bread that had an interesting taste, and a new taste sensation with every bite.....and low in fat!

This bread combines the sweetness of the dates with the tartness of tamarind, and those two flavors balanced with dried apricots. The main spices are cardamom and dried orange peel. This combination is what I would consider complimentary to both the date and tamarind flavors. I did not use the cardamom seeds like in other recipes as I wanted a more subtle flavor. I have used the other spices as background notes that work together with the two main spices. These spices are also said to aid digestion. The bread is very filling, especially when thickly spread with sweet cream butter or accompanied by a slice of Manchego Cheese.

Ingredients

1 cup chopped dates

6 dried apricots, chopped into small cubes

1 1/4 cup boiling water

1 tbsp tamarind paste

Juice and zest of one lime

1 rounded teaspoon baking soda

2 tablespoons coconut oil (this is usually solid at room temperature so it is easily measured)

3/4 cup dark brown sugar

¼ cup finely chopped walnuts, almost ground to a meal

1 tbsp molasses

1 egg, beaten

1 1/2 cups plain baking flour

1/2 cup flax meal

½ cup whole wheat flour

1 rounded teaspoon baking powder

½ tsp salt

1/4 tsp Chinese 5 spice powder

1/8 tsp ground coriander

1/8 tsp black pepper

1 tbsp green cardamom pods

2 pieces of dried orange peel

Method

1.      Grease and line the bottom of a loaf pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit

2.      Soak dried orange peel for about 4 hours or until soft. Scrape away white pith, and discard. Chop the peel finely and put in a small bowl.

3.      Smash the cardamom pods with the back of a cleaver or mortar. Place the seeds and husks in bowl with orange peel.

4.      Measure the flours, flax meal, spices, and chopped walnut and put in a large mixing bowl.

5.      Mix the chopped dates, apricots, coconut oil, tamarind paste and molasses in a medium sized bowl.

6.      Boil the 1 ¼ cups water and pour over the smashed cardamom pods and orange peel. Let that steep like you would when making tea for 3-5 minutes. Pour through a strainer and discard the pods and peel.

7.      Bring the “tea” again to a boil and pour over dates, apricots, coconut oil, tamarind paste and molasses. Stir until coconut oil is melted.  Set aside for one hour. Add zest and lime juice when the mixture has cooled to room temperature.

8.      Beat sugar, and egg with a hand mixer until it becomes a bit pale in color. Add cooled date mixture to this.

9.      Mix together wet and dry ingredients. Stir until just combined, making sure to incorporate any flour that sticks to the bottom of the bowl.

10.  Pour mixture into a greased 9” loaf tin and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until inserted skewer/cake tester comes out clean.

11.   Leave in tin for about 10 minutes before turning out onto cooling rack. Wait until it has completely cooled before slicing.

Mahi Mahi with Spicy Tamarind Apricot Sauce

Mahi Mahi with Spicy Tamarind Apricot Sauce

Mahi Mahi with Spicy Tamarind Apricot Sauce, Rice, Baked Plantain, Pickled Green Mango Vietnamese Style

This is not a recipe for people who do not enjoy cooking. The sauce is a complex one with very diverse flavors, and requires patience to prepare. It uses a mixture of Asian, Indian and Jamaican ingredients. The cooking style is similar to that of a Chinese stir-fry, or Balti style Indian cooking. For someone like me who thinks that fish is the most boring thing to eat, this certainly goes a far way in waking up the taste. Mahi Mahi is a dense, firm fish so it works well for this.

Ingredients

8 oz Mahi Mahi filet

1 tbsp tamarind chutney

½ tbsp Japanese vinegar

½ tbsp Pickapeppa sauce

½ tbsp Sriracha sauce

3 dried apricots, chopped into small pieces
1/2 tsp salt

2 tbsp cooking oil

1 shallot, chopped

2 cloves garlic, sliced

1 inch piece of ginger, peeled, sliced

1 inch piece of Lemongrass, tender inner portions only

½ tbsp garam masala

½ tsp curry powder

2-3 tbsp water or coconut milk (preferred)

Method

1. Cut the Mahi Mahi Filet into cubes (photo)
   
   Season with the Garam Masala and curry powder. Let marinate in the refrigerator until ready to cook.
2. Mix the next 6 ingredients for the sauce and store in refrigerator until ready to prepare.
3. In a wok or frying pan, sauté the chopped shallot, sliced garlic, ginger root and lemon grass in oil until it starts to release their fragrances. Remove from oil and put in a small chopper along with the sauce mixture from the refrigerator, and the water or coconut milk. Puree until it forms a smooth paste.
4. Over high heat, sear the fish cubes in the oil until the Masala starts to smell. Add the pureed sauce. Cover and simmer for about 5-10 minutes or until cooked to your taste.

 

Five Pepper Sauce Pork

Every country has its own type of peppers, and pepper sauces. All are revered and beloved in their country of origin. However, none of them, used alone, has ever given me a “complete” or “balanced” taste. There always seems to be something missing e.g. not spicy enough, not sour enough, not sweet enough etc. I guess this is the reason why I’m always trying new combinations of the various sauces to see how well they “play” together. This recipe came from that thinking. The Jamaican meat seasoning I used is just to provide some background spice notes, along with the shallots and garlic. Some of the pepper pastes do contain onion powder, and spices but I have never found that concentration to be strong enough to prevent me adding my own spice combination. To balance the “hot” with “sweet”, I used dried Cranberries.

Ingredients

1 3/4 lb pork butt strips, with some marbling and fat (see photo)

2 tbsp Jamaican meat seasoning

2 shallots

4 cloves garlic

1 tbsp Korean red pepper paste (Gochujang)

¼ cup Aji Amarillo paste (Peruvian)

¼ cup Aji Panca (Peruvian)

¼ cup sweet and spicy Thai Chili sauce (Thailand)

¼ cup Sriracha pepper sauce

1 tbsp Vinegar

1/4-1/3 cup dried cranberries

Method

1. Make some shallow cuts in the pork strips, and place in a Ziploc bag. Add the meat seasoning and make sure all the pieces get covered with it.
2. Put the shallots, garlic cloves, vinegar, and pepper pastes in a small chopper. Blend to a smooth paste and put that over the pork in the Ziploc bag. Massage the bag well so that all pieces of pork are coated with the paste. Marinate in refrigerator overnight.
3. When ready to start cooking, set oven temperature to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Dump the contents of the Ziploc bag in a roasting pan lined with foil (see photo).
   
   Sprinkle the cranberries over the meat, and cover with foil. Bake for 1 ½ hours. This cooks the meat slowly, and helps render any fat present.
4. Remove from oven, uncover, and place under broiler for 3-5 minutes until sauce is bubbling. Keep turning the meat in the thickening sauce, making sure that it coats all sides. Broil to slight char.  To plate, slice and dress with a tablespoon of the thick sauce (see photo at top of page).

 

 

Steamed Fish with Lime Pickle

Like most people, I am trying to find new ways to include more fish in my diet.This recipe is loosely based on a Hakka Chinese recipe that my best friend’s Mother used to make. It was called Fish and Corned Lime. The Corned Lime was the Hakka way of preserving limes in salt, and then using it in their cooking. The cured lime is said to help aid digestion. My friend's Mother showed me how to make it, and I used to make my own for a while but could not use it up fast enough. Inevitably, I’d have to throw it out. Recently, I found a salt cured pickle from Sri Lanka that tasted pretty much the same, and although it had some extra spices in it, I figured that would only enhance the flavor. I used a Mahi-Mahi filet for this but I think that a less dense fish might be better. Maybe next time I’ll try it with snapper, Basa (Swai) or even Tilapia.

Some of the ingredients

Clockwise, Lime pickle,Shallot,garlic cloves, lemongrass, ginger root, red jalapeno, dried orange peel in middle

  

Chinese cooking wine, lime pickle, soy sauce

Ingredients

1 Fish filet, about 8 ozs
1 shallot

4 cloves garlic

1 stalk of Lemongrass, inner part only, cut in batons

1 Red Jalapeno

2 pieces of dried orange peel, soaked in water until soft

1 piece of ginger root, peeled and sliced

4 pieces of Indian Pickle

2 tbsp cooking oil

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp Chinese cooking wine

2 tbsb water or chicken broth

½ tsp sugar

Salt and white or black pepper

Method

1. Sprinkle salt, pepper, sugar, and a light dusting of cornstarch over the fish filet. Place in steamer dish
2. Cut the ginger root and lemongrass stalk as seen in the photo.
   
   They are cut in large pieces that will make it easier for them to be removed before plating. They are not eaten but only used to flavor the sauce.
3. Put the shallot, jalapeno, garlic cloves, and orange peel in a small chopper (see photo)
   
   and coarsely chop.
4. Sauté the chopped mixture, along with the larger pieces of lemongrass and ginger in 2 tablespoons of cooking oil. Add the soy sauce and cooking wine to this and simmer for 2-3 minutes.
5. Pour this over the fish filet. Add the water or chicken broth. Steam for about 20 minutes depending on the type of fish and thickness of the filet. Before plating, remove the lemongrass stalks and sliced ginger, then spoon the sauce from the steamer over the fish.

   

   Steamed fish with lime pickle, Chinese Broccoli, Brown Rice and Vietnamese pickled Mustard Greens

 

 

A more traditional, non spicy version of Jamaican Steamed Fish

I have been asked many times if all the dishes I prepare are spicy. I guess the answer to that would be “most” but not “all”. I grew up in a country where every house had Habanero Chili Peppers or “Scotch Bonnet” pepper plants (a type of Habanero) growing in the yard, and that pepper went in most of the dishes. This version of Steamed Fish is a more traditional Jamaican dish, and although it has Habanero Chili in it, it is not spicy (don’t be put off by the Habanero slices that you see in the photo). The flavors really just perfume the meat but for people who like to taste the flavor of the fish, without a lot of spiciness, this is the recipe to use. Traditionally, in Jamaica the fish is “steamed” in the sauce as a “one-pot” meal, along with vegetables but I have opted to use a steamer so only the flavorings in the steam permeate the fish and very delicately flavor it. Because I like very spicy dishes, this is not a dish I make often! I plated it with Korean Yam and Chinese Broccoli.

Steamed Fish, Korean Yam and Chinese Broccoli

Ingredients

1 1/4 lb fish (filet or whole). This is one and a quarter pounds not one, quarter pound of fish.

Salt, black pepper, ground allspice and any brand of dried, Jamaican fish seasoning you like

2 shallots

2 tbsp cooking oil or butter

3 cloves garlic

1 small Roma tomato, coarsely chopped

1 green Habanero Chili Pepper (green Habaneros are traditionally used as they are not mature or “ripe”, and therefore much less spicy)

5 sprigs fresh thyme

3 stalks green onions (green part only)

½ tbsp vinegar

1 tsp honey

1 tbsp any sweet and hot chili tomato sauce

Method

1. Put the thyme sprigs and the slices of Habanero chili in the bottom of the steamer dish.
2. Season the fish with the spices, both sides, according to taste
3. Put the garlic, shallots, and green onions in a small chopper and coarsely chop all.
4. Gently sauté the chopped mixture in the oil or butter over medium heat, taking care not to burn the garlic (it becomes bitter when it is burnt)
5. When the shallots become transparent, add the vinegar, honey and tomato chili sauce along with the chopped Roma tomato. Simmer for about 2-3 minutes.
6. Place the fish on top of the thyme sprigs and Habanero slices then pour the sautéed “sauce” over the fish.
7. Place in steamer and steam for 15-20 minutes depending on the thickness of the fish, or until it flakes easily when touched with a fork.
8. Plate and top with some of the sauce from the steamer dish.