Baked Chicken Breast with Cheese and Tomato

Most of my cooking are Asian or Chinese food but KC is a person who loves Western food especially cheese. He will cook spaghetti or roast chicken wings at home and he is very good at marinating meat. Since we arrived at Hershey, I have become the full time ‘cook’. So I guess he may have forgotten how to do that. hehehe…

Today, he told me that he would love to have baked chicken with cheese. This dish was introduced to us by Erin and Joel when we had our first dinner at their place. Erin told me that it’s a very easy dish to prepare and she was very kind to email me the recipe. I remembered all it needed were chicken breast, tomato, cheese, salt and pepper. Simple, right?! However, when I went through the recipe just before I wanted to start cooking, I found out that I lacked so many ingredients stated. So, I had no choice but to cook using whatever I had.

First, I mixed cubed tomato, finely chopped garlic, dried parsley, dried basil, crouton, olive oil, salt and pepper. Then I spread the mixture and cheese on top of chicken, drizzled with a bit of olive oil and baked it at 350F for 30- 40 minutes.

I served it with baked potato and romaine. Hey, it turned out better than I thought! The only thing is it’s not good for the next meal. The chicken will be too dry after reheating.

Give it a try and let me know how do you like it. It’s very easy to prepare and needs little work.

Curry Chicken

 I ushered in my new year at a party organized by KC’s supervisor. They loved Asian food so I thought curry chicken would be a good dish to introduce to the people here. This was my second attempt of cooking curry chicken. The first one was just ‘so so’ because I only used the ready mix curry paste. It’s definitely lack of something very important – the ‘kick’!!

I googled and I was very excited when I found this website Nyonya Food. It had a lot of tasty yet easy recipes for the dishes that I never thought I would want to cook myself. Now that I have no choice, I am really thankful and much willing to give it a try. The original recipe for curry chicken can be found here. I modified according to my accessibility for spices. Though without the curry leaves, I am very satisfied with my curry chicken this time round. It tasted better after reheating as the gravy would thicken. I cooked quite a lot and we ate it with rice, bread, pita bread, naan…

This is the curry paste we used for cooking curry

 

This is the curry I cooked using my modified recipe

This is the curry I cooked using only curry paste. You can notice the obvious color difference, not to mention about the fragrance and flavor *sniff sniff*.

Naan is sold for $2 a piece here. So far, we only had twice ;P

Here is my modified recipe for curry chicken:

Ingredients:

• 6 chicken whole legs (cut in small pieces)
• 4 medium size potatoes (peeled and cut into cubes)
• 100ml thick coconut milk and 100ml milk (I use less coconut milk because I am watching out for my cholesterol level)
• 2 star anise
• 1 cloves
• 1 cinnamon stick (3 inches long)
• 1 lemongrass (cut into 2 inches long)
• 5 tbsp. oil
• 2 cups water (use more if you like it to be more diluted)

Spice Paste (ground):

• 4 cloves garlic
• 2 big onions
• 1 tbsp. turmeric powder
• 1tsp galangal powder
• 2 tbsp. curry powder
• 1 lemongrass (white part only)
• 2-3 tbsp. chili paste
• ¼ pack of curry paste (optional)

Seasoning

• 1 tbsp. salt
• 1 tsp. sugar

Method:

1. Heat up your wok, pour in 5 tbsp oil, sauté cinnamon stick, star anise, cloves and lemon grass, fry over low heat, add in spice paste and stir-fry until fragrant and turn into darker color.
2. Add chicken and potatoes and fry well. Add in water, cover the pot, bring it to boil until chicken and potatoes are cooked well (around 10 min).
3. Transfer everything to crockpot and cook for at least 3 hours on high.
4. Add the thick coconut milk, salt and sugar. Continue to cook on high for 2-3 hours or until the chicken and potatoes become tender. Remove and serve with white rice, bread, nasi kunyit, or roti jala.

Notes: To make it easier, add in coconut milk when you transfer everything into crockpot and let it cook for few hours until chicken and potatoes are tender and the gravy starts to thicken.

Steam Chicken with Mushroom and Ginger

This is one of my favourite recipes from my MIL. I like it because it’s very healthy and simple. All you need is chicken, chinese mushroom, ginger, oyster sauce, black pepper and a pinch of salt. However, my MIL will serve this with fried shredded ginger and dark soy sauce as dipping sauce which makes this taste even better.

Personally, I like ginger and I use a lot of it in my cooking, especially for meat and fish. It’s spicy-sweet taste not only get rid of the unpleasant flavor of meat or fish, it gives the dish a totally different yet wonderful taste and aroma. We know old ginger as a heaty spice. But a lot of people didn’t know that  the skin of old ginger is actually not heaty and it balances off the heaty ginger flesh. So next time, when you cook with ginger, don’t peel off all the skin. My mum used to cook ginger with egg and Foo-Chow red wine to ease my menstrual pain. It’s very famous among Foo-Chow people and the most important thing- It works!!

Ginger in America is more expensive compared to Malaysia. Worst thing is I couldn’t get young ginger, turmeric or galangal here. Turmeric and galangal are the members of ginger family but they taste so different from one another. Imagine ayam percit or rendang without them!! That’s why I miss rendang so much now *sigh*. Anyway, I have some ready mix rendang paste and I am going to cook it very soon

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Ingredients

• 2 chicken leg quarters or 6 drumsticks
• ginger (sliced and shredded)
• 3-4 pieces rehydrated chinese mushroom (sliced)
• 1 tbsp. oyster sauce
• black/ white pepper
• salt (to taste)
• sesame oil (optional but it gives credit to the dish)
• 3 tbsp. dark soya sauce
• sugar

Steps

1. Trim off the skin and fat of chicken.  spread the oyster sauce, pepper, salt, sesame oil, ginger and mushroom on the chicken
2. Steam the chicken for  40-45 minutes
3. Meanwhile, fry the shredded ginger until brown and crispy and set aside
4. Boil the dark soya sauce with 2 tbsp. of water and sugar (to taste). It’s supposed to be thick and sweet
5. Serve the chicken together dark soya dipping sauce and fried ginger

Enjoy!!

Tomato Salsa Chicken

I cook almost everyday and sometimes, I am really out of idea what to cook. I got this ‘brilliant’ idea when I was preparing to cook tomato chicken (another of my own recipes). Why not use up the salsa I have made?! Save my time from chopping and the best thing is I don’t have to throw away the salsa. So, I come out with this recipe- tomato salsa chicken. It’s sweet and sour and it goes well with rice. To my surprise, KC likes it. So I will definitely cook this again!!

Ingredients:

• 2 chicken leg quarters
• ½ sweet onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• ½ cup salsa
• 1 tbsp. rice wine
• 3 tbsp. tomato sauce
• 2 tbsp. chili sauce
• 2 tbsp. sugar
• 1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
• salt to taste
• corn starch (optional)

Instructions:

1. trim off the skin and cut the chicken into smaller pieces. Pan fry the chicken until brown to get rid of access fat and set aside.
2. Sauté the onion and garlic until brown, then add in the chicken, wine, salsa, tomato sauce, chili sauce, sugar, balsamic vinegar and salt.
3. Simmer for 10 minutes or until the gravy thickens to your liking, stir occasionally. Add in a bit of corn starch helps to thicken the gravy and serve.