In the kitchen - Round-up 3-9 August

You remember the Red Rooster meal from my sister's birthday lunch? I put the left over chicken (there was a lot of it) in the freezer and on Friday 3rd boiled it for four hours with an onion and a carrot and some bay leaves to make chicken stock. After the four hours, I drained the stock and picked the meat off the bones and put that back into the stock. Then I sliced the kernels off three cobs of corn and threw them in, along with chopped yellow capsicum, sweet potato  and two handfuls of risoni and simmered for another hour. Yum! Chicken soup.

It was also my turn to host Parent's Group again. This time I made double-chocolate muffins  from Leanne Kitchen's 'The Baker', full of cocoa, dark chocolate and sour cream. These were especially good microwaved for 20 seconds.

Double-chocolate muffins.

We had a big weekend eating, but it was out in restaurants (yum cha and Oriental grill) and at a friend's house (thank you, Anu!). On Sunday 5th, Darren did decide that we were in need of chocolate brownies, so he made some from the recipe that he once found in a magazine for chocolate brownie and vanilla ice-cream cake with raspberries and raspberry syrup. The brownies are good by themselves and are full of nuts and rum.

On Monday night, I cooked a chicken pie for Tuesday 7th's dinner. The recipe was based on chicken and leek pie from Stephanie Alexander's 'The Cook's Companion', but I also added chopped spinach and peas, and a side salad of chickpeas, tomato and cucumber with lemon juice. Miss 1, who had been off her food since the weekend, ate the chickpea salad for dinner, but the next day decided that chicken pie was THE BEST and finished off the left-overs.

Chicken and leek pie.

On Wednesday 8th, I had decided that I was going to make pat thai using the recipe from David Thompson's 'Thai Street Food' that Darren used exactly a month ago. Unfortunately, when I came to cook, I realized that I didn't have many of the right kind of noodles. Nevertheless, I persevered, adding in some rice vermicelli noodles instead, as well as fresh prawns, broccoli, carrot, mushroom and red capsicum. The end effect was really a prawn, egg and vegetable stir fry with noodles and Thai-style tamarind-fish sauce sauce, topped with fried shallots and lime juice. It was nice though (although vermicelli rice noodles did stick to everything that Miss 1 came in contact with).

Thai-style stir fry.

Grilled pork chops were dinner on Thursday 9th. I marinated them in garlic, brown sugar, fish sauce, soy sauce and oyster sauce for a couple of hours and then grilled them. To go with the chops was a stir fry of udon noodles with spring onion, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, carrot, rehydrated Chinese mushrooms and pickled cucumber all in soy sauce and garlic.