Ha-Gai-Thai Chicken Curry

Real early in this semester my friend from Israel and I had dinner with these two lovely ladies from Holland and even after like half a year, I never forgot how good the dish he made was. It's his own invention so there's no name for the dish, but it's basically a thai chicken curry with coconuts and a bunch of other stuff in it. Since yesterday was my second last day here, I decided I'd ask him how to make it so I could write a recipe and remember it (as well as share it with all of my loyal readers). Credit goes to my buddy Hagai for the amazing recipe!

INGREDIENTS (using these amounts yesterday, we had enough for two people and had plenty of leftovers. i forgot the precise amounts for most of these but its not really important, just put more of whatever you like):

- two chicken breasts

- 2 medium or 3 small potatoes

- a couple of spring onions (scallions)

- one lemon

- mushrooms

- coconut powder or coconut milk

- rice

- oil

- salt/pepper

- onions

- red pepper

- cumin

- minced garlic

- chili powder

- thai red curry paste

- mango (optional)

First, chop up the potatoes into small cubes. Place them into a bowl (or any container) and add a tiny bit of cooking oil. Add water until it looks like this:

Stir it a little bit, then put it in the microwave for 6-7 minutes. It should be basically cooked after microwaving - if not, just microwave it for a little longer.

Next, chop up the scallions, mushrooms, onions, peppers, and chicken. Keep them separated for now.

Cut off about 1/3 to 1/2 of the lemon and slice it into thin slices.

Now it's time to make the coconut milk. Pour some coconut powder into a glass and then fill it up all the way with water. This is how much powder we used (actually we added a bit more powder after the pic was taken), and how much milk we ended up with:

Now it's time to cook the rice. You can cook it however you want to cook it. Rice cooker would probably be easiest... what we did since we didn't have one, is put the rice into a bowl, then add hot water (amount of water = double the amount of rice) and a bit of salt and oil, mix it up, and mirowave it for 14 minutes.

Now comes the fun part... the cooking. It's pretty easy and what you're basically doing is adding the ingredients one at a time to a big pot/wok until everything is done cooking. You can basically cook it in anything that's big enough to hold the amount that you're cooking. First, add a little bit of oil to the pot and put in some of the thai red curry paste. Mix it up and let it cook for just a minute or two.

Then add the onions and stir it with the paste. You'll want to let this cook for just a couple minutes.

Add the chicken and stir it in. Mix it up every now and then.

Add potatoes, stir for 30 seconds to a minute.

Do same thing for peppers/mangos, and then mushrooms, and then the coconut milk.

Add garlic, nutmeg, cumin, chili powder, and salt and stir. Add the chopped spring onions on top and mix them in. By this point the chicken should be done cooking but if not continue cooking until it's ready.

Final step is to prepare yourself to eat some of the tastiest Thai food you've ever had in your life! Oh yeah, and put it over the rice.

Enjoy.... more coming soon!

Fettucine Alfredo

This is a repost of a recipe I put on facebook:

This is probably the best dish I've eaten since I've gotten to Australia (which isn't saying much, but it's still really good). Credit goes to my buddy Chayapol, who taught me the recipe and is a bad ass chef who hopes one day to start his own restaurant. This note is partly for all of you guys, but also for myself since the dish was so damn good I want to remember how to make it next time. Oh yeah it's also EXTREMELY simple.

Ingredients:

- Flour

- Eggs

- Roma tomatoes (We used two... the amount of this dish we made was enough for two people but we could've had a little more. I was still hungry after I finished eating)

- Garlic

- Olive oil

- Salt

- Pepper

- Milk

- Butter

- White Wine

- Chicken

- Any kind of herbal seasoning you want, we used "mixed herbs" seasoning from the grocery store which is basically just basil, oregano, garlic, shit like that all mixed together

COOKING THE CHICKEN

This is the first thing you have to do. We used two chicken breasts. Cover them in salt and pepper and place each of them in a ziplock bag. Then fill a big pot full of water and heat it to 60 degrees. It's crucial to make sure that it stays at 60 degrees... we used a little 10 dollar thermometer to monitor the temperature. If you go over 65 degrees or so you're fucked. Anyway put the sealed ziplock bags of chicken into the water, cover the pot, and let it cook for like an hour. Cooking it this way makes the texture of the chicken AMAZING... it's super moist and tastes just incredible.

chicken cooking

While the chicken is cooking...

PREPARING THE PASTA

You're going to want to get started on making the pasta. Let me tell you something... freshly made pasta is about a MILLION times better than pasta you'd get at the store. It's worth every bit of work you put into making it, and it's really pretty simple. First scoop about 4/5 of a cup of flour into a big bowl, and then add one raw egg. Just mix it up with your hands until you have a nice, sticky dough. If it's too dry you can add a little bit of water. I think the word for making the dough is kneading? Anyway you'll need to knead for a couple minutes before you get the dough right. You'll want to make more dough but it's easiest to do it one egg and 4/5 of a cup of flour at a time.

Once you get the dough ready, roll it out until it's real thin. You might want to put a little flour onto whatever surface you roll it on so it doesn't stick. Ideally you'll get it into a big flat oval but it doesn't really matter. Once it's rolled out and it's nice and thin, roll it up into a cylinder and then cut it like this:

cutting the rolled up dough

After cutting it up, unroll the pieces and place them in a bowl.

fresh, uncooked pasta. smells amazing!

After preparing all of the pasta, boil some water, put salt in the water, and then cook the pasta. Make sure to keep an eye on the chicken at all times and make sure the temperature is 60 degrees.

PREPARING TOMATOES/GARLIC/OLIVE OIL

This part is easy. Just dice the roma tomatoes, cut up the garlic, and put them in a bowl together. Put some olive oil in there too... amount just depends on how much you want.

YUM.

PREPARING SAUCE

First, cook some white wine in a pot. Doesn't really matter how much, a couple shots worth is probably more than enough. Add some butter. A table spoon or two is enough. Add an equal amount of flour... maybe a little more. Once the butter melts and starts to brown a little bit, add some milk. The amount you add really depends on how much sauce you want to make but look at these pics for a general idea. Keep cooking it and stirring it and let it thicken a little.. if you want it thicker, just add more flour. Keep it boiling for a bit and it should be done real fast.

sauce cooking

You should be keeping an eye on the chicken and on the pasta at all times. By now the pasta should definitely be done cooking. Take the chicken out (remember takes 40 min to an hour to complete) and cut it up and add it to the sauce. Drain the water from the pasta and then pour the sauce over it. Then add the tomato/garlic/olive oil mixture on top of that.

Enjoy!!!! This dish was so amazingly good that I'm actually inspired to put effort into cooking from this day forward... more notes like this will be coming soon.

Basic Fish

This is a real easy one. Learned it from my popz... apparently it can be used for ANY fish (his words) but today we used halibut. Doesn't really have a name so I'll call it "Basic Fish". I took a few pictures but it was with my phone and I'm not yet sure how to upload them so yall will have to deal with all text for now. In the future all of these recipes will include a LOT of pictures.

Anyway... here's the ingredients.

3 fish filets of any kind

3 cloves of garlics

2 spring onions

1 thing of ginger

cooking oil

soy sauce

First you'll need to prepare the ingredients for the sauce. Slice the spring onions but do it so that the slices are LONG instead of little bits like how'd you'd usually chop it.

Cut the pointy, hard end off each clove of garlic. Crush the clove of garlic with your knife (I was using a pretty big knife so it was easy) and chop it into little pieces. You don't need to chop it that much just make sure it's in pieces and not just one huge crushed clove. Do this with each clove.

Cut the ginger into a few thin slices, then cut these into thin strips. Amount of ginger you use should be roughly equal to the amount of spring onions.

Put spring onions/garlic/ginger aside for now. You'll use it later.

Put oil into the wok and let it heat up. Medium - medium high heat should be good. Place each fish filet into the wok one by one and just let it cook. Cover the wok.

You can move the fish filets around if you want it to cook more evenly. Eventually, the bottom of the fish filets will start to brown... once they start to brown in the center of the bottom side, you can flip them over. Let them cook for a few more minutes... you can check if they are done by looking into the middle of the filet/checking if they come apart easily.

Remove them when they are done. Put a little more oil into the wok, let it heat up, and then add the garlic/spring onions/ginger. Let them cook until the garlic softens (should just be 2 minutes or so) and then add soy sauce. I used around two tablespoons but you can add as much or as little as you like. Let it cook for another minute or so, then pour it over the fish.

This dish is GREAT with rice :).

Side note... he also taught me a great way to cook broccoli. This might be way too basic for some of you veterans out there. Basically just chop up the broccoli, wash it, put oil into the wok, and throw the broccoli in. Flip it a couple times with the spatula to make sure the oil gets distributed, then cover the wok and let it cook. Check periodically and add some water if you think it's getting too dry. Eventually it'll start to darken and you'll know it's done. Add garlic salt and stir it up some more.

Delicious and healthy.

INTROOOOOOOOOO

Heya... so I've decided to start taking cooking seriously. I've been cooking my own meals for the past year and a half but I haven't really done anything to develop my skills and nothing I've made has been all that interesting. When I first started cooking (beginning of junior year when I moved into the frat house) I was basically making the same healthy meals (from Precise Nutrition) over and over again, plus some other basic stuff like spaghetti. The semester I was in Australia, I literally made the same meals almost every day: spaghetti (or some other kind of tomato sauce based pasta with ground beef/onions/mushrooms), carbonara, burgers, and steak. BORING!!!

It's time for a change. Ever since I was a little kid I've ALWAYS wanted to become a chef and even though I don't really want to be a professional chef anymore, I still want to become amazing at cooking or at the very least learn how to make some tasty new dishes.

I'm going to start off by learning some simple Chinese dishes since I'm at home right now and that's what my parents can teach me. The dishes I cook will progressively get more complicated. I'm going to use this blog to write down everything I learn so that I don't forget it, and I'll put pictures to make it more effective/interesting.