Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #9: Green Curry
This is our 9th cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We picked this recipe for a few reasons: We had the episode saved on our DVR. (It’s always nice to watch him prepare it rather than rely on the book solely.) This one doesn’t have a dessert, and it also looked like one that could be fairly low-carb, as long as you didn’t eat the noodles. (I indulged a fair bit at my birthday last week, so I’m trying to make up for it.) And also, we LOVE green curry. 🙂

Substitutions: Not a single one. However, we didn’t bother with the “garnishes” of prawn crackers, chili sauce, and a cos lettuce. That just seemed like overkill for two people!

Quick verdict: Pretty good! The chicken was very good and the skin crisped up nicely. Snook thought overall the flavours of the meal were very tasty. We both liked the curry a lot, but we felt the kimchee slaw probably had a bit too much chili. We both felt it rated between 8.5-9/10. Not a homerun, but pretty darn good. Elapsed time was 39:09, but I can’t think of many ways to speed it up (beyond having the recipe memorised). There are just a LOT of ingredients to handle with this one!Pre-start prep: We got out all the necessary ingredients, tools, and cooking vessels, including the food processor. The kitchen was clean (well, as clean as it gets) and everything wiped down and ready to go. The kettle was boiled. We had a two frying pans and a pot ready to go.

First up are the ingredients for the chicken: chicken thighs (with bone and skin), sesame seeds, and honey.

Next, the ingredients for the “kimchee slaw”: radishes, red onion, Chinese cabbage, coriander, red and green chillies, ginger, limes, and sesame oil.

Ingredients for the curry sauce: ginger, chillies, kaffir lime leaves, coriander, garlic, lemongrass, spring onions, sesame oil, chicken stock, green beans, coconut milk, limes, and soy sauce.

Lastly, the ingredients for the noodles: noodles and a lime. And our sole garnish, a bag of beansprouts.

Pans, ready to go! The two frying pans are for the chicken, and the pot is for the curry.

Food processor – with slicing disk! This was our first try with the slicer. (You’ll recall the slicer on our old one gave us no end of grief.)

And we’re off! First step is to get the chicken thighs frying in the larger pan, skin side down. The Snook has also sprinkled them with salt, pepper, and olive oil.

Meanwhile, I got to work prepping the MANY vegetables for the kimchee slaw.

Here we go with the food processor! It’s worked GREAT. I didn’t even have to push down, really; it just sucked them down in and sliced them neatly.

The Snook has moved on to the next step of chicken prep: covering them with a piece of greaseproof paper.

On top of that goes the smaller frying pan, which had been heating this whole time. The mortar went on to provide extra smooshing weight. The chook was definitely sizzling!

Here’s the kimchee slaw once I got all the ingredients whizzed up. Pretty!

The Snook has moved on to the curry sauce. He found it hard to whack the lemongrass the way Jamie did on the show, so he’s just chopping it up here.

The lemongrass goes into the food processor – this time with the regular chopping attachment – along with ginger, chillies, lime leaves, coriander, garlic, sesame oil, and olive oil.

Whizz! And there’s our green curry paste.

Time to remove the weights and the greaseproof paper. The chicken is looking good!

The smaller saucepan goes back on the heat and gets used to toast up the sesame seeds.

Here the Snook has flipped over the thighs so you can see that golden crispy skin!

There was quite a lot of fat in the pan, so here he’s draining most of it away.

I got to work dressing the kimchee slaw. Here’s my pathetic attempt to squeeze limes with my weak, tiny hands.

Other than lime juice, the dressing is just salt and sesame oil. The key is to SCRUNCH everything together with your hands. Seriously, I scrunched for a good couple of minutes. I also squeezed out quite a bit of water into the sink, which he did on the show but doesn’t mention in the book.

The Snook has now put some of the curry paste into the pan with the chicken and tossed it around.

The rest of the curry paste gets poured into the pot along with the stock, green beans, and coconut milk.

Finally done scrunching! Here’s the finished kimchee slaw with extra coriander on top.

Sesame seeds are toasted!

The small frying pan now gets used for a third time to cook the rice noodles. Here I’m pouring boiling water from the kettle over them.

The chicken thighs get a good drizzle of honey for caramelization…

At this point we were monitoring three things at once! Curry sauce at the back, noodles in the front, and chicken thighs on the side.

The noodles cooked quickly, and the Snook drained them before rinsing with cold water.

I started to plate up. Rather than put the garnish separately, I just put it straight in our bowls. Here we’ve got beansprouts, coriander, and a wedge of lime.

The noodles get tossed with sesame oil, lime juice, and salt, and that’s them pretty much done!

The curry sauce is also finished cooking.

Here’s the finished chicken. The honey made the skin fantastic… but it also completely cemented onto the bottom of the pan. (I found it difficult to get some of the chicken out without tearing off the skin, which had stuck in the carbonized honey.)

And the final meal! We each had two chicken thighs, noodles, curry sauce, kimchee slaw, and garnish, and the whole thing was sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds.

Tasting notes: The curry sauce was very good, and it paired well with the chicken. The skin was fantastic, even though I did worry I wasn’t going to be able to get it out of the pan. (Tip: soak your frying pan overnight if you ever want it to come clean after.) I felt like the kimchee slaw should have been better, but somehow the balance was off. I think I had more Chinese cabbage than he did, and I wish I’d only used one chili instead of two. It was good but not great. This made for a very generous meal and we didn’t miss the extra “garnishes” at all. Lots of fresh flavours and some truly outstanding chicken!

This is our 8th cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We decided this week to move our “Jamie meal” to Saturday nights which gives me a lot more time to put the post up on Sunday. The goal for this particular meal was to CARB-LOAD in preparation for today’s long run. With that in mind, we picked out “Pregnant Jools’s Pasta, Crunchy Chicory & Watercress Salad, and Little Frangipane Tarts.” We saw the corresponding TV episode a couple months ago, so we had a good idea of the preparations.

Substitutions: We couldn’t find red chicory in any of the shops – it must not be in season – but we did find a bag of mixed salad at the farmers’ market that had red chicory in it. We only made a half-recipe of the dessert. It was supposed to use “golden” caster sugar, but we couldn’t be arsed buying it specially so we just used plain. The Snook ground his own almonds (just because he objected to the price of pre-ground at the grocery store) and we used cherry preserves instead of raspberry jam. Everything else was as-written.

Quick verdict: Yum! This is the quickest and easiest recipe in the whole book, I bet. The frangipane tarts are really impressive considering how quick they are to make. The sausage pasta is just good, filling comfort food that would please any picky-eater. The Snook found the simple salad a little too bitter for his taste, but I thought it was a nice contrast to the sweetness of the pasta. We both rated it 9/10. Our elapsed time was 35:23, but the last 5 minutes were just standing around waiting for the tarts to finish baking. If we’d have been quicker getting them in the oven, we’d have easily made the 30 minute mark. This is a great recipe for any beginners who aren’t super confident in their cooking ability!

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This is our seventh official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We picked this recipe because we hadn’t tried a fish recipe yet, and because we happened to have the corresponding TV episode saved on our DVR. (As before, we noticed that on the show Jamie does some things differently than the book. I’ll try to mention those as we go.) Historically I haven’t been a very big eater of fish, so these dishes are definitely going to be more challenging for me. This wasn’t my favorite of the Jamie meals we’ve made, but it did get me to eat a big piece of salmon… which is fairly momentous in our house.

Substitutions: Our salmon fillets were slightly bigger than the ones called for (250g instead of 180g), and the Snook had to remove the pin bones himself. (We didn’t count that as part of the cooking time.) He also had to spend a few minutes removing a few scales the fishmonger had missed. We had to settle for canned mango instead of fresh, and we used snow peas for the broth instead of sugar snap. We used some of the Snook’s duck stock instead of a stock cube.

Quick verdict: We both weren’t that impressed, to be honest. Personally, I thought this was my least favorite so far. We both rated it 8/10. It was somehow less than the sum of its parts for me. The Snook thought the dessert was “kinda meh.” Our elapsed time was 39:59, but a lot of that was extra fish prep time. (Twenty minutes had elapsed before we got it into the oven.)

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This is our sixth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. As we did last week, we picked this one with the idea of going to the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market Saturday morning to get any necessary ingredients. There are always a couple vendors there with duck. When we got there, we worked out pretty quickly that four duck breasts were going to cost us close to $30. The Snook persuaded me to get two whole ducks from Coles instead (for $40 total), which would also give us legs and fat for confit, and a carcass for making stock. Sounds like a plan! So earlier today he carved up the ducks so we could get started. I was running a pretty serious caloric deficit for the day thanks to my long run, so I was excited for such a big, healthy meal.

Quick verdict: We followed it pretty much exactly (except for actually making homemade rice pudding in the rice cooker rather than buying expensive pre-made stuff). Elapsed time was 39:52, but we think this is one you could easily get down to 30 minutes once you have it memorised. There’s not much to it, really! In terms of presentation, this was the best one yet. If you served this at a small dinner party, people would be in awe! We both rated it 9/10 for taste (but we may have overcooked our duck a little bit).

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This is our fifth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. Hey, we’ve made it through 10% of the book! I had plans to go to the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market on Saturday morning, so I figured we should find a recipe that uses ingredients I can get there. We settled on Oozy Mushroom Risotto, Spinach Salad, and Quick Raspberry & Lemon Cheesecake. For most of my life, mushrooms have been my most hated food, but I’ve been working to get over that in the past few years. I figured this would help. But I wasn’t going to use just any old crap button mushrooms from Coles. There’s always a stall at Eveleigh selling fancy mushrooms (“The Fun Guy”), so that was my first stop Saturday morning. Let me tell you: 500g of fresh exotic mushrooms is NOT cheap. Neither are dried porcini. I’m glad I suffered the expense though, as the resulting meal was well worth it.

Quick verdict: No substitutions on this one; we followed the recipe pretty much exactly. Elapsed time was 43:07, which wasn’t too bad. In terms of taste it was fantastic, and we both rated it 9.5/10. I would have never thought such a quick risotto would turn out so good! We did come up with a couple things we’d do differently next time though.

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This was our fourth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. The weather this weekend has been cooler, so we thought something warming was appropriate. We also had some pumpkin and carrots to use up from the veggie box, so one recipe leaped out at us: Curry Rogan Josh, Fluffy Rice, Carrot Salad, Poppadoms, Flatbread, and Beer. (I love that Beer is in the meal title!) No dessert with this one, but it made a huge feast’s worth of food.

Quick verdict: The only substitution we made was using Kent pumpkin instead of butternut. Time-wise, we were worse than last week with an elapsed time of 48:02. There are definitely things we’d do to save time next time though. Overall I rated it 9/10, while the Snook rated it 8.5/10. (Personally, any recipe with two whole bunches of coriander/cilantro is A-OKAY by me!) However, we both agreed that the lemon pickle SUCKS.

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This was our third official cooking/blogging attempt from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. It’s been so hot in Sydney this week that we wanted to choose a “cooler” meal, something with lots of salad. We settled on Cheat’s Pizza with 3 Delish Salads, Squashed Cherries & Vanilla Marscapone Cream. It actually worked out pretty perfectly, as we had a surfeit of tomatoes and basil from our weekly veggie box, and cherries were on special at the grocery store.

Quick verdict: This was the first recipe where we didn’t substitute anything; we had it all. This was also our FASTEST attempt yet! Elapsed time: 38:26. That’s pretty damn good! I think you could easily get this one down to 30 minutes once you had the recipe memorised. (There’s also a step we’d eliminate if we did it again; more on that in a minute.) Overall I rated it 9/10, while the Snook judged it 8/10.

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This is our second cooking experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We had about half a dozen episodes saved on the DVR, so we skimmed through them today looking for a suitable one. (We reckoned that if we could watch the episode first, we might stand a better chance of reproducing it.) We settled on Summer Veg Lasagne, Tuscan Tomato Salad, and Quick Mango Frozen Yoghurt.

Quick verdict: We couldn’t find any frozen mango cheeks, and fresh ones are just way too expensive right now. So we subbed in frozen berries for the dessert. Everything else was according to the recipe, pretty much. It was FANTASTIC. We rated this one 9.5/10. Our elapsed time was 60 minutes. That’s why we’ve taken off half a point. We feel that with more practice we could maybe shave off 15 minutes, but there’s no way we could get this one down to 30 minutes total. Still, the taste made it all worthwhile!

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As promised a few weeks ago, the Snook and I have decided to cook and blog our way through Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals in its entirety. We got the book this week (thank you Booko!) and picked out a hopefully-easy recipe to start with: Mustard Chicken with Quick Dauphinoise, Greens, and Black Forest Affogato.

Quick Verdict: We experimented a bit with the dessert but the other three components were prepared exactly as specified. Both of us rated this one 8/10. With a few small tweaks, it could’ve been even higher. Our elapsed time was 50 minutes, but that was mostly due to capacity of our frying pan.

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