Nasi Goreng

For the past half year, we had been cooking with Nigel Slater in I Heart Cooking Clubs. Although I didn't join my fellow peeps there, I had a great time cooking with Nigel Slater and I'm sure many of them would agree with me too.

To recap, the following dishes below were from Nigel Slater:

 

 

Of all the dishes above, I really love the sticky toffee pudding and the chicken with leeks and lemon the most. However, this doesn't mean I will stop cooking with Nigel Slater. I will definitely continue to cook or bake with him if I find a recipe of his that I love :)

Having said that, we at I Heart Cooking Clubs will be cooking with someone new - Diana Henry. Diana Henry is from Northern Ireland and is a cook and food writer with The Sunday Telegraph. Since the birth of her first kid, she began writing about food and has published 4 cookbooks todate. All of her cookbooks were great successes.

 

In particular, this cookbook did impressed me - Cook Simple. This book tells us alot about the food that Diana cooks at home on a daily basis. In it, she also shows us that food cooked without much effort need not be lacklustre but instead it can be as yummy too, if not nutritious as well.

To welcome Diana Henry, I'm cooking her nasi goreng recipe which is from Food From Plenty: Good food made from the plentiful, the seasonal and the leftover.  Maybe you also have your own nasi goreng recipe that you often cooked at home. But for those of you who don't, this is another versatile one-dish meal that you can eat on lazy sundays ;) You get the hint right? See my modifications in blue.

Ingredients:

2.5 tbsp groundnut oil olive oil

1 onion, finely sliced

1 red pepper, finely halved and sliced

200g tenderstem broccoli or broccolini, halved horizontally (You can also use cabbage, chinese bokchoy or chinese cabbage)

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 or 2 red chillies, halved deseeded and sliced I used 2-3 heaped tbsp sambal belachan

350g cooked chicken sliced pork marinated with Korean bulgogi sauce

550g cooked rice, kept in the fridge overnight

4 spring onions, cut on the diagonal

4 eggs, beaten

100g cooked, shelled prawns

4 tbsp dark soy sauce

2 tsp soft light brown sugar

1 pinch salt and pepper

3 lime wedges to serve

1 4-inch piece of cucumber, halved, seeds removed and cut into little cubes

1 juiced lime

2 tbsp unsalted peanuts, coarsely chopped

1 handful coriander, coarsely chopped

 

Method:

1. Heat 1 tbsp of the groundnut oil in a large frying pan, sauté pan or wok. Add the onions and cook over a medium-high heat until the onions have softened (though still have bite) and are golden. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
2. Beat the eggs and make an omelette in the oiled frying pan. Remove it from the frying pan and cut into strips when cooled.
3. Add another tbsp of the oil, heat and stir fry the red pepper for 2 minutes. Now add the broccoli and stir fry for another minute. Add the garlic, chilli sambal belachan and chicken marinated pork and cook for another 1 ½ minutes.
4. Toss in the rice and spring onions and mix everything together lightly - it's important not to press the rice or it will become stodgy - and cook till the rice is heated through, stirring occassionally.
5. While you are frying the rice, quickly heat the remaining oil in a non-stick frying pan and add the egg. Cook this as if you are making an omelette, rather than scrambled eggs. Don't stir the egg but drag the bits which are set round the side into the centre then tip the pan to allow runny egg to set around the outside - keep doing this until it is all cooked.
6. With a sharp knife cut the egg into thin ribbons. Add to the rice along with the prawns, soy sauce, sugar, salt and pepper and onions. Toss and heat through.
7. Squeeze lime over the top, scatter on the cucumber, peanuts and coriander and serve with lime wedges.

 

I feel this dish from Diana Henry made it super easy and versatile where you can simply just add or deduct ingredients that you have in your pantry. That is good isn't it? Especially for lazy days when you don't feel like going out of the house for food. Mr G prefers even more sambal belachan as he likes his food really spicy. But overall, it has plenty of flavours - sweet, salty, spicy and it has vegetables, proteins and carbs. Perfect for a meal :)

 

I'm submitting this post to I Heart Cooking Clubs as our introduction to Diana Henry for this week.

 

 

I'm also submitting this post to Cook-Your-Books#17 organized by Joyce of kitchenflavours.