Darren870 asked me via PM for two recipes. I had no digital copy at hand. It was a bit of work to write them down. so I might as well share them here for the (hopefully) greater good:
Oven roasted tomato sauce with baked feta, ouzo flambéed shrimps and scallions
Tomato sauce ingredients:
- three garlic cloves
- three shallots
- two big cans of skinned tomatos
- two bay leaves
- one whole cinnamon stick
- salt and pepper
- 200ml excellent olive oil
Ingredients for the rest of the dish:
- 200g feta cheese
- three to five scallions
- two garlic cloves
- ten fat shrimps
- two table spoons fresh or dried thyme
- 2cl ouzo
- pepper
Tomato sauce directions:
Crush garlic, slice shallots. Drop tomatoes, cinnamon, crushed garlic, bay leaves into a pot and add as much/little water to cover it all. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Add the sliced shallots, continue to simmer for another 20 minutes but uncovered. Sauce should have thickened by now so stir occasionally or it will burn easily. Add olive oil, season to taste with salt and pepper and give it another 15 minutes.
Rest of the dish:
Heat oven, 180C/356F. Crumble feta, slice scallions, crush the remaining garlic and clean shrimps. Move tomato sauce to a casserole dish (remove cinnamon stick and bay leaves, if necessary) and top with crumbled feta. Roast tomato sauce and feta until the cheese starts to brown a little. In the meantime pan fry garlic, thyme, half of the chopped scallions in a splash of olive oil. Add the pan fried stuff on top of the casserole. Same pan, stir fry the shrimps in the remaining (now well seasoned) olive oil until pink, then add the ouzo and set them on fire to flambé their crustacean asses. Top the casserole content with flambéed shrimps, add a bit of pepper and roast everything for another 5 minutes. Garnish with the remaining chopped scallions. Delicious on rice or with some pita bread.
Korean chili paste, crazy old soybean paste, ginger, garlic, sugared chicken, zucchini, scallions, soju
Ingredients:
- two chicken breasts or deboned tights
- big zucchini or two small ones
- cup of chicken stock
- four big garlic cloves
- enough ginger to match the garlic, 1:1 ratio
- one table spoon of sugar
- five scallions
- bottle of soju or sake (rice wine)
- one table spoon rice wine vinegar
- two table spoons of gochujang (korean chili paste)
- one tea spoon of doenjang (korean soybean paste)
- roasted sesame seeds
- sesame oil pressed from roasted seeds (the pungent stuff)
- soy sauce
Directions:
Slice the chicken and marinate it in sugar for 2-4 hours. Slice scallions, separate whites and greens. Quarter zucchini lengthwise, remove mushy seed center of the four parts and slice its remaining meat. Crush garlic and grate ginger. Heat deep fry pan, add: stock, garlic, ginger, gochujang, doenjang, a proper splash of soju/sake, rice wine vinegar, zucchini, white scallion slices and chicken. Bring everything to a boil (see picture
), reduce heat and simmer until the zucchini is done. Store bought stock can be pretty salty by itself, so only if necessary season to taste with a little bit of soy sauce. For reference, the dish should be more on the slightly sweeter and hotter end. Garnish with scallion greens, a drizzle of sesame oil and some sesame seeds.
This recipe can easily be modified, e.g. replace chicken stock with fish/oyster sauce and chicken meat with seafood: bam, new dish (sort of).
