Chicken Paprika

This is from Delia's Complete Cookery Course. Probably my favourite cook book. Covers plenty of the basics even if it is getting a bit dated.

Take a full chicken - chop it into portions. As many as you want. Then heat some oil in a pan or large pot. Brown the chicken portions well in this at a fairly high heat. Lower the heat and transfer the chicken to a casserole. Put a lid on this to stop the chicken getting too cold while you get the rest of the ingredients prepared.
Chop 2 onions finely and fry them for about 10 minutes in the chicken fat in the first pan. When the onions are cooked add a heaped tablespoon of plain flour, a heaped tablespoon of smoked paprika. About half a level teaspoon of Cayenne pepper. Mix this around until it has absorbed the juice and fat from the chicken. Then put a tin of tomatoes in there along with about 150 ml of chicken stock. Give it all a good mix. Then pour it over the chicken and put it in a preheated oven at gas mark 3.
After 45 minutes take it out and add the chopped green pepper. You can also add some mushrooms now.
Put the casserole back in the oven for another half an hour at gas mark 4.
Serve with some brown rice and cabbage on the side.
When I poured the tomato and onion mixture over the chicken it looked a bit dry. I normally prefer my casseroles to have more gravy, but after the full cooking time, this ended up being fine.
The picture looks a bit rough, but it was very tasty and enough for 2 people for 2 dinners.

Moro Chip Cookies

This is a variation of a recipe for chocolate chip cookies from the Ballymaloe Cookery Course book. This is probably my biggest cookbook both in terms of size and the number of recipes it contains.

As you can see from the picture the batch of cookie(s) was very big. It spread out all the way over the baking tray and would have spread a lot further, but it hit the edges. And this is just half of the amount that Darina gives in the book. She must have hapes of nice cookie sheets, so what harm.

This is the modified recipe:

110g of butter
100g of brown sugar
90g caster sugar
1 egg beaten
½ teaspoon of vanilla extract (not the crappy chemically one: vanilla essence)
175g of plain white flour
½ level teaspoon of baking powder
½ level teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
A Moro duo bar (both bits)
50 g of chopped nuts, I used almonds

This is where I differ from Darina again. She is probably a lot better than me at this, but she is nothing like as lazy. So I have shortened the method a bit.

Soften/melt the butter in the microwave. This only takes about 10 seconds. You are not going for an oily puddle, but a bit of oil won't hurt. In fact I reckon an oily puddle would be just fine. I think you are supposed to soften the butter in a warm kitchen for several hours, but I always forget and could not really be bothered. Think this stuff matters for cakes, but not for biscuits.

Chop the nuts and the Moro up. Don't go to town on this. Don't leave the nuts big enough to break your teeth and don't bother chopping the Moro up very small as its going to melt anyway. I figure if you were really lazy you could just throw the Moro into the mix whole, switch the machine onto full and batter the bar to bits. There is lazy and there is asking for trouble. Chop it up.

Then chuck all of the ingredients into a mixer and give is some welly. When is looks nice and mixed its ready. This should be a very quick mix as you don't want to purée it.

I oiled a baking sheet for the next bit. This did not really do the job. Maybe it was the addition of the gooey Moro, or maybe my cooking sheet is covered in ancient crud which bonded the cookies in place, but either way next time I am going to use grease proof paper. You should do this first time. Don't bother with the kango hammer requirement that I almost found myself with. In fact the cookies did come off the sheet with a bit of persuading, but the middle bits were not cooked. Again this might be the Moro affect(effect? too lazy to look this one up either), or maybe my cooker is a bit crap. It never cooks stuff as quickly as recipes suggest. Too lazy to get that checked too.

So I put the raw bits back in to the oven for another 10 minutes. (its gas 4 by the way, don't know what that is in electric. Look it up.)

The result was awesome. And indeed still is. There are some left in a seal tight container in the kitchen. Think we will polish them off this evening. They are at their best by far when you take them out of the oven, but are so nice and chewy that they are always good. They will not last longer than a few days at most, so I have no idea how long they would keep for if you were a self loathing deny-er.

So there we are, Moro Cookies. By the way I was watching a nice video of Jamie Oliver at the TED conference in California. He wants to get people to cook their own food so that they will be more healthy. I agree with him, but just want to say that he is probably not talking about these cookies :-)