Grim up North Heath

Tag: Recipes

  • Chicken Basmati rice pilaf

    Chicken Basmati rice pilaf

    Based on a recipe I can’t find for an Iranian dish. It falls under the general category of ‘pilaf’, where rice is cooked with other stuff. Chicken is spatchcocked to (a) reduce cooking time and (b) fit in the roasting tin.

    Timings: Prep: 20 minutes. Cooking: 1 hr to 1 hr 15. Eating: about 10 minutes.

    Ingredients

    Medium roasting chicken (1.8 kg ish)

    250 g basmati rice

    500 ml chicken or veg stock (I used Knorr stock pots)

    One onion

    6 cherry tomatoes or a couple of normal tomatoes

    One carrot (diced) and a handful of raisins

    A teaspoon each of chilli flakes, cumin, oregano, and black pepper (to be more authentically Iranian, sumac should be used. But I didn’t have any. Sue me).

    Method

    Set oven to 180 C (fan). Will need at least one hour, up to 1 hr 15 min.

    Chop the onion into thick slices and scatter on the bottom of a lined roasting dish. Cut the tomatoes and add to the onions.

    Spatchcock the chicken (pictures below). I marinated the chicken overnight – rub the skin with olive oil and salt, put into a big plastic bag and put in the fridge. I try and do this when I do a roast, it tenderises the meat.

    Add the chicken to the roasting tin.

    Raw spatchcocked chicken placed in a roasting dish with sliced onions, cherry tomatoes, and diced carrots on a bed of foil.
    Chicken ready for the rice and stock.

    Add the rice, diced carrots and raisins. Pour over the stock.

    Cover with baking parchment, then foil to seal in the steam as it cooks.

    Bye, bye birdie.

    I used a thermometer to check that the chicken was cooked. After an hour it was nearly done (not yet at 74 C) , but the rice looked a bit dry on top so I added 100 ml water. I gave it another 10 minutes and it was done.

    Finished dish, roast chicken in colourful rice.
    Dinner’s ready!

    There was a nice contrast in textures between the rice at the top and the rice at the bottom, so there was crunch and softness.

    I’d go heavier on the spices next time. Maybe buy sumac, or look into the traditional Turkish method.

    Also some recipes call for grilling the dish before serving to brown the chicken and give extra burned rice. Maybe next time.

    Spatchcocking a chicken

    This is removing the spine of the bird and pressing it flat so it cooks quicker.

    Another Taskmaster reference. Hugh Dennis spatchcocked a camel, which I won’t be doing.

    I bought bone scissors some time ago because doing this without the proper tools hurts and can ruin a normal pair of scissors.

    “You Tansung?” “You asking?” “I’m asking.” “Then I’m Tansung”. A reference for the youth, there.

    I use these to cut the legs off roasted chicken, so they are used at least once a month. And they come apart and are dishwasher safe.

    I chopped off the parson’s nose then cut down one side of the spine. The skin is more difficult to cut properly with these scissors. I removed the spine fully.

    The world’s most cowardly animal – a spineless chicken!

    I wiped the inside with kitchen towel to get rid of rogue bits from inside. Turn it over and press down to flatten. The wishbone needs to be broken so the bird will lie flat.

    Spatchcocking reduces cooking time by about half.

  • Buckwheat pancakes

    Buckwheat pancakes

    A favourite when we go to France. And it’s pancake day!

    Ingredients (pancakes)

    80g buckwheat flour

    1 egg

    250 ml milk

    pinch of salt

    Mix flour, egg and salt in a bowl. Once mixed, leave to stand for at least 30 minutes. Overnight in a fridge is supposed to be better.

    When it’s time, put a blob of butter in a frying pan. Once it’s bubbling add enough batter to cover the pan and fry until the top is almost solid. Then flip and continue to fry until the bottom is solid.

    We had buckwheat flour left over from youngest daughter’s Food Tech last month. And an egg! Currently a luxury in the USA.
    Quite a thick batter (not that you can tell). If I was working I’d do some rheology and a design of experiments on this and determine the ideal ratio of flour, egg and milk. But I’m not working, which is why I’m doing this nonsense.

    In the end, they were OK. We had them with baked salmon (from frozen – salt, chili flakes and frozen onions, bake 30 minutes at 180 C) and corn on the cob (butter and salt, wrap in foil, bake with the salmon).

  • Blender lessons

    Blender lessons

    Taking 3D design seriously

    I’ve been working with 3D design for about two years. As a pharmaceutical scientist, I’ve been keeping track of possibilities in 3D printing tablets and other dosage forms. There’s been some interesting recent work on this and in custom design of arm casts. At my last job, we bought an Ender 3 Pro in early ’23 and set about finding uses for it.

    Ender 3D printer. This isn’t the exact one we bought.

    I used TinkerCad for most of the design work.

    https://www.tinkercad.com/

    We used it to design all sorts of things – new funnels, inserts for spectrophotometers, toroidal propellers and flexible substrates for rheology testing. But I kept seeing Blender being mentioned when I looked on YouTube for help with 3D design. But I thought Blender was scary. Just look at it!

    Blender window as it opens.

    There’s loads of stuff on there! And that’s just one window! Sculpting? UV Editing? Eh?

    But it is supposed to be a good program to learn 3d design, animation and simulations. I’d also had an idea to make a 3d print of a SEM image I took some years ago of a fractured oil droplet.

    SEM image of a fractured oil droplet. I spent over 20 years studying these things.

    This sort of thing was beyond the scope of TinkerCAD, but it turned out it was (relatively) simple in Blender. Well, I followed a tutorial on how to add things at random over a surface. I needed this because other images we took showed that there’s bumps all over the surface of the droplets. So with a knobbly hemisphere generated in Blender, I used TinkerCAD to add the rock-like frozen fractured oil interior. Then it was a matter of slicing and printing.

    Easy.

    I’d made a doughnut in September following a YouTube course (see below), which as OK I suppose.

    A doughnut made in Blender. Looks delicious!

    After faffing around a bit, I decided to give Grant Abbitt’s Low Poly Well a try. I chose this because Grant is an excellent tutor. He’s clear, doesn’t skip over bits (no ‘draw the rest of the owl’ nonsense) and has been using Blender for 20 years. He’s also English, so he says ‘zed’, rather than ‘zee’.

    So I’m going to see how the low poly well goes. This will be under ‘Blender’ in this blog.