Sunday Afternoon Experimental Cooking

For dinner today, I cooked myself up some Peachy Sambal Chicken (It's a link to a google search, but every recipe that comes up is the same). The recipe comes from a cookbook called "Let's go Dutch."

The recipe marks a number of firsts for me in terms of ingredients... oyster sauce, sesame seed oil, peaches (I have, of course, had peaches before. Many times.), whipping cream (which I've used in recipes before, but never actually cooked) , and turmeric. I couldn't find sunflower margarine, but if I could have, that would have been another first.

I did things a little differently from what the recipe says (which, I think, is how you should follow recipes. Not that I have the skill and knowhow to do that all the time.) Cream doesn't come in 1.5 cup containers where I shop, so I used a full 2 cups (500mL). To compensate for this, I increased the amounts of most of the ingredients, in a somewhat random fashion. I cubed my chicken breasts instead of halving them (the recipe says it serves 5. Halving two chicken breasts yields 4 pieces. I guess someboday has to do without a piece of chicken.) I used a 28oz (796 mL) can of peach slices with the syrup removed instead of 5 peaches.

All in all, cooking time was about an hour. Preparing the marinade and chopping the chicken probably took about 5-10 minutes, and cooking everything else was probably about 45 minutes. If I do it again, which I probably will, I could probably cut the time down by maybe 15 minutes.

The recipe turned out quite well according to my tastes and in comparison to many other first times trying out new recipes. I was sad when my bowl was empty (ah, but there are many leftovers! Yaay!). The peaches were quite mushy after the 8 minutes or so of simmering. They probably wouldn't have been as mushy if I had used fresh peaches (Maybe those not quite ripe peaches are good for something?) They didn't contribute as much to the overall flavour as I had expected, which was neither good nor bad. It was noticeably spicey, but I could do with something spicier. Next time a lot more sambal and/or pepper is going in.

That's all I'm going to say about it for the time being. Now, I have to clean up!

(Wow! I just reviewed my own cooking. How self-absorbed is that?)