Laksa

Every Sunday morning, or sometimes Saturday, I sit down with a bunch of cook books and work out what we're going to eat for the week. I can pretty much choose whatever I want - we decided a few weeks ago that we were both heartily sick of being unable to decide what to have for dinner over the week. So we did as we all do when democracy fails, and turned to the loving embrace of dictatorship. So now it is all (mostly) up to me. I only have a few guidelines - nothing too spicy hot, must be low in fat, low in cost, and very little seafood.

Because of rule no. 3, we eat a lot of chicken. Thus I present the first Kitchen Dad adventure: low fat chicken laksa.

With most of my meals, I normally take a base recipe from a book or magazine, and make little changes to it to suit us. In this case, the recipe base was for a salmon laksa. I changed the salmon to chicken (thigh fillets - breast would have been better but see rule no. 3 above), added shiitake mushrooms (left over from earlier in the week), and removed bean sprouts (because I forgot to buy them). It started off looking like this:

On the left is the broccolli, on the right is four thigh fillets (about 450 grams) sliced into slivers, and three shiitake mushrooms also chopped into thin strips.

As I was doing this, on the stove I was simmering one quarter cup of laksa paste (which I had fried in some peanut oil), 270 ml of light coconut milk (apparently they sell it in cans that size, I could only find 400 ml cans) and a litre of chicken stock. It looked like that, there (on the right). What I love about laksa is the way the ingredients don't come together until the very end, and you get these lovely scarlet blobs all through it. Oh, and there is a bit of bruised lemon grass in there too.

After 10 minutes of simmering that, I tipped in the chicken, and cooked it for five minutes, and in the last two minutes added the mushrooms and broccoli (right).

So that cooked for a couple of minutes together. I put the noodles (which I had prepared earlier - I should do this in the proper order) in the two bowls, and poured the soup over the top, and added some lime juice and torn mint for garnish (and flavour, it turned out). The final result was quite impressive.

Results
It turned out really well. I made laksa from a different recipe a few weeks ago (without using bought paste) and it was really not pleasant. It was far too hot, and the ground onion was all mealy.

But this laksa was brilliant. The chicken was tender and tasty, the broth really sweet with a hint of spice, and the broccolli heads had soaked up all the little laksa oil bubble thingies and were just delicious. This one is definitely going in the recipe book.

Until tomorrow, then.