Home Cooking Express

This time around the dish of choice is tender chicken thighs filled with a tasty stuffing made with soft bread, onions, crab meat, celery and some more things.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1/2 a cup finely chopped celery
• 1/2 a cup finely chopped onion
• 1 (6 ounce) can lump crabmeat, drained
• 2 tbsp dry sherry
• 1/2 tsp poultry seasoning
• 1/4 tsp ground black pepper
• 2 1/2 cups white bread cubes
• 1 1/2 tbsp minced garlic
• 6 boneless chicken thighs, with skin
• 1/2 tsp garlic salt
• 1/2 tsp onion powder

PROCEDURE

Heat the vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the celery and onion and cook and stir until soft or for about 5 minutes.  Remove the pan from the heat and season with poultry seasoning and pepper. Add the crab meat, sherry and bread cubes and stir until everything is well blended.

Preheat a grill to medium heat.

Lay the chicken thighs out on a clean surface with the skin side down.  Spread the crab meat evenly on top of each one. Roll up the chicken and secure with toothpicks.

Now place the stuffed thighs seam side down onto the grill and season with garlic salt and onion powder. Cover and allow to cook for 20 minutes to half an hour, turning it occasionally to allow it to cook. When the juices begin to run clean when pierced with a fork is when the chicken is done. It can now be removed from the grill ad served.

You can put a slightly smaller amount of bread cubes into the mixture if the thighs are small. You could also use breast pieces for this dish. They would work just as well.

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Liqueurs are sweet alcoholic beverages which are flavored with fruits, spices, flowers, seeds and very often even cream. The word ‘liqueur’ is derived from Latin where liquifacere means ‘to dissolve’. This has reference to the process of dissolving the flavorings that are used to make the liqueur. Liqueurs also are not allowed to age for too long. Today recipe is for an Irish Cream Liqueur which when made at home is better than those that are commercially available.

INGREDIENTS

A bottle of Irish whiskey

9 ounces of milk chocolate

2 cans of sweetened condensed milk

2 cans of evaporated milk

2 ½ cups of heavy cream and

1/4^th tsp of instant coffee

PROCEDURE

Pour a small amount of the whiskey into a large bowl. Then in the top of a double boiler, melt chocolate and stir constantly until smooth. Mix the melted chocolate along with the whiskey in the bowl. Slowly mix in the condensed milk and the evaporated milk. Add the cream and coffee along with the remaining whiskey and stir until an even mixture has formed. Don’t wait too long before adding the coffee as it may not mix well if put in very late.

Now pour this mixture into bottles of around 750 ml and store in the refrigerator. It tastes best if refrigerated for at least a month before serving.

Serve it in a glass with crushed ice and make sure to shake well before serving. You could always make your own additions to the recipe like adding more chocolate, putting in chocolate chips. Chocolate adds its own flavor to the drink so if you are a big fan of chocolate feel free to add more. After all whatever makes you happy is what you should do. This also tastes great when accompanied with ice cream.

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The stir fried beef in oyster sauce always comes out so perfect in restaurants and most people complain that it just isn’t the same when made at home. But that shouldn’t deter you from giving it a shot. Here’s how you make it:

INGREDIENTS (Serves about 4)

300-350 grams of beef steak

4-6 small dried Chinese mushrooms, soaked

1 pint of vegetable oil

1 spring onion cut into small sections

115 grams of snow peas topped and tailed

½ small carrot, thinly sliced

½ tsp salt

½ tsp soft brown sugar

1 tbsp soya sauce

2 tbsp oyster sauce

2 tbsp Chinese rice wine

½ teaspoon baking powder

2 teaspoons thick cornflour paste

PREPARATION

Slice the beef against the grain into thin slices of a decent size and marinade for a few hours at least and overnight if possible. This will make the beef soft. Then squeeze all the water out of the mushrooms and discard the stalks if they are hard.

Heat the oil in a preheated wok until it is medium hot and then blanch the beef for under a minute, stir so that the slices are separated and remove as soon as the color changes. Drain. Remove the excess oil, leaving around 2 tablespoons in the wok, stir fry the vegetables, add the sugar and salt, continue stirring and then add the beef and oyster sauce. Make sure everything has blended well together before serving.

The dish isn’t that hard to make and marinating it overnight adds that something extra to the taste so I recommend that you allow it to marinate for as long as possible. You can always make a few variations later on to suit your taste.

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Buffalo wings are a great favorite with everyone these days. It hasn’t always been so though. Earlier chicken parts such as the neck, wings and back weren’t use in dishes but were used instead in soups and stocks to add flavor. They remained so until one day one enterprising restaurant owner came up with the recipe of buffalo wings.

The accepted date of creation of this dish is the 30^th of Octobey, 1964 when the owner of the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York Teressa Bellissimo came up with it. She had to cook up a snack for her son and his friends and had a lot of chicken wings lying around. So she fried the wings and dipped them in spicy sauce. And so the buffalo wings were born, giving America one of its favorite snacks of all them that is served anywhere you go.

Ingredients:

1 cup of flour

1 tsp of salt

¼ tsp of cayenne pepper

½ tsp of paprika

20 chicken wings

½ cup of butter

¼ tsp black pepper

½ cup of hot sauce

¼ tsp of garlic powder

Combine the salt, flour, cayenne pepper and paprika in a bowl and coat the chicken in this dry mixture. Refrigerate for an hour.  Now melt the butter in a sauce pan and stir in the pepper, hot sauce and garlic powder.

Deep fry the chicken and drain on paper towels.  Place the chicken in a bowl and pour the sauce over it.  Coat evenly.  Serve with ranch or a blue cheese dip.

Buffalo wings are extremely yummy and very easy to make. They are the perfect appetizers to make and are especially good when guests drop in unexpectedly, which is often the case. So make this and I’m positive there aren’t going to be any complaints.

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