Worldfoods Fusion of Flavours Challenge 4: Indonesian Nasi Goreng

We've cooked Pad Thai from Thailand, Ayam Percik from Malaysia and Tom Yum (also from Thailand). And now it's time for the fourth Worldfoods challenge... Nasi Goreng from Indonesia.

Nasi Goreng is a traditional Indonesian dish of fried rice, seasoned with spices and usually includes vegetables, prawns and chicken. An authentic Nasi Goreng also has eggy omelette ribbons strewn over the top. I made mine with chicken, because I just wasn't in the mood for prawns that day - and adapted the recipe to make a dish for one. The thing about the Worldfood sauces that I've tried so far (including this one) is that because each jar comes with a few meals' worth of sauce or paste, you can just scoop out enough for one without any fuss, leaving some for another day!

I've made a little step by step video below and you'll see how easy it all really is. And I made mine with a video camera in one hand.

Nasi Goreng with Chicken

(serves one, generously)

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 egg, beaten
• 2 tablespoons Worldfoods Nasi Goreng paste
• 1 boneless and skinless chicken thigh, shredded thinly
• couple of handfuls cooked rice
• 1 spring onion, chopped (including the green bits)
• 1 small mild chilli, de-seeded and sliced finely

Method

1. Bring a pan of slightly salted water to the boil and cook the rice. Drain, rinse under a cold tap and leave to one side. (You can cook the rice the day before if you wish but remember to keep it refrigerated).
2. Heat about 1 tablespoon of oil in a wok and make an omelette with the beaten egg. Flip over, cook the other side and tip out onto a chopping board set to one side.
3. Heat another tablespoon of the oil in the wok and spoon in two tablespoons of the Nasi Goreng paste. Stir on a medium heat until it becomes fragrant (about 1 minute).
4. Tip in the shredded raw chicken and stir fry in the paste until the chicken is cooked.
5. Add the cooked rice and stir fry until the rice is heated through and coated in the reddish paste.
6. Transfer to a bowl, before scattering with the omelette, spring onions and chopped chilli.

The Taste
The dish was spicy - not really 'hot' but it  had a definite chilli tingle to it. It also tasted more aromatic than the other sauces and pastes I've tried so far - almost similar to Chinese food. The shredded egg omelette gave the finished dish sweetness and cooled the heat of the spicy rice. The chicken - because it was thigh meat and cooked quickly - was still very juicy and succulent. And the spring onion and red chilli gave it crunch and colour. It's a good job I have some of this paste left, because I plan to make more of this. I think this is my favourite of the Worldfoods sauces I've tried so far. I also think it would be good with cooked noodles stir-fried into it instead of rice. When I've tried it I'll report back!

WorldFoods Fusion of Flavours Cooking Challenge 3: Tom Yum Soup

I have to be honest and tell you that up until now, I had never tasted Tom Yum soup. I've made variations of it - with coconut milk and red Thai curry paste - but if this stout little WorldFoods jar contains authentic Tom Yum flavours then I was just very, very surprised. It was spicy - the chillies being the first thing you taste - and then you get a very slight earthiness as a result of the galangal and a citrussy flavour from the kaffir lime leaves. Nothing at all like a generic Thai curry paste. And, once again it tasted fresh, aromatic and I really enjoyed it.

I added noodles to bulk out the soup and stirred in some frozen green beans along with the sliced mushrooms, to add both crunch and colour - as I didn't have any coriander to use as a garnish. The soft white noodles added substance to this rich, rust-coloured broth flecked with chopped red chillies. It is spicy, but comfortably so, and I didn't add coconut milk (although you can, to tame it) because I wanted to taste the full flavour of the soup. Garnish with fresh coriander leaves, if you have some - and add fresh raw prawns in the last few minutes of cooking if you have any of those. The soup was also not as watery as I thought it would be, but was relatively thick and silky (you only add 200ml water, it goes a long way). The whole dish also takes about 10 minutes from scratch to make, so as long as you have the Tom Yum paste, you can keep the rest of it handy in the cupboards and fridge and make as a last-minute dinner or lunch, if you need to.


Just a few points to note:

• If you're adding vegetables, stop cooking the soup when they are just slightly crunchier than you like. The vegetables will continue to cook slightly as they sit in the hot liquid, so keep them crunchy to avoid soggy veg at the bottom.
• It's best to cook the dried noodles in a separate pan of boiled water. Give them a quick rinse under the cold tap and this will remove any excess starch clinging to the noodles, making them easier to separate and less stodgy.
• You only need to stir the Tom Yum paste in the hot pan for about a minute, until the spices release their fragrance. Don't overdo it.

Here's the recipe!

Tom Yum Soup with Vegetables
Serves 1 as a filling, hearty soup or 2 as a lighter soup

Ingredients

• About 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 3 tablespoons WorldFoods Tom Yum Paste
• 200ml water
• 3 medium sized chestnut mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
• handful of frozen green beans
• 1 nest of dried medium noodles

Method

1. Put a small pan of water on to boil the noodles. While it comes to the boil, heat up the oil in a separate, larger saucepan and stir in the Tom Yum paste. Let it sizzle for about a minute until the spices become fragrant. Pour over 200ml water and leave it to bubble.
2. The water for the noodles should now be boiling. Drop in the noodle nest and separate the strands as they soften, and leave to cook.
3. Drop the mushrooms and green beans into the Tom Yum liquid and simmer until cooked.
4. When the noodles are cooked, drain and rinse them under cold water and then add to the soup.
5. Serve the noodles in deep bowls, with the vegetables and dark broth poured over the top. 

Recipe on Test: Barefoot Contessa's (aka Ina Garten) Cheddar and Jalapeño Chilli Cornbread

Mmmm.... I love cornbread. It's a recent discovery, one that I first ventured on in my American Ranch Feast I made a few months ago. Stuck for something for lunchboxes for the week - I wanted to make something savoury rather than cakes again - I came across Ina Garten's recipe for cornbread on the Food Network's website.

It consisted of mixing the cornbread up like a muffin mix - the flour, sugar, cornmeal, salt and baking powder in one bowl and then you tip in the wet ingredients: eggs, milk and melted butter. The spring onions, grated cheese and jalapeño chillies are stirred in at the end, before tipping out into an ovenproof dish and baking. The results were brilliant, but the recipe wasn't without its problems.

The Recipe
I did love that this recipe is made using American measuring cups. For a Sunday morning's lazy baking I love to scoop out the mixtures with cups, it all feels a lot more easy going than squinting at the tiny notches of a set of scales and measuring with precision. That was what I loved.

A couple of things to bear in mind though. Don't worry, when you're instructed to melt almost a whole block of butter - the cornbread cuts into 12 hefty squares.  Do also soldier on when you pour the melted butter into the milk and eggs mixture and it goes all granular and sticky, it doesn't affect the finished result (but is a bit scary if you haven't seen it before). The recipe also very pointedly states that you need 'three extra large eggs'. My eggs come in a box of mixed sizes, and I just grabbed three of the largest although I wouldn't call them 'extra large'. And my cornbread came out fine.

One of the problems I did have though, was with the timing. The recipe says to cook the mixture for '30-35 minutes'. Mine took exactly one hour until it was ready. I used the right-sized oven dish and according to the comments on the Food Network's page, other people had the same problem. So if you do make this, just be prepared to leave it in a bit longer.

The Taste
It's bouncy, crumbly, sweet and pleasingly yellow. The grated cheddar sprinkled on top gives it a really crunchy texture on top. The cornbread is also very cheesy - my 2-year-old loves it despite the slight hum of the jalapeños buzzing through it. If you do make it, leave it to cool slightly and eat when it's just warm - when it's cold it has a completely different taste and a firmer texture, and although it is delicious, I prefer it much more when it's warm. The cornbread makes excellent picnic or party food, it's economical to make and a winner cut up into squares for lunchboxes or served with a rich chilli con carne.

Review of Very Lazy Concentrates - Caribbean Chicken

I received an email from the English Provender company, asking if I would like to review one of the cooking sauces they've recently released. Now, I have always felt that comfort food doesn't have to be cooked from scratch. Sometimes you want something soothing, or something that provokes holiday memories to cheer you up on a grey day - but you want it in 15 minutes flat.

So I was really happy to road-test the Very Lazy Caribbean Chicken concentrate. The instructions were simple enough. You just add diced chicken, a 227g can of pineapple cubes (including the juice) and half a can of coconut milk. The sauce was to do the rest, which was fair enough.

The Taste
From the first impressions I initially thought that the concentrate would be more of a paste - like a Thai curry paste - but it was much more sauce-like. Having tried Caribbean food before, I was worried that it would be a little too peppery or spicy (I've said before that my family are chilli-wimps) but it wasn't.

I've never been to the Caribbean (poor me) but I went to a Caribbean food market about a year ago and tried a curry dish there and it was very peppery, and head-blowingly spicy. I took that as authentic Caribbean cuisine, and decided that I didn't like it very much. Now this - it's much less spicy than I expected and doesn't taste of pepper. It has a much sweeter, fruity taste (probably down to the mango in it) and although it definitely does have a real chilli 'kick' to it, you don't have to fan your mouth after each forkful. I don't know if it's strictly authentic, but I liked it, and it's renewed my interest in Caribbean food. I'd definitely cook it again. 

Ease of Use
The instructions are printed clearly on the cardboard sleeve that the jar comes wrapped in, and they were so simple that I kept thinking I had missed something out. You just stir fry some diced chicken (the instructions state chicken breast but I used diced thigh) until it's cooked, tip in the sauce and add the pineapple pieces and their juice. Let the lot bubble for 15 minutes and then serve with rice. After a long day at work, when you have to conjure up something warming it would be brilliant. The concentrates also come in different varieties, including Coq au Vin, Posh Sausage Casserole and Creamy Chicken.

For more information on the Very Lazy Concentrates range, visit the English Provender Co website.

Many thanks to the English Provender Company for the jar of sauce they let me try!