I’ve gotten lax in my cooking skills. I have a series of recipes I follow and I haven’t added to my repertoire in awhile. So last weekend I worked on improving that.
The biggest problem is trying to figure out something I want to eat. It’s like going to a restaurant I’ve been to before. I know what I like so I constantly order the same thing. Why risk an experiment? Eventually though you should see if you like something else.
Going to restaurants actually gives you an idea of other things you may like so it is a good source of inspiration.
On Sunday, my inspiration was Chinese lemon chicken.
Online I found a few recipes. A key ingredient needed was lemon curd. I was not properly organized for this; if I had researched a bit harder, I would have probably been able to find it in a grocery store, among the jams. But, I found a recipe that seemed good. So, with my big bag of lemons I spent about an hour making the lemon curd. The recipe claims it will take 15 minutes, but I think that is if you have some minion who has prepped all the ingredients for you already.
Truth be told, it tastes a lot like lemon meringue pie. Which it probably is.
The next time I make it, I think I will use less sugar to make it more tart. And less pie-like.
The recipe for the actual Chinese lemon chicken was from the same site. The advantage of this one, was that it didn’t need to be deep fried. I was actually thinking I would be able to use my Actifry to do the frying without using enormous amounts of oil, but it looks like I didn’t have to.
The end result was a good meal, but it wasn’t exactly as I wanted. The chicken was not crispy. Not surprising, since it was stir-fried instead of deep. ”Jeanette” has a way to make crispy chicken in an Actifry so I may experiment next time with that method. In the meantime, I still have about a litre of lemon curd still, so the hard part is already done.