Dinner party for 6
Posted by spunky | Filed under Monkee Do, Monkee Grub
It has been raining since Sunday. Bambi seems to be getting a natural wash, but yeah I’ll have to bring her for a proper wash soon enough, when the rain stops.
I’ve not been to yoga since the last 5pm class on Saturday, not wanting to be stuck in the rain with Bambi is a bad excuse. Looking at the rain now, I’d be stuck in the shopping centre for a long time if I had gone for yoga.
Still, there’s no excuse for not going. Monday I wanted to chill, yesterday I was plain lazy. Today? I’m preparing for a dinner party. All I really needed to do was soak the chicken in the marinade and come back to marinade the beef. I watched the rain as it grew, I watched it and imagined my journey on the wet road. Not the best scenario.
Anyhoo. Tonight’s dinner was planned based on the fact that us peeps are BROKE.
Yes, broke.
We want to have dinner together but we are broke.
We could go to the hawkers, jostle with the crowd, end up spending more than $10 when we order lots of food and drinks.
I came up with a better idea, if each of us put in $10 each, I’d have $60 to play with.
I bought 6 chicken legs, 5 portobello mushrooms, thyme, a bag of washed potatos, a bag of onions, a pack of rocket, some clams and garlic, and some organic chicken stock, which I discovered I don’t really need to use tonight, hmm. Total spent? $50.
Starter: Clams with butter, garlic and mirin
Clams
Garlic
Mirin
Oil
Give the clams a good soak. Heat up pan and add some oil, melt a dollop of butter in the oil and throw in garlic, quickly fry and throw in the clams, season with salt. Finish cooking with some mirin.
Ta- daaaaa!
Don & Steph have contributed 3 huge beautiful steaks.
Here’s how it was done last time, as usual looking for anything and everything you have in your fridge/cupboard.
Today’s steak will get this treatment:
Oyster Sauce
Teriyaki Sauce
Ketchup and Chili Sauce
A touch of black soya sauce (optional)
(amount I don’t count, I just add what I think is right..)
Don’t go ‘eeeeeeeeee’ yet okay? I’m cutting it all up into strips so that everybody can have a portion. It gets covered in fried garlic chips too! So this either gets to be starter part two or.. hmm. See? I told you we can be greedy!
The marinade was heated till it boiled and I had to add sugar to tone down the saltiness, it IS very salty. There’s heaps left so I might use it to roast some other meat, perhaps some pork, or another chicken. A lesson learned from this experience, using pre-chopped garlic from the supermarket does not give you the same result as fresh garlic thinly sliced and carefully fried.
Main: Seaweed Soaked Chicken with roasted potatoes
The chicken legs have been sitting in a seaweed brine since 11.30am. I emailed w yesterday and asked her if nori would go well with roasted chicken cos I have some which I usually sprinkle over my cod-roe pasta but for some reason they are all stuck together, probably due to my bad storage method. She gave some objective advice and it turns out she’s not a fan of seaweed so I googled and I got the recipe here but as usual I am tweaking it to suit the situation. I could not find two decent sized whole chicken yesterday and decided it would be better if we each had a chicken leg.
Brine:
Nori
Salt (sea salt if you can) about 300g
Sugar 150g
thyme about 10 sprigs or so.
Came home last night to set all the above in pot of cold water and bring to boil. Went to bed to let it cool. Woke up this morning, dumped some of it out as my pot is kinda small, added more water and submerged the chicken legs in the pot. It is now sitting pretty in the fridge. A few more hours and it will be seared and get the roasting treatment along with the potatoes and onion and some butter, in our trusty Baby Belling.
The Portobello Mushrooms don’t need a lot of work. Just sprinkle dried herbs, salt and pepper and drizzle olive oil over before roasting.
Tonight, everything will be served with a lemon, butter and chives rice. (Thanks to w for the easy recipe)
-Fold butter, grated lemon skin and finely chopped chives into piping hot rice.
Alternatively I could pluck Joey silly and use basil instead of chives. Joey is the name of my basil plant. She’s thriving pretty well these days.
Update –
Dinner went really well! We had so much fun chatting and the boys did a fantastic job washing up and cleaning around the stove area. RESPECT! SW came home pretty late (he’s party number 6) so I had to reheat everything for him in a casserole dish. The dude is happy and has just gone to bed.
I’m happy, although this dinner took all day cos of my dilly-dallying, it feels great to see your friends enjoy your cooking. I did manage to sqeeze in coffee with Kwanyi after I pre-roasted the chicken in the afternoon!
The girls came early to help out! Among other things, they spun the rocket, dressed it with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and grated cheese over it and that was PERFECT. Thank you! 
*update: I did go buy some tomatoes, lemon and butter before I started to cook, so dinner did work out to be around $60!*
Tags: Baby Belling, beef, chicken, clams, dinner party
