The Food Site

Whenever I cook during the weekends, I always do it in the shortest time possible because I’d usually be alone at home with my toddler. It is not a good idea to spend too much time in the kitchen while watching over a toddler who likes to get up to all sorts of mischief.

So, I usually do a lot of short-cuts in my cooking and one of it is to use the same sauce for two different types of mains and yet come up with absolute different flavours for both of it. Curious? Read on to find out how I do it.

I first use a recipe for BBQ Chicken from here, except that I didn’t exactly follow the whole recipe. Heheh…that’s me, I love to try out new recipes but I somehow never do follow the whole recipe and I tend to change it around.

So, here’s my own version of

Stir-fried Chicken in BBQ sauce

AND

Grilled Lemon & Herbs Salmon

Ingredients for chicken

1/2 chicken, chopped into four pieces (you can also use whole chicken)

2 onions, chopped

1 clove garlic, diced

3 tbsp homemade salsa

2 tbsp ketchup

1 tbsp honey

1 tbsp brown sugar

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp Worchestershire sauce

2 - 3 tbsp mixed fresh herbs (I used basil, thyme, dill and rosemary)

1 capsicum, sliced

Ingredients for salmon

3 tbsp butter

2 tbsp diced garlic

1 lemon

4 tbsp mixed fresh herbs (thyme, dill and rosemary)

1 salmon steak

Instructions

1. Prepare the ingredients for the chicken

6. Set aside the chicken. But don’t wash the wok / frying pan.

10. Turn on the heat of the pan (the same one that was used to stir-fry the sauce for the chicken) and add butter to it.

11. Add garlic and sautee for a few seconds over low heat.

13. Once it turns opaque with a gorgeous ‘tan’ to it, it is cooked so remove from heat.

14. Now back to the chicken. Add about 3 tbsp butter to the same pan and heat it up.

16. Stir fry till the chicken is cooked through, about 10 to 15 minutes. Then, you will get this…

And…

Here’s the

You will find that the salmon has a hint of the BBQ sauce but not much as it has its own lemon and herbs flavour.

I serve these two mains with

and

That’s a complete meal for the three of us. This is all done within an hour (including preparation time). The trick to using the same frying pan (or wok in my case) for the sauce, then the salmon and then the chicken is to keep the heat at medium or medium low so that it won’t burn.

Of course, the mains can be eaten as is or serve with other side dishes but I think the stir fried chicken in BBQ sauce goes very well with rice due to the sauce.

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Other than rice, my son absolutely loves to drink soup. In fact, he’d rather drink soup than milk! I’ve been working late into the night a lot these days (blogging and some freelance writing work) so a nice bowl of nutritious chicken soup is really good to rejuvenate my tired body.

This is a recipe for nutritious and highly healthy clear chicken soup:

Chicken Soup For the Tired Body

(with ginseng / pao sam and Dom)

Ingredients

Half chicken, cleaned and skin removed (so that soup will not be so oily)

6 - 7 pieces of pao sam (a type of ginseng)

4 - 5 tbsp Dom

1 tbsp salt

1 tbsp kei chi (wolfberries)

5 dried red dates

1 litre water

Instructions

1. Prepare your chicken and place in a zipper bag.

6. Heat up a pot of water till boiling.

10. Then, add in these:

It is wise not to use too many as this is a powerful herb and eating too much of it may cause effects such as fever. Just use four to five pieces, it is good enough.

The amount of this is actually dependent on you. Also remember to add the salt to this soup.

It is usually cooked by 30 minutes but if you want better flavour or taste, you can let it simmer longer. After that, you will get this..

This soup, in Chinese terms, is pretty heaty for the body so only cook this during cool weather. I also used more Dom as I like the extra sweet flavour it gave the soup. Also, this is not suitable if you have a cold or flu as it may make your sorethroat even worse!

You can use a slowcooker to cook this. Just put water in the pot, add the ingredients and let the slowcooker do it’s magic.

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