The Last Month (Time Has Flown)

Last Sunday it was the first anniversary of this blog and I realised I hadn’t posted for a while due to a busy summer. Well, I’m going to rectify this today with  a catch up of my holidays. This might not be posted for a few days as I currently don’t have reliable internet but as soon as I can I promise to upload this! 

I last posted when I was in Sweden. We had a fantastic two weeks there and the food, well, it was brilliant. If you ever go to Stockholm then I recommend you eat at Oaxen Slip, which is on the same island as the ABBA museum (also worth a visit for the hilarity of it all. And the chance to pretend you’re part of the band). The menu is intended to be shared but you could quite easily have a plate each and just share the sides. We each chose a dish and then tried each others’. I had pork with spring onion butter and a charred lemon, so simple yet full of flavour. My family chose cod with hazelnuts, Swedish beef sausage, and a steak. All tasted fantastic. For me, the anticipated dessert, and the reason I chose the restaurant, having spotted it on Rocket and Squash’s instagram, was a salted caramel brownie with ice cream and sour cream. Boy, did it live up to expectations! The warm brownie was light and gooey with the sour cream being a perfect, if unusual, foil to the chocolate sweetness. 

Satay

My cousin's wife and their children came over to cook the other day* (you may remember them from when we made dumplings) and we made chicken satay. Charlie also demanded that we made bread so there was a quick detour for that to happen but ultimately we made some amazing satay that tasted just like the stuff I ate all the time when we went to Boat Quay or Chinatown in Singapore. Now, this isn't as much of a coincidence as it might seem - the cookbook author, Ghillie James, is an expat in Singapore. If you want little ones to help then juicing the limes with an electric juicer was deemed excellent fun, as was pressing the buttons on my mini processor (it's fairly noisy). Holding the hand held mixer to knead the bread definitely met with Charlie's approval - he loved the shape of the dough hooks but interestingly didn't want to touch the dough itself.

The recipe is quite straightforward but I'm not happy with the marinade for the chicken and want to tweak it using a satay recipe I previously used. Therefore I'm only going to give you the recipe for the sauce, with my changes, and will upload the marinade another time. When I can't be bothered to marinate, thread and grill the chicken I often just fry the chicken and cook some rice/noodles and peas and serve with this sauce on top. You could use beef, pork or prawns if you'd rather.

*Other week - I forgot to finish this before I went to Sweden (more on that next time) - sorry!