HOMECOOKING WITH TERESA

This is a very traditional Catalan dish that every household has its own way of doing it. It's also very common to use scampi instead of prawns. I have used a couple of recipes from well known Catalan cooks and adapted them to create my own. Mixing chicken and seafood has been very traditional in many regions of Catalonia. Chicken used to be eaten only for big celebration and Christmas, and some seafood such as lobster or scampi were cheaper products on the coastal regions. In fact, they use to call the recipes Lobster and chicken because the chicken was then more scarce! I served it with Rossejat de fideus but without the allioli, the sauce was so flavoursome that it didn't need the extra punch of the garlic. Also, I find that raw garlic can repeat when eaten at night time! Ingredients 1 chicken (approx. 1.6kg) 16 prawns 3 ripe, chopped tomatoes 2 carrots 1 onion 1 bay leaf 1/2 cup cream 4 cloves of garlic 1/3 cup of brandy 1/3 cup of sherry 1 tsp butter 1 litre of chicken st...

  This is the first time I made this dish and used two recipes to make my own version. I used the one from Larkin Cen mostly, but I cooked the pork using another recipe as it contained basic ingredients such as garlic and ginger, which I thought would give the pork a nicer flavour. Everything was made from scratch except for the crunchy chilli oil, that came from a jar.  I couldn't get the traditional preserved mustard greens (yacai), so I made Quick-pickled turnips to give a bit of crunch and sweetness to the dish. I can see why it is a very popular street food in Sichuan. A lovely dish for a relatively cold evening. Ingredients: Quick-pickled turnips 250g of baby turnips, or regular turnips 1 tbsp of salt 125ml of water 125ml of rice wine vinegar 100g of caster sugar Dan dan sauce 100g of sesame paste or smooth peanut butter 10g of light soy sauce 1/2 tsp caster sugar 1 pinch of Sichuan peppercorns 1 garlic clove, ideally confit or roasted 1/2 tbsp of toban djan chilli bean ...