Slow Cooked: 200 exciting, new recipes for your slow cooker (14 page)
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Authors: Miss South
The marinade will baste the chicken with the oil from the tahini and it will become tender enough to fall off the bone. Serve the chicken hot on a tortilla with some crunchy shredded white cabbage and discover the dinner party-friendly take on a chicken kebab with garlic sauce.
Living in Brixton, jerk chicken has become a staple of my culinary life. The word ‘jerk’ refers to the seasoning on the meat and to the style of cooking. Allspice is essential to both. It’s rubbed into the meat to marinate it and the wood of the allspice tree is used on the drum to create lots of smoke that infuses the meat with a wonderful flavour.
This jerk chicken is very easy to make, but the Scotch bonnet peppers are essential to add their unique fruity flavour and lip-tingling heat. Many major supermarkets stock them and they freeze brilliantly, so keep some in the freezer ready to make this time and time again.
The slow cooker can’t add smoke, but something amazing happens when you slow cook the jerk rub — you end up with juicy chicken with a wonderful, almost charred outer skin, that brings a splash of summer at any time of the year.
SERVES 4 WITH LEFTOVERS
4 spring onions, roughly chopped
4 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
1 Scotch bonnet pepper
6 sprigs of fresh thyme or 1 tablespoon dried thyme
2 tablespoons ground allspice (honestly! It’s not a typo)
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon sea salt
¼ teaspoon ground mace
¼ teaspoon black pepper
2 limes, juiced
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon black treacle
1 teaspoon soy sauce
500g chicken thighs or drumsticks, skin on and bone in
Put the spring onion and garlic in a blender. Take the stalk off the Scotch bonnet and put it in whole. This fiery little pepper will make your hands or eyes tingle if you get the juice on your hands, so this is safest.
Add the rest of the herbs and spices. Squeeze the lime juice in and add the sugar, treacle and soy. Season well and blitz it all in the blender until it is a rough paste. It should be liquid enough to drop from a spoon. Add the juice of another lime or about a tablespoon of water if it’s too dry. This is your jerk marinade.
Make two to three cuts in the skin of each chicken thigh. If your slow-cooker crock fits in the fridge, place them directly in the slow-cooker crock skin side up. Pour about two-thirds of the jerk marinade over them all and, using gloved hands or a spatula, toss them to coat well with the marinade. If your crock doesn’t fit, use a freezer bag or Tupperware. Marinate the chicken overnight in the fridge. Reserve the remaining marinade.
Next day, add the remaining marinade to the chicken in the slow-cooker crock so that it covers the chicken skin well. This helps form a lovely crust on the meat that gives a barbecued effect. Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook the chicken on high for 8–9 hours. This will make the sugar and treacle caramelise on the skin and the meat become incredibly tender. Serve the jerk chicken with rice and some crunchy coleslaw.
I adore pâté. One of my favourite light meals is pâté on toast. The bread must be brown and the pâté must be chicken liver and spread generously. It reminds me of having tea at my uncle Tom and aunt Kathleen’s house, where I used to spend evenings when visiting my granny. Kathleen would even make Melba toast sometimes, which made me feel ridiculously sophisticated. In those days, pâté on toast was served on proper china and followed by playing on the electric organ in their living room. These days, I tend to eat it curled up on the sofa, plate balanced on my knee, reading a good book.
This pâté is best made using frozen chicken livers, which have a looser texture than fresh ones and need to be baked in the slow cooker as a water bath to firm them up. It’s so easy that it leaves lots of reading time handy.
SERVES 4–6 AND KEEPS WELL IN THE FRIDGE
350g frozen chicken livers
85g butter
2 shallots, finely chopped
2 rashers of streaky bacon, finely chopped
1 tablespoon red wine, port or brandy (optional)
75ml double cream
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
salt and pepper
Trim the livers of anything that looks unappealing. Chop them finely and set aside. Frozen livers are quite wet and they will create lots of liquid as you chop. Reserve this.
Melt the butter in a frying pan on the hob, add the shallots and bacon and sweat them both over a medium heat. You want the shallots to become translucent, but not coloured. The bacon should just start to crisp around the edges.
At this stage, add the chopped chicken livers and any liquid from them. Cook them for about 1 minute until they just start to change colour. Add the alcohol if you are using it and allow it to bubble slightly.
Pour in the cream and season. Sprinkle over the parsley and cook it all for 1–2 minutes until the livers are almost completely cooked. Remove from the heat immediately.
Blend with a hand blender until it is smooth, but retains a little bit of texture. Pour the mixture into a shallow dish or ramekins. Cover with foil. Set the dish into the slow-cooker crock and pour boiling water into the crock so that it comes about halfway up the side of the pâté dish.
Cook the pâté on low for 3 hours to firm up the texture. Allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before eating. It will keep for about 3 days in the fridge. Keep it covered, but don’t be surprised if the top of it oxidises and darkens slightly. This is natural and doesn’t affect eating it. Mine rarely lasts long enough for that to be an issue.
I love fish and seafood. It’s a family joke that if you left an old boot in the sea for long enough, I would eat it. Yet not as many British and Irish people share my love as you’d expect for island dwellers. One of the reasons for this is that they are unsure how to cook fish, believing it to be difficult. They also dislike the smell of fish in the house, and the bones, and so the majority of fish eaten in the UK comes from the chippie or with a crumb coating.
You probably don’t think of a slow cooker as the way to introduce people to fish or seafood, but it’s a great fuss-free way to get to grips with cooking it, mainly because there is very little odour during or after cooking. Invaluable in a day and age when so many kitchens are part of the living room!
Fish and seafood doesn’t need the long cooking that many cuts of meat benefit from, but several hours cooking will give you tender and tasty cuts of fish using the natural abilities of the slow cooker to steam and poach food. You can copy the ‘just steam’ fish dishes available to buy, but for less money and with more variety. Seafood can also be cooked easily due to the capacity of the crock and it’s difficult to overcook either by a minute or two, which can often make all the difference with traditionally cooked fish.
Octopus, Polenta and Pepper Salad
Fish is a favourite meal for me when I’m eating alone. I am lucky enough to have an excellent fishmonger near me and I really enjoy picking out my fish of the week. There’s such a wide choice I don’t know what half of them are and constantly ask my fishmonger, Donna, questions. And then I buy a trout anyway because they are my absolute favourite fish. I’ve given the recipe here for trout, but I’ve also done mackerel, snapper, sea bream and sea bass the same way in the slow cooker. It’s so easy you can definitely experiment!
Take one whole trout with the head and tail still on. This makes it easier to cook the fish well and allows you to see how fresh the fish is. Look for bright sparkly eyes, shiny glossy scales and a tail that doesn’t look like it’s starting to droop. It shouldn’t smell fishy, at most it should smell of the sea. Ask the fishmonger to gut it if it’s whole.
Fill the inside of the fish with any of the following, depending how you feel: fresh dill, tarragon, rosemary, sage or parsley and lemon for a Mediterranean feel; fresh lemongrass, sliced red chilli, fresh ginger and star anise for an Asian feel; or fresh sliced tomatoes, onions, garlic, lime, whole allspice berries and Scotch bonnet peppers for a Caribbean version.
Season the skin well and then place your stuffed fish on some tin foil and wrap it up like a present, allowing some room at the top for steam to collect. Make sure there are no gaps in your parcel to allow this to escape. Place the parcel of fish in the slow-cooker crock (you can layer them on top of each other if you have more than one fish) and pour 3–4cm boiling water into the base of the crock. The tail will bend to fit it into the crock so the skin might split slightly. Don’t panic. This is fine.
Put the lid on and cook the fish on high for 2 hours. Take the fish out of the slow cooker and serve immediately with a side dish of your choice and a squirt of lemon juice to bring out the flavours of the fish. It will be perfectly moist and will come away from the bones easily.
Unless you are my dad’s cat Mitch, you’ll no doubt prefer to cook kippers without the whole house smelling of fish. Well, the good news for humans is that you can in the slow cooker. Mitch has to sit right above the slow cooker now to get a waft of kipper.
Slow-cooker kippers are so simple they don’t really need a recipe. Allow one kipper per person. Lay it on a rectangle of tin foil. Add a slice of unsalted butter, a goodly sprinkle of white pepper and some dill, if you have it. Make a neat little parcel with the foil, folding the sides and the top over, and place in the slow-cooker crock, making sure there are no gaps or holes. Add enough boiling water to create steam in the slow cooker, about 2–3cm for one or two kippers. Put the lid on and cook the kippers on low for 2 hours. Carefully remove the tin foil parcels from the slow cooker and open them onto a plate, making sure you don’t spill the gloriously fish-infused butter. Pour it over the kippers and serve with scrambled egg.
I have never ordered one of these when I’m out for breakfast because I always get Arnold Bennett, the novelist, mixed up with Gordon Bennett, the expletive you can say in front of your granny, and risk culinary embarrassment. But one day, faced with a nice bit of smoked haddock, some spare egg whites and a slow cooker, I realised my moment had come. And oh my, it’s the best omelette I’ve ever eaten. Light and fluffy and very luxurious, I make it all the time now. I add a few spring onions and sometimes sub the haddock for some blue cheese to keep it vegetarian. Slow cooking eggs is the way to go!
SERVES 2
3 eggs
150g smoked haddock, cut into small pieces
2 spring onions, finely sliced
25g Parmesan
3 egg whites
chopped fresh parsley, to serve
salt and pepper
Line the slow-cooker crock with a sheet of reusable baking liner and set aside.
Break the 3 whole eggs into a large bowl and beat until well combined. Add the haddock, spring onion and the Parmesan and season carefully with salt and pepper. Mix well so that everything is well coated with egg.
In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites to soft peaks so they are light and fluffy. Fold them into the whole egg and fish mixture. Don’t overmix as you want to keep the air in.
Pour the egg mix into the lined slow-cooker crock. Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook on high for 2 hours. The base of the omelette will become slightly crisped and golden. Lift it out of the slow cooker, peel away the liner and serve with some chopped parsley and a green salad.
Note:
I don’t mind that the top of the omelette is quite pale, but if you prefer it more bronzed, simply grill in the liner for 3–4 minutes before serving.
POACHED FISH
This is probably the easiest way to cook fish in the slow cooker because the liquid in a slow cooker takes a long time to heat and it’s almost impossible to boil or overcook the fish. Both fresh and smoked fish work well with this method. I’ve given a recipe here for both steaks and fish fillets, which can be used as a guide for most types of fish.
I’ve never cooked something as delicate as flat fish in here, preferring more robust fish like salmon, coley and smoked haddock. Frozen fish doesn’t work so well as it tends to shrink as it defrosts and cooks, so make this your opportunity to trying cooking fresh fish.
