365DOP: Mint & chilli chicken on lime & coconut rice

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta

This week has been characterised by the acquisition of more Peta books. I bought both A Cook's Tour of New Zealand (2005) and Insatiable(2000) from Trade Me, and read Insatiable over my coffee on Saturday morning.

Insatiable came out at a special time for New Zealand cooking - I think it was only about then that people became more interested in cooking with the kind of Mediterranean flavours that Peta writes about, and which now form a fair part of my cooking repertoire. She also seems to be quite obsessed with extra virgin olive oil and verjuice in the book, both of which had recently emerged as THE thing to obsess about, in a culinary sense.

A Cook's Tour attempts to be an encyclopedia of New Zealand food and cooking, but it's a rather slim and completely subjective encyclopedia. I've flicked through it. The entry on roses includes a story about why rose gardeners are obsessed with roses: because the flower reminds them of women and female sexuality. Hokay.

Shannon and I were invited to a barbeque on Saturday night and I decided to take a Peta recipe from A Cook's Tour as our offering. The recipe that I chose was mint & chilli chicken on lime & coconut rice (p. 57). The chicken is marinaded in fresh mint, chilli, garlic and soy sauces for a couple of hours before being skewered and grilled. Peta recommends char grilling and serving the skewers with snake beans and rice cooked with coconut, ginger and kefir lime leaves.

I followed the recipe religiously - or at least, almost religiously. I dorked out on the lime required for the marinade and replaced it with lemon, I didn't have jasmine rice so I used basmati, I used chilli powder instead of chilli flakes because that's what I had on hand, and Moore Wilsons weren't carrying any snake beans when I went down for the ingredients - so I served green beans instead.

 

My skewers on the barbeque next to some freaky orange New World marinated skewers

 

The recipe was super easy to follow, and the meal was delicious! The skewers were easy enough to transport to the barbeque. For the rice: I prepared it at home as I thought I could just heat it up in the microwave. That worked fine in terms of quality etc, although nobody seemed too too keen on eating rice at a barbeque (quelle surprise?). I took about half the amount of rice home and my flatmate Fran made a lovely fried rice with it on Sunday night.

This meal then is quite different to anything I've done before ala Peta. Lots of Asian style flavours, and not terribly complicated in terms of technique. I usually avoid making rice using the absorption method but I was really happy with how the rice turned out - so ten points for excellent instructions Peta!

I'm super keen to make this again - partially because we have a glut of mint (for serious, so much) and partially because it's always nice to take something with interesting flavours to a barbeque. Don't get me wrong, I love sausages as much as the next person (Peta notes in A Cook's Tourthat New Zealand is a nation of sausage lovers with just under a third of people indulging once a week*) but it's always nice to mix things up on ye olde grill.

 

Dave has the skills, I am excited for dinner

 

*Peta also notes that one of her favourite kinds of sausage is Italian Pork and Fennel - FYI that's the sausage offering that we took with us. Peta much? Yes I am.