Book 25: Eating In - Niki Brezzant

You may be shocked to learn that I'm in a bit of a recipe book slump at the moment.  I have only brought 4 recipe books in the last month.... FOUR!!! and I haven't even looked at what Book Depository has coming out.  Looking at it, four recipe books in as many weeks seems fairly excessive (for a normal person), but considering these were all unplanned, its a bloody miracle for me.  Before my Christmas mayhem kicked in, I would quite often scroll through up and coming recipe books with a haze of cooking excitement, wish listing and purchasing left right and centre..  But lately the only books I've purchased have been some Donna Hay (massive sale at Aldi) and a double pack of Women's Weekly books.  The only reason I brought the Donna Hay books was that I felt a bit guilty combing through them and then not taking one home (doesn't make sense to me either).  Now to you, not purchasing copious amounts of recipe books is probably a good thing, but I'm slightly (read massively) obsessive and I'm currently without an obsession..... that is not good!  I've had some good obsessions, some not so good obsessions and some "what the bloody hell was I thinking" obsessions.  Good, Tupperware Modula mates, Wustoff knives and fruit trees, by good these are things that are actually useful and have continued to be used after the obsessions burnt out.  Not so good, shoes.... lots and lots of shoes... on paper seems fine, but really its awesome (I love shoes).  But the other obsessions, the ones I don't really talk about much (mainly because I look like a massive nerd/idiot) are the other sort of obsessions.  The ones though usually short, that end up with me driving all over the country looking for Lord of the Rings figurines.... (seriously I have a massive collection that I have no idea what to do with!!).  There was also the time when I fell in love with chicken nuggets, luckily it was when I was younger because if I tried to eat that many chicken nuggets now I'm pretty sure I would have a heart attack!  So me without an obsession can be a pretty dangerous (read expensive/fattening) thing.  At the moment I'm avoiding anything with obsession potential, footwear, JB hifi, toy stores, pretzels (did you know they make fresh pretzels at Cold Rock?  the cinnamon one is awesome)........

Recipe - Laab Chicken

Canola oil spray
400g chicken mince
4 cups finely sliced veges such as cabbage, red cabbage, carrot etc
3 kaffir lime leaves, finely sliced
1 stalk lemongrass, finely sliced
1/2 cup fresh mint leaves
1 red chilli, deseeded and finely sliced
1 spring onion, finely sliced

dressing:
1/2 cup fish sauce
1 tsp sugar
juice of 1-2 limes
pinch of dried chillies (optional)

Spray a little oil into a non-stick saucepan and cook the chicken mince over a medium heat, breaking it up with a spoon as it cooks.  When well cooked, remove from the heat and set aside to cool.
To make the dressing, combine the fish sauce, sugar and lime juice, and the dried chilli if using.  Taste and adjust until you get a flavour that suits you.  Everyone's taste is different and it's fine to play around with this to get it how you like it.
Combine the remaining ingredients in a large bowl.  Add the chicken and mix well.  Add the dressing and stir to combine.
Serve the salad with steamed jasmine rice.
Serves 4

 

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I was given this book as a gift a few years ago and apart from looking through it, like so many of my books, I've never cooked from it.  To be honest, I'm not sure of it, on one hand it has a recipe for Forgotten cookies that is AMAZING!!!  On the other its full of salads, salads are not something I think to hard about for anything.  When we have BBQ's I ask people to bring a salad because in general, I don't make salad. To me a salad is lettuce (iceberg, none of this fancy stuff), cucumber and anything else I can be bothered adding before I make up some pannacotta. I can say this isn't a book I would normally buy, as I said its very salad based, but if you are into light salady dishes you may enjoy this book. 

The recipe, this is horrible!  HORRIBLE!!!  I don't think I can honestly get across just how disgusting this recipe is!  For something so simple it is horrendously bad.  I've had and made Laab before and I've always found it to be really light and tasty.  This recipe is both bland and horrid at the same time and I'm not really sure how it does that when it ticks every horrible recipe box I've got and still manages to be bland.  I think what ruins it is the fish sauce, I like fish sauce, it can give great flavour to some fantastic recipes.  But when you have a sauce that is mainly fish sauce, well its kinda fishy and not in a good way!  I'm really sorry I typed this recipe up and even more sorry to share it with you.  I really should have made something else, but I figure I'm testing the books and you always have some crappy ones..  Hopefully you won't be like me and you read the whole blog before you start cooking.  I didn't really look at the quantity's before I made this and I paid the price, unfortunately so did Charli who I used as a guinea pig when I wasn't sure if the horrible taste was in my head.... it wasn't!

Thanks
Kate
xx

Ps:  Sorry about the massive delay, I'm been having some camera issues that have slowed me down a bit..... also My Kitchen Rules is on and I've been a bit busy yelling at the TV :)