Snesi/Chinees Tayersoep (Eddo/Taro Soup)

This is another wonderful one-pot soup so popular in Suriname. Although named for the Chinese tayer or Eddo, which is a root tuber similar to a potato in shape, this soup is more than just this one exotic ingredient. As with many Surinamese soups, the actual meat ingredients can vary each time you make it, as it is an opportunity to use whatever meat you have in the house at the time. Chicken thighs, pigs' tails, salted beef, pork rib pieces, chicken feet are favourites found in soups like Bruine Bonen Soep, Pindasoep and also Chinese Tayer soup.

Eddoes (or Taros as they are also called) are a popular plant throughout the Caribbean region and are thought to have been introduced there from China, hence the name Chinese Tayer. They resemble hairy potatoes, and when peeled have a similar look also. They take quite a bit longer to cook than potatoes however, so if you wish to mix your soup with both eddoes and potatoes you will need to add the eddoes to the pot at least 20 minutes before the potatoes.

The real star of this soup though is coconut milk! It gives such a rich yet delicate flavour to the soup and also helps to thicken the liquid. Coconut palm trees are common throughout Suriname, so there is no shortage of supply. I even planted a few coconut shoots in our yard in Suriname myself; hopefully I will be able to reap the benefits in a year of ten!!!

Ingredients

2 chicken legs, skin and fat removed

200g salted beef/zoutvlees

200g pork rib pieces, excess fat removed

1 large white onion

2 tomatoes

3 L water

4 chicken stock cubes

2 beef stock cubes

10 Allspice/Pimento berries

1 bay leaf

8 Eddoes/Chinese Tayer roots

6 potatoes

2 400ml cans Coconut milk

1 tsp Laos powder

1 tsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

1 Madame Jeanette/Adjuma pepper

2 celery leaf stalks

sunflower oil to fry

Method

If using salted beef, put this in a medium sized pot with enough water to cover and boil gently for about 15 to 20 minutes to release most of the salt in the beef and also to soften the meat. Remove from the salted water and discard this. Cut the salt beef into small cubes.

Chop the chicken legs into smaller pieces, about 5 pieces each depending on the size of the legs. Trim any excess fat from the chicken and also from the pork rib pieces. The pork ribs are not a rack of spare ribs that you might put on the barbecue, rather they are smaller bony pieces of pork, known as krabbetjes in Dutch.

In a large soup pot, fry the chicken, pork and salted beef in a little oil until browned all over. Drain any excess liquid from the pot.

Peel and finely chop the onion and chop the tomatoes and add these to the meat. Fry for a further 3 minutes. Add 3 litres of cold water to the pot, and the chicken and beef stock cubes, bay leaf and Pimento berries. Bring the water to the boil and cook for about 10-15 minutes.

Next, peel the eddoes/Chinese tayers, and rinse under cold water. Cut the eddoes into chunks of about 3cm. This will usually mean just cutting the eddoes in half, but larger eddoes can be cut into 3 pieces. Add these to the soup water. Season the soup with the Laos powder, salt and pepper.

Peel the potatoes and cut them into pieces the same size as the eddoes. About 20 minutes after the eddoes were added to the pot, it is time to add the potatoes. I prefer the quicker cooking varieties as, strangely enough, these, err, take less time to cook! Chop the celery leaves finely and add these as well to the soup pot. Place the whole Madame Jeanette pepper gently into the soup. This is left whole as the desired effect is to get the aroma of the pepper without the heat. Be careful that the pepper does not split, or your soup will be very hot!

Roughly 10 minutes after the potatoes have been added to the soup you can add the 2 cans of coconut milk. Make sure to shake the cans well before opening as the milk may have separated slightly in the can. Stir the coconut milk well through the soup and continue cooking on a medium high heat for another 5-10 minutes.

Serve the soup on its own, or as is more common in Suriname, with white rice.

Njang Switi! Enjoy!

DID YOU KNOW?
Coconut milk contains a high amount of coconut oil. This oil contains lauric acid, which is a saturated fat that raises blood cholesterol levels, and is found in similar levels in breast milk!

DID YOU KNOW?
Chinese tayer is a root popular vegetable among the Maroon communities in the interior of Suriname. The Maroons are descendants of runaway slaves who fled the plantations into the rainforest, where they lived off the produce of the jungle. Chinese tayer is able to grow in high water levels and can be found in swamp areas, which flood frequently during the long rain season.

Chinese Shrimp Fried Rice

The secret to this dish is it's simplicity; although most associated with Chinese cuisine, fried rice is now a favourite of many cuisines around the world, and is a great way of using leftover ingredients. The essential aspect of good fried rice is that the rice should be cold when it is added to the wok/frying pan. If you use freshly boiled rice, this will end up steaming instead of frying and you will be left with a soggy, lumpy fried rice. The rice should be cooked several hours in advance and then refrigerated, or ideally the night before. As I mentioned before, this is a perfect opportunity to use up any rice that you have over from the previous day.

As for the type of rice, I would recommend long grain rice. You want your rice to be easy to separate into individual grains. Starchy shorter grain rices have a tendency to clump together, and are more difficult to separate.

Pollo alla Cacciatore (Hunters' Chicken)

This is a hearty and filling chicken casserole classic from Italy. Cacciatore means "Hunters' Style", so this dish would likely have been what the hunter would eat after a long day out in the forest. It is more usual to cook it with some of the produce of the hunt, perhaps a small hare, pheasant or even wild boar, but perhaps the chicken variety rose in popularity with the hunters who weren't quite so good, and didn't catch anything!

As with most Italian peasant fare, there are probably as many recipes claiming authenticity as there are villages in Italy. Each one will have its individual characteristics and the ingredients may vary in different regions, but the basic recipe is for chicken thighs/drumsticks in a thick tomato sauce enriched with white wine. The rest of the ingredients you can add according to your own taste.

This is a one-pot casserole and is perfect for a cold and wet Autumn afternoon.

Moroccan Grilled Chicken & Couscous with Roasted Peppers Salad

For today's recipe we move outside of our comfort zone of Italian/Mexican/Chinese/Surinamese to something a bit different!!!

This delicious salad is great as a main course but can also be eaten as part of a picnic or as a starter. The North African flavours of cinnamon, coriander, paprika and cumin are prominent in this dish, and the addition of fresh mint gives it a really aromatic powerful flavour. An important spice mix in North Africa is Ras-el-hanout, which will typically comprise all the traditional spices such as cumin, paprika, coriander, chili powder, cinnamon and fenugreek. There are many local variations of ras-el-hanout, but the base ingredients as listed above should all be present. 

Haricots Verts wrapped in Pancetta

This simple little dish is equally at home as an antipasto (appetiser) as it is as a contorno (vegetable side dish). It is essentially made of only 2 ingredients, but if these are of good quality, the end result is amazing!

Pancetta is an Italian bacon, made from pork belly. It is quite easy to get these days in supermarkets, but if you can't get pancetta, you can substitute it with thin slices of unsmoked streaky bacon.

Haricots Verts is French for green beans, but these are slightly longer and thinner than standard green beans. Again, these should be readily available in most supermarkets, but if you can't find them, substitute with normal green beans.

Ingredients

300g Haricots Verts

16 straight Pancetta slices 

black pepper to season

olive oil to drizzle

Method

Preheat the oven to 200 C.

Boil a medium pan of salted water. When the water is boiled, add the haricots verts and cook these for 2-3 minutes. The beans should still have a bite to them. Drain the water and put these into a colander to dry.

Lay one of the pancetta slices out flat on a plate. Place 4 or 5 beans in a bundle at one end of the pancetta. Roll the pancetta up around the beans. Place the rolled beans onto a shallow baking tray covered with a sheet of greaseproof paper, or drizzled with a little olive oil. The greaseproof paper/oil is purely to stop the pancetta from sticking to the bottom of the baking tray.

Repeat this process with the remaining pancetta slices and haricots verts.

Place the baking tray into the middle of the preheated oven and bake the pancetta/bean bundles for about 15-20 minutes.

Buon appetito! Enjoy!

Pollo alla Parmigiana (Chicken Parmesan)

This is not so much a classic Italian dish, more like an American take on a classic Italian dish. Chicken Parmesan is known more in the United States and outside of Italy, whereas the traditional dish, Melanzane alla Parmigiana, uses aubergine/eggplant. The rest of the ingredients remain the same and the methods of preparation are fairly similar, with the exception that the aubergine parmigiana is made up of layers of vegetable and sauce, similar to a lasagne, whereas the chicken version is only one layer.

The name of this dish itself is a little misleading. Parmigiana means in the "Parma style", but this dish is not native to Parma in Northern Italy. Instead, it is a Southern Italian dish, with both Campania and Sicily claiming versions of the dish. The most likely explanation is that the dish is named after Parmigiana-Reggiano (Parmesan) cheese, which is called for in the recipe as the cheese topping. Funnily enough though, there are plenty of chicken Parmigiana dishes out there that do not feature Parmesan cheese at all, using mozzarella in its place. So not only do they not come from Parma they also do not feature the most famous of Parma's delicacies, its' cheese!

Another theory on the Parmigiana name is that Parmigiana is an Italianisation of the Sicilian parmiciana, which refers to shutter slats, which closely resemble the layers of overlapping aubergine in the original dish. So for the versions using chicken instead of aubergine, and mozzarella instead of Parmesan, the name is a bit confusing to say the least. Maybe they should call this version "chicken"!

Anyway, names notwithstanding, both the chicken and aubergine versions are delicious, and not so difficult to make. You should give yourself at least a couple of hours though, as there are several steps involved, which are time consuming.

Ingredients

For the chicken:

4 skinless chicken breasts

300g plain flour

3 eggs

50ml milk

300g breadcrumbs

1 tsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp oregano

olive oil to fry

For the tomato sauce:

2 tins plum tomatoes

1 tsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

1 tsp oregano

2 cloves garlic

For the assembly:

2 balls fresh mozzarella

75g grated Parmesan cheese

2 tsp oregano

Method

Preheat the oven to 200 C.

Slice the chicken breasts horizontally to give you 2-3 slices per breast, 8-12 slices in total. To give them all an even thickness, they can be placed between two large pieces of clingfilm and beat with a meat tenderiser or mallet.  Each "escalope" should be about 1/2 cm thick. Season these lightly with salt and black pepper.

In 3 separate shallow dishes or bowls, assemble the flour in the first bowl, the eggs and milk in the second bowl, and the breadcrumbs in the third bowl. Beat the eggs and milk together to give an even egg wash. Distribute the paprika, oregano and salt and pepper evenly between the first (flour) and third (breadcrumbs) bowls and mix these in well.

In an assembly line fashion, dip each chicken escalope first in the flour, then in the egg wash and finally in the breadcrumbs, each time ensuring that the escalope is covered thoroughly and allowing any excess to drip back into the bowl. Repeat the process for all the chicken escalopes.

Heat the olive oil in a large non-stick frying pan over a medium heat. You should have enough oil to cover the entire bottom of the pan but not enough to submerge the escalopes. When hot enough, shallow fry the escalopes a few at a time on both sides until golden brown. When done, drain these on kitchen paper to remove any excess oil.

Peel and finely chop the garlic cloves. Fry these in a little olive oil in a high sided pan or pot on a gentle heat, making sure they do not burn. Add the plum tomatoes and chop/mash these in the pan until they are much smaller. Add the oregano, salt and black pepper and simmer this for about 20 minutes, until it is a smooth sauce.

Slice the 2 mozzarella balls into thin slices.

In a baking tray, place the breaded chicken escalopes along the bottom of the tray, overlapping slightly if they do not all fit. Pour the sauce evenly over the chicken pieces and spread it out until it covers everything. 

Add the sliced mozzarella over the sauce and then the grated Parmesan.

Put in the oven for about 20-25 minutes until the cheese has melted and turned golden brown.

This dish can be served with a  number of things, on spaghetti with Neapolitan sauce, or with chips, or even with a nice seasonal salad.

Buon appetito! Enjoy!

Risotto con Funghi e Castagne (Mushroom and Chestnut Risotto)

Risotto is very popular as a primo (first course) in Italy, as an alternative to pasta, especially in Northern Italy. A dish made from rice and broth, risotto is a hearty carbohydrate source, which lends itself perfectly for a range of other ingredients. This rich, creamy risotto features 2 staple Autumn ingredients, mushrooms and sweet chestnuts. Most mushroom varieties can be found all year round in good supermarkets, although risotto recipes often call for dried porcini (piglet) mushrooms, which are able to retain their flavour while dry. If you can't find porcini mushrooms, most other mushroom varieties will do. For a nice symmetry use chestnut mushrooms!

Italian Three Bean Pasta Salad

This is a ridiculously easy and delicious salad that can be eaten as a side dish, starter or even as a main course. It should be served cold and is therefore perfect for picnics. The combination of lovely fresh ingredients and bright colours is a feast for the eye as well as the stomach. This salad is suitable for vegetarians.

You can use any beans that you want to make this salad. Whichever beans are easy to come by. Beans are part of the legumes family, and are a great source of fibre. They also help to reduce cholestorol and blood sugar levels, so all in all they are a pretty great food!!!