bill’s everyday asian

As I mentioned in my last post I am back on the cooking bandwagon and last night I tried my first recipe out of one of Christmas presents – bills’s everyday asian. The cookbook looks really promising in terms of how many recipes I have bookmarked to try – but my first go was with his Classic stir-fried chicken with basil: 

It was supposed to be served with rice, however eating for one I didn’t really want to extend the servings by adding rice to the meal, so I ate it alone. The flavour was the perfect balance of spicy and salty, however I think next time I will make an extra effort to get the thai basil, rather than ordinary basil – I think that could make all the difference.

a wagamama salad

So it seems I am slowly on the mend, my sinus infection is abating, although still somewhat present. But it does mean that I am well enough to not go straight to sleep when I get home, and blog instead!

Now I have quite a few cookbooks, and a high majority of these cookbooks have never been cooked out of. I felt inspired to remedy this after watching Julie & Julia. If you haven’t seen the movie it centres around a girl who sets herself a challenge to cook through all the recipes in Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking.  In the movie she ends up blogging about her challenge, which has really had me thinking about a cool blogging challenge to set myself…but anyway, a discussion for another day.  So I had a good look at my bookshelf and took out a few of the cookbooks I hadn’t touched since the initial flick through, and decided to tackle a recipe from The Wagamama Cookbook  which I had bought probably over a year ago now. The book itself is filled with numerous delicious sounding recipes, however I had been put off previously with its often hard to find ingredients and multiple recipes within recipes (when the ingredients themselves require separate recipes).  But in the spirit of adventure I decided to tackle one recipe, and if it was worth the effort, may even more.

I decided on tamarind chicken salad recipe. It only require a few out of the ordinary ingredients (tamarind paste – which in the end I didn’t even end up using, so I suppose I really just made chicken salad…whoops!) so it seemed like a good start. Now the recipe itself was short but the ingredients required three more recipes before you even got started. These were the marinade for the chicken (which needed to be left over night), the sauce and the salad dressing. All of these three weren’t complicated to do, but they were time consuming – this is not an easy, whip it together salad. That being said – it was ah-maz-ing! The flavour packed into this salad is the best mix of powerful, yet not overbearing, all the flavours compliment each other so nicely, without having anything shout out above anything else.  Now I haven’t had this particular salad at the actual Wagamama’s restaurant, so I can’t compare my version to theirs, but I am extremely happy with how it turned out. It is not a great one for keeping (it is on its third day legs now and the leaves are looking worse for wear) but it would be a fantastic salad to pull out to impress your guests. I am going to try a few more of the recipes from the book in the future, so I’ll let you know if those are just as impressive.

May not look the most appetising – but I promise you it was delicious.