Hello Feeder gang!
I come to you this week with The Chicken Special, after a few months off the world’s favourite poultry. I avoided meat at all costs at the start of my pregnancy, finding chicken and beef particularly icky. I am thankfully out of that phase now, so in the words of that chunky Uruk-hai in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, “Look’s like meat’s back on the menu boys!”.
In honour of this sentiment, this week’s newsletter has two glorious chicken dinners in it. We’ve got my coconut caramel chicken lettuce cups, a super fresh and speedy dinner that is really packed with flavour. My paid subscribers will also get my coronation chicken schnitzel, the reimaging of the very 70s British dish to make it a bit sexier. Because who doesn’t love curry mayo with fried chicken?
You’ll also get my recommendations for trousers I’m loving, my podcast of the week, and recent pregnancy snacks.
Enjoy pals!
Sophie x
The Recipes
Coconut Caramel Chicken Lettuce Cups
Very occasionally I crave a dinner that isn’t heavy on carbs, and this is one of those meals that ticks the box without being boring. The coconut caramel sauce is great in a lot of environments, to coat crispy tofu, chunks of white fish or indeed stir-fried chicken chunks. Here I mix it with chicken mince and other aromatics, and load it into lettuce cups for a speedy dinner. Really glorious stuff.
Serves 4
50g caster sugar
200g coconut milk
15ml light soy sauce
15ml fish sauce
500g chicken mince
1 red chilli
3 cloves of garlic
10g coriander
2 spring onions
2 limes
2 tbsp crispy onions
1 round lettuce
salt and vegetable oil
Add your caster sugar to a saucepan, along with 25ml water, then put it over a medium heat. Do not touch the contents of the pan with a spoon, but simmer it until the sugar has melted and is bubbling. Keep cooking it until the sugar has turned to a dark brown caramel, swirling your pan around so that it cooks evenly.
Pour in your coconut milk, soy sauce and fish sauce, and give it all a good mix. Simmer for about 7 minutes, until the sauce has thickened and darkened slightly. Set aside.
Finely chop your chilli and garlic. Pick the leaves of your coriander, and chop up the stalks. Finely slice the spring onions on a diagonal, separating the whites and greens.
Heat a wok over a medium-high heat, and add 1 tbsp vegetable oil. Add ½ your chicken mince with a good pinch of salt, and fry for a couple of minutes until lightly browned, breaking it up with your spoon as you go. Remove from the pan and repeat with your remaining chicken mince.
Add 1 tbsp vegetable oil to the pan, and add your chopped chilli, garlic, spring onion whites and chopped coriander stalks. Fry on a gentle heat for 30 seconds, then tip your chicken back into the pan. Pour in the coconut caramel sauce, and reduce down until it thickly coats the chicken. Squeeze in the juice of a lime, then season to taste with salt.
Break the whole leaves off your lettuce, and put two on each plate. Spoon your chicken mixture into the centres, then finish with spring onion greens and crispy onions. Serve with extra wedges of lime.
Coronation Chicken Schnitzel
The first thing my Mum ever taught me to took was something we called bang bang chicken. Not the Chinese dish, but an escalope made by bashing a chicken breast with a rolling pin. It has been one of my favourite meals since I was a child, and is still something I take great pleasure in cooking.
The way to make pané-ing (breadcrumbing) enjoyable is to make sure you always keep one hand wet, and one hand dry. That means dipping your chicken in flour and breadcrumbs with one hand, and dipping it in the egg with the other. It stops a gluey build up occurring on your fingers, which really dampens the mood and slows things down.
This schnitzel is an ode to coronation chicken, the retro classic, which normally features chicken in a curry mayo, with crunch from celery and apple. It sometimes also features raisins, so if that is your bag, by all means chunk some into the slaw. I won’t judge.
Serves 2
For the chicken: