Paprika Chicken with Sour Cream and Thyme

This creamy oven-baked chicken dish, subtly flavoured with smoked paprika and thyme, is perfect for family dinners. The chicken pieces are smeared with a yoghurt marinade two or three hours before they're baked, which gives them a great succulence. If you want to cut down on calories, you can use plain yoghurt in place of the sour cream, but it will curdle slightly in the oven (see notes).

I used whole chicken legs (that is, Marylands, or pieces with drumstick and thigh still joined) but any cut of chicken will do. You could also use skinned, deboned chicken breasts, but you will need to reduce the cooking time by at least half.

If you can't find smoked paprika, use ordinary, fresh paprika (which should be a vivid brick-red colour, not brown or dusty).


This is lovely with new potatoes and sugarsnap peas, or a green salad. My kids really liked this, although the oldest was a bit huffy because he doesn't like 'gristly bits' in any sort of meat and is a boneless-breast and fillet-steak sorta guy. Hmmmph.

Baked Paprika Chicken with Sour Cream and Thyme
12 pieces of free-range chicken
salt and milled black pepper
200 ml plain white yoghurt
1 Tbsp (15 ml) olive oil
1 onion, peeled and very finely chopped
2 cloves fresh garlic, peeled and crushed
the juice of 1 lemon
1 Tbsp (15 ml) paprika
1 tsp (5 ml) smoked paprika
a handful (about 3Tbsp; 45 ml) fresh thyme leaves
300 ml sour cream or crème fraîche

Season the chicken pieces well with salt and pepper. Place them, skin-side up and in single layer, in an ovenproof dish. In a separate bowl, combine the yoghurt, olive oil, onion, garlic, lemon juice, paprika, smoked paprika and half the thyme. Mix well, and then, using your hands, smear the paste all over the chicken pieces, top and bottom. Cover with clingfilm and set aside to marinate for two to three hours.

Heat the oven to 200°C. Bake the chicken pieces in a hot oven, for 25 minutes, or until the skin begins to brown and crisp. Now cover the dish with a lid or tin foil, turn down the heat to 160° C and bake for 1 hour. Remove the dish from the oven and scoop off any excess fat with a large spoon (or drain by tilting the dish over the sink). Pour the cream (see note below) all over the chicken pieces, sprinkle with the remaining thyme and give the dish a good shake to combine the juices. Bake, uncovered, for another 20 minutes, or until the cream is slightly thickened.

Serves 6-8

Notes:
- If the sour cream or crème fraîche is too thick to pour, thin it down first with a little warm milk or water.

- If you use yoghurt instead of cream, choose a thin pouring yoghurt, and whisk in 1 tsp (5 ml) of cornflour [Maizena or cornstarch] before you pour it over the chicken. This will help to minimize (not prevent) curdling.

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Hot Caprese Salad on Phyllo Pastry

This tart, with its crisp phyllo base, ripe tomatoes, basil and mozzarella, is dead easy to make and quite delicious as a light lunch or quick snack.

The idea for this tart came to me because I am trying to convince my 9-year-old daughter to like tomatoes. She usually picks them out of a salad, or off the top of a pizza, although she tolerates them in sandwiches. But I don't want her merely to tolerate them; I want her to adore them, as I do!

Caprese Salad is, I think, one of the world's greatest salads, least of all because it's so incredibly simple, and because the combination of flavours is, in a word, sublime.

I knew my daughter wouldn't go for the raw tomatoes, so I thought I'd pizzafy the salad. The pizzafication worked: she ate the tomatoes.

The mozzarella in this photograph isn't real Italian mozzarella but the South African equivalent, which is rubbery and, when melted, super-stringy.

The only producer of authentic Buffalo milk mozzarella in this country is Wayne Rademeyer of Buffalo Ridge in Wellington. His cheese is just gorgeous, but at around R70 for a small tub, way too pricey to eat often. Buffalo Ridge mozzarella is available from Cheese Gourmet in Linden, and also stocked by Melissa's and by Giovanni's in Cape Town.

If you can find vine-ripened plum tomatoes (unlike the supermarket tomatoes I used here) use those. This is also good with sweet cherry tomatoes.

I don't think this salad needs anything else but a glass of crisp and very cold white wine. Definitely no rocket or garlic.


Hot Caprese Salad on Phyllo Pastry
6 sheets of phyllo pastry
a little melted butter or olive oil, or a mixture, for brushing
8 ripe tomatoes
500 g mozzarella (I used Simonsberg, which comes in a cylinder shape)
fresh, small basil leaves
olive oil
flaky sea salt and milled black pepper

Preheat the oven to 160° C. Using a pastry brush, brush the bottom and sides of a shallow baking tray with the butter or oil. Add a sheet of phyllo pastry, allowing the edges to drape over the rim of the tray. Use your fingers to press the pastry into the corners, and brush the sheet generously with butter. Continue layering and brushing the pastry sheets until you have used up all six. Gently press the pastry to squeeze any air pockets towards the edges. Cover with a damp tea towel. Using a razor-sharp knife, top and tail the tomatoes and slice thinly. Cut the mozzarella into thin slices (if you're using a cylinder-shaped piece of mozzarella, cut it in half lengthways first. Slice, then use your fingers to ease each slice back into a semi-circle (the cutting will have squashed it).

Set out layered stripes of the tomato, mozzarella and basil on the phyllo pastry base, as shown in the second photograph. Sprinkle with sea salt and a good grinding of milled black pepper, and sprinkle with olive oil. Bake at 160° C for 10 to 15 minutes, checking every five minutes to make sure that pastry isn't catching. Remove from the oven and cut into squares using a sharp knife or a circular pizza-cutting knife.

Serve immediately.

Serves 8-10 as a snack or starter; 6 as a main course.

Notes:

- Another way to serve this tart would be to bake the case for about 10 minutes, then arrange the uncooked ingredients on top. To prevent the pastry from puffing up too much in the oven, bake it blind: cover with a piece of greaseproof paper or tin foil and weigh down with lentils or beans for the first five minutes of cooking.

- You can use a pair of scissors to trim the edges of the pastry (or round the corners; see photo above) if they look too scruffy.
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Easter goodies: Chocolate, Amaretti and Coconut Fridge Biscuits

Fridge biscuits made with butter and crushed biccies were all the rage in the Seventies, when nobody cared how much sugar and fat they ate, and aunties always kept a stash of them in their humming old General Electrics. A cold, nubbly fridge biscuit with a glass of iced milk is a thing of beauty, not least because it requires no baking and is easy enough for a six-year-old to make. [Please note that I use the word 'biscuit' in its British sense: that is, in the US sense, a cookie.]

Unbaked fridge tarts are still popular in South Africa. Made with Marie biscuits, Tennis biscuits, ginger nuts or Boudoir Biscuits, they usually include condensed milk, whipped cream, grated chocolate, tinned fruit, or a combination of all four.

The undisputed queen of fridge tarts is the icky but strangely compelling Peppermint Crisp Tart, about which my fellow South African food blogger Jeanne of Cooksister has written a full treatise. For a selection of eat-until-you-turn-green fridge-tart recipes from around the world, have a look at this newsletter from Funky Munky.

You can use any combination of biscuits and nuts and flavourings for this recipe, provided you stick to the basic quantities (too little crumb material, and you'll end up with a biscuit that's too hard to bite into). You can also add raisins or dried cranberries or apricots, but I personally think fruit should have no part in this tart.

These biccies cry out to be served on a doily (see my note about doilies at the end of this post).

Chocolate, Amaretti and Coconut Fridge Biscuits

175 g butter
150 g good dark chocolate, broken into pieces
1 packet (200 g) of Tennis biscuits (or light, crumbly coconut biscuits)
14 Italian amaretti biscuits
1/2 cup (125 ml) desiccated coconut
1/2 cup (125 ml) icing sugar
3/4 cup (180 ml) nuts (I used walnuts, but pecans, macadamias or almonds will do)
a few drops of almond extract/essence, or a good glug of Amaretto liqueur

Melt the butter and the chocolate in a double boiler, stirring gently now and then. Or melt it in the microwave (find tips for melting chocolate at Godiva.com). Put the amaretti biscuits in a big plastic bag and, using a rolling pin, crush to a coarse powder. Now put the tennis biscuits in the packet and lightly crush them so that you have a mixture of crumbs and small bits. Tip the biscuits into the chocolate and butter mixture and add all the remaining ingredients. Stir well to combine. Press into a buttered 20cm x 20cm square glass or ceramic dish and refrigerate until firm; about two hours. Remove from the fridge and slice into squares (this is easiest done by cutting the whole slab into quarters, then slicing the quarters on a chopping board). Keep in the fridge.

Makes 12 biscuits.

PS Do you like my heart-shaped doilies ( see photo)? I bought a packet of these, and some gold ones, at a Chinese discount shop, knowing that a doily occasion was bound to arise sooner or later. This is exactly the sort of biscuit that requires a doily.

Do you know that doilies are dying out? An article in The Telegraph in 2007 reported that sales of paper doilies have plummeted in recent years:

'Once, no self-respecting cake stand or plate was complete without one.

'But now the traditional paper doily, for decades a symbol of suburban gentility, is on the verge of extinction.Asda reported yesterday that it sold only 400 packs last week, compared with an average of 12,000 a week 15 years ago.

'The terminal decline in demand is down to changing social trends, says the supermarket. Since the 1950s doilies have been regarded as a sign of high class and good manners.But many now view them as outdated and the preserve of snobs - as epitomised by Hyacinth Bucket in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances.' Print Friendly

Cauliflower with Butter, Lemon, Parsley and Crispy Breadcrumbs

"Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education." I think of Mark Twain's famous words every time I look at the curious 'brain' of a cauliflower, which I reckon is one of the world's most underrated vegetables, along with parsnips and celeriac.

Okay, I concede that overcooked, flabby cauliflower is just revolting - fartily whiffy, slimy, and stinking of boarding school - but a dishful of fresh, springy white cauliflower florets, cloaked in cheesy Béchamel sauce or a zinging salad dressing, or crunchily pickled with peppery spices, is just a joy.

I only ever make cauliflower cheese (or my cauliflower-cheese soup recipe) so I was interested to come across a recipe, in Robert Carrier's seminal seventies book Great Dishes of the World, for Cauliflower à la Polonaise. The combination of lemon juice and cauliflower had never occurred to me; but it works so well here, with plenty of butter, and crunchy fried breadcrumbs.

You can do this with a whole head of cauliflower, or you can break the cauliflower up into florets and coat them in the sauce. I took the picture above with a whole head, trying to be clever - like a cauliflower! - and then decided this was a ridiculous idea, as the sauce wouldn't be able to coat every chunk. I then broke the cooked head apart, tossed everything together, and served it up to the hordes.

Robert Carrier's original recipe calls for diced ham, but I don't think this dish needs it.

Cauliflower with Butter, Lemon, Parsley and Crispy Breadcrumbs

1 small, fresh head of cauliflower
1 tsp (5 ml) salt
a slice of lemon
2 extra-large free-range eggs
½ cup (125 ml) melted butter
4 Tbsp (60 ml) breadcrumbs (blitz a few slices of white bread in a food-processor)
the juice of 1 lemon
4 Tbsp (60 ml)  finely chopped fresh parsley
salt and milled black pepper

Fill a big saucepan with water, add the salt and the lemon slice, and bring to the boil. Remove the green outer leaves of the cauliflower and trim the stalk, and any brown bits.

Submerge the whole head of cauliflower in the boiling water and cook for 15-20 minutes, or until it's just tender and yields to a knife. (Cauliflower cooks beautifully in a microwave oven: see Cook's Notes at the end of this post.)

In the meantime, put the eggs on to boil. Fill a small saucepan with water and bring to the boil. Gently lower the eggs into the boiling water, and cook for 10 minutes. Take the pan off the heat, pour off the boiling water, and run cold water over the eggs until their shells feel cool to the touch. Crack and peel the eggs, chop them into a fine dice, cover with cling film and set aside.

Remove the head of cauliflower from the water and drain, upside down, in a colander over the sink.

Heat the butter in a frying pan. When it stops foaming, tip in the breadcrumbs and fry them for a few minutes, or until they turn golden brown and crunchy. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice, parsley and chopped boiled egg. Season well with salt and pepper.

Put the head of cauliflower into dish, and pour the buttery mixture over it. Or - if you're not looking for a cheffy result - break the cooked cauliflower into florets, place in a dish, and coat with the butter sauce.

Serve hot, with extra parsley.

Serves 4 as a side dish.Cook's Note:

To cook a whole cauliflower in the microwave oven, put it in a deep glass or ceramic dish and add half a cup of water. Cover with a plate or lid and microwave on high for about eight minutes. Push a sharp knife into the cauliflower to test for doneness. If it feels crunchy and unyielding, continue to cook it in two-minute bursts, or until it is just tender to a sharp knife. At this point, remove it from the microwave, douse it in cool water for a minute, and set it upside down in a colander to drain. Don't allow the cauliflower to sit in its steaming dish: it will turn into an overcooked mush. Print Friendly