Roast chicken lawar
Whenever I’ve invited people over for dinner and then find I have ended up with almost no time to cook, I tend to fall back on an old favourite in this house – roast chook.
This happened on Tuesday evening. I’d invited six pals around, having forgotten that the plasterer was coming to fix the many cracks in our 120-year-old house. Which meant spending Monday getting allll the furniture and paintings and whatnot out of allll the rooms (except the kitchen, thankfully) while they did their thing – and then on Tuesday ridding the entire house (including kitchen!) of its fresh coating of plaster dust, and hauling all the stuff back into place. All while noticing along the way that my generally sluttish housewifery meant all our belongings were in fact covered with their own rich patina of dust and grime, so all that had to be cleaned as well. Lordy.
Despite the house looking like the above at 10am, we managed to get everything back to order by six o’clock and dinner was had and all was lovely (especially including Senor’s chocolate pots au creme from Neil Perry via our friend F! Divine).
Anyhoo, as I erred on the side of too much food and roasted two chooks for eight people, this meant two roasted chook breasts waiting to be used in the fridge the next day.
What to do with leftover roast chook? Normally I just pick at it for lunches and whatnot, but this time wanted to try something different.
My brainwave was to revisit my lawar love affair of this time last year, following our beautiful holiday in Bali. And now I reckon this must be one of the most delicious and easy ways to use leftover chicken – because you can make a whole meal from it even if you only have a tiny bit of chook. We had lots, but if you didn’t all you would need to do is just increase the beans or other veg quantities and away you’d go. We’re thinking it might be very nice with beans and cashews or tofu cubes, actually …
Once again I used this SBS Food recipe as the starting point, but this time I doubled the paste quantity so I could keep some of that fab stuff in the freezer. I also added a whole bunch of coriander to the paste, and used one small red birdseye chilli instead of two big ones. As before, I dry-fried half a cupful of shredded coconut till brown.
Rather than going the trad mortar-and-pestle route, I whizzed the paste up in the food processor because I prefer pastes with lemongrass in them to be very smooth. Also I am bone idle as you know and can’t be bothered with all that pounding.
So, into the whizzer went the paste ingredients:
- 1 birdseye chilli
- 12 cloves garlic
- a sizable knob of ginger (about 5cm lump)
- ditto of fresh peeled galangal
- a little finger of fresh turmeric
- roots & leaves of 1 bunch coriander
- 6 candlenuts
- 4 roughly chopped lime leaves
- 12 eschallots
- 1 chopped stalk lemongrass
- a couple of teaspoons of shrimp paste
- 2 tablespoons black peppercorns (ground)
- 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
- juice 1 lime
- juice ½ lemon
- 2 teaspoons brown sugar
- salt to taste
- a few lugs of olive oil (vegetable oil if you wish to be more authentic)
After whizzing for a few minutes, it ended up as a very aromatic yellowish paste.
Next step was to fry off about four tablespoons of this – use as much or as little as you like, but it’s so delicious I say don’t skimp on the amount. I fried it for about six minutes, stirring now and then to stop it sticking, over a medium heat.
While that was going on I shredded the chicken breast meat and set it aside. The real recipe uses poached chicken mince, and you then use the chicken water to cook the beans in. But I just blanched the beans – about 2 cups of green beans, cut into 3cm lengths – in boiling salted water for a little over a minute.
Once the beans were just crisp and refreshed in cold water, I added them to the chicken with about ½ a cupful of thinly sliced red capsicum and the previously browned coconut.
Then I added the lawar paste and combined very thoroughly until all the chicken, beans and capsicum were well coated in the mix. At the end I added the roughly chopped coriander leaves and about a tablespoon of chopped mint, and served this with a wedge of lime on each plate for squeezing. You could serve it with rice, but the paste is so deliciously rich and thick we just ate it in a bowl on its own.
All in all, it was a damn fine dinner. And it might have been extra good because of the satisfaction quotient involved in transforming quite ordinary leftovers into something much more special, which always feels a bit magical to me.
What about you – any good kitchen transubstantiation going on at your place lately?
I love how the best meals so often come about through serendipity. Last night’s was like that for us, prompted by a gift from my friend Tigs last week (delivered along with a fresh batch of 
First step was to crack those babies – our bowl of nuts yielded about 50g of hazelnuts. I think I used about 30g in the dish and saved the rest – shelling nuts always makes me appreciate how relatively cheap it is to buy shelled nuts, because with hard nuts like these it’s a bit of a palaver. Once I got into the rhythm of it with our nutcracker – also known as The Big Red Pliers – however, it only took about five minutes. Collecting all the sharp little bits of shell out of the stove fittings, off the floor, the kitchen shelves and so on took a little longer. They were very nice raw, even with the slightly bitter skins on, but toasted in the oven for ten minutes and with most of the skins rubbed away they were really good – crunchier, and with the unique, slightly sweet flavour that hazels have.
A dressing of chives, lemon juice, a single finely chopped garlic clove, olive oil and the surprise star ingredient of apple cider vinegar made this a really delicious side dish.
How to shuck an oyster 