Saturday, June 13, 2009

Cooking for Love: Rosemary Chicken


One of my favourite one-dish poultry meals is Rosemary Chicken which darling wife, Lynna, prepares with such tender loving care.

It is amusing to watch the way she so fastidiously massages the chicken - both inside and out. First, with 'PacificSalt' sea salt. Then with lemon, garlic and rosemary - but not necessarily in that order. Finally, she drenches the whole chicken very generously with extra virgin olive oil and leaves it to rest. The resting, I believe, is to allow time for absorbing all of the goodness and flavour of the marinade.

The chicken is stuffed with whole salted lemon and garlic bulbs before it is put into the oven, for a gruelling period of roasting. To avoid over-charring and dryness, she takes it out of the oven once every 30 minutes to baste it in its own juices and to add more extra virgin olive oil if needed.

At last, a combo of vegetables goes in the roasting pan - potatoes, pumpkins, corn, Japanese sweet potatoes, and capsicum of different colours.

The product of what might seem to be hours of hard work, is a poultry meal I can only describe as simply the best.

The finished product - simply the best!

Monday, June 01, 2009

Food for Thought: Yum Thai Cuisine

One of our favourite dining places in New York city is Yum Thai Cuisine on Times Square. It is a small take-out outfit with a little more than a dozen seats for in-house diners. It does get pretty crowded during peak hours when diners join the already long queue of people who are ordering take-outs. But the reason for the long queue is the fantastically authentic Thai dishes whipped up by the lone chef in the small galley-style kitchen. It is open-concept so you get to watch the chef at work.

Duck Salad
Rice with basil and pork
The pricing is also very reasonable with most main dishes costing less than US$10. Dining here will definitely not burn a hole in your pockets. But the real reason why we ate here at least four times during our month-long stay in NYC, was because the food was so good and we enjoyed it so much.

Seafood noodle soup
Thai-style fried rice
Thai fish cake
Some of our favourite dishes include the seafood noodle, rice with basil and pork, Thai-style fried rice, duck salad and deep-fried fish cakes. They were all good - much better than what we have eaten at some other more upscale and expensive Thai restaurants in NYC.

Eating at this hole-in-the-wall eatery made us feel like we were actually in Bangkok.

Yum Thai Cuisine
West 44th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenue)

Ambiance: 3
Service: 6
Food: 7.5
Pricing: $-$$
Recommended dishes: Thai-style Fried Rice; Duck Salad; Deep-fried Fish Cakes; Rice with Pork and Basil; Seafood Noodles