Last week's rundown: beef roast, sesame chicken and yakitori

French Dip Roast Beef

This is the first crockpot recipe I have tried for a long time. The ones I made before have been improvised and always seemed to turn out with an excess of liquid, so I was glad to have a recipe to work off this time.

It was really easy - just put some chuck steak in the slow cooker with some soy sauce, a beef stock cube and some dried herbs and cook on low for 7-8 hours.

We had it with some soft bread rolls. I thought the soy sauce flavour was this was a bit strong. I would have preferred a bit more of a subtle flavour. Next time I might halve the soy and make up the liquid with beef stock. The boys liked it, though.

Imperial Chinese Sesame Chicken

My goodness. This recipe (well, my making of it) made the worst mess of my kitchen. It was crazy! It also took a long time to cook. Luckily, it turned out really good, tasted great and everyone loved it.

Firstly, you needed to brine the chicken strips in salty water for about 15. Then, add 5 tablespoons of cornflour and mix well. You then fry the cornfloury brined chicken strips until the outside goes crispy. Now, I don't know what I did or didn't do, but I didn't get anything even remotely resembling a crispy skin, and I left the chicken in there for longer than I was really comfortable with. I did get some crispiness from the bits that stuck the bottom of the pan, but that wasn't until after the 6 or so batches of chicken had been in and out of the oil, so maybe my oil wasn't hot enough?

The sauce was really really good. It was very yummy and had a fantastic flavour and I'm going to be making it again, and probably often. I would only make the sauce again though - I would cook the chicken normally (i.e not fry it) next time. The author recommends doubling the sauce, and I completely agree.

Yakitori


These were really easy to make. It was my first time making kebabs though, and my cubes were unfortunately not consistent in size, so it made it a little bit difficult to cook at first. I solved this by not very delicately smooshing them down so they were all touching the grill. I used our George Foreman-esque (it's just a cheap version) grill to cook them, but found it would only fit three at at time (the recipe made 8). I wasn't really enthused about cooking them in batches, so I threw the remaining 6 into a frypan. When it came time to baste, the sauce of course stayed in the bottom of the frypan and made just a bit less authentic.

They turned out well though, even though they were more braised then grilled, and the bottom of the skewers became all sticky, so I removed the meat etc before serving.