Griddled Lemon Sole with Lemony Couscous

Doesn't this dish sound very familiar?

It most definitely does! Remember my previous post?

It was the Griddled Chicken with Lemony Couscous!

I like the dish so much so that I tried to make a twist to the original recipe by swapping the chicken with lemon sole and adding some extras to the dish!

Lemony Couscous

I really liked the lemony couscous cooked in chicken stock and mixed with toasted pine nuts, lemon juice and chopped fresh parsley. A lovely accompaniment to the lemony lemon sole!

Lemon Sole

Side-view

I bought some lovely white and black skinned lemon sole from the supermarket. After seasoning with salt and pepper, I griddle-pan-fried the lemon sole fillets in butter and olive oil.

Just a few minutes on each side and the lemon sole was ready to be plated on a bed of lemony couscous. Garnished with some lovely, fragrant, chopped up flat-leaf parsley and served with a couple of lemon wedges where lemon juice can be squeezed onto the fish just seconds before eating - hhhmmmmmm.....simply delicious!

With green beans, bacon and cherry tomatoes

On the side, I also blanched some green beans and topped them with crispy bacon pieces sauteed with butter and olive oil. The seasoned cherry tomatoes roasted in the oven were really juicy and oozed out the wonderful, vitamin C-rich, tomato juices with each bite.

Another lovely dinner done in under 30 minutes! Happy days!

@Nandos

To bid farewell to one of our colleagues, my staff and I organised a farewell do at a bowling centre.

But before we commenced on the energy-using activity, we had to feed ourselves and decided to do so @Nandos.

Their specialty is "flame-grilled PERi-PERi chicken" with different levels of spiciness.

Restaurant Napkin

Lemon&Herb Chicken

The really mild - not spicy at all- flame grilled whole chicken served with coleslaw and peri-peri salted chips. Lovely charcoal flavoured chicken with citrusy lemon and herbs taste to it. A rather refreshing coleslaw and chips filled with carbohydrate and starch - just nice for two.

With mushy peas and chips

Different Sauces

One outstanding feature in this restaurant is the many different sauces available to choose from! I literally mean MANY! There were about 10 different sauces from mild to very spicy to super duper hot and spicy, they also have garlic peri-peri sauce, wild herbs peri-peri sauce, creamy salad dressing and many more, we were just spoiled for choice!

Table No. and Salt Shaker

The best of all was the dessert, yep, the dessert. Almost all of us ordered the Mango & Passionfruit Cheesecake served with clotted cream. A very refreshing and lightly sweet cheesecake, flavoured with citrusy and sweet mango perfectly combined with passionfruit! The rich and creamy clotted cream just completed the dessert dish - lovely!

Mango & Passionfruit Cheesecake with clotted cream

A delightful and relaxing evening @Nandos!

Seafood - Chinese Style!

My housemate is on a 'special chinese dish' cooking spree again!

This time we had the -

糖醋魚 Sweet and sour fish

and

橙花鲜蟹肉 Orange stuffed with crab meat

Tilapia

Few weeks ago, I was shopping in Tesco in the daytime (for a change) and the fresh fish stall was still open! So I headed straight to the stall and had a look at what fish was on offer. I was very delighted to see some fresh Tilapias, bought two and went home to freeze it until one of us decided how to cook it.

Not long later, we invited a friend over for dinner and my housemate decided to cook her famous sweet & sour fish dish using the Tilapia.

Sweet & Sour Tilapia by AT

A very appetizing looking dish which emitted a very wonderful fragrance, we just could not wait to dig in!

'Head' view

Deep fried Tilapia with sweet and sour sauce poured on it and garnished with fried and caramelised onions. A very delicious sweet and sourly taste, where the sourness is not the same as that you can find in the usual sickly sweet and sour chicken dish, the sourness was more of a chinese black vinegar type taste and the sweetness was not overwhelmingly sweet.

All I can say is 'HHHhhhhmmmmmm.....' a very delicious fish through and through!



The next dish was the steamed orange stuffed with orange and crabmeat, where the ingredients were cooked inside a whole orange! It was one of the recipes found in a cookbook I borrowed from Cardiff library.

We have not been to the newly built library since it opened few years ago, and when I went there for the very first time I was very impressed with the beauty of the architecture and the completeness of its collection. What more can I say when they even stock chinese cookbooks written in Mandarin!?

Orange

Orange and Crabmeat inside

Stuffed Orange by AT

We have heard of and actually eaten some dishes where fruit and seafood was put in the same plate but we were not sure what this dish would taste like with the combination of crab and orange?! Surprisingly though, it was amazingly delicious and tasty!

The acidity of the orange just cuts through the sweetness of the crab meat and the whole dish was very tasty. A very unique dish indeed!


I am definitely looking forward to more seafood dishes!

A Greek Experience

Thanks to Groupon, we got to enjoy a Greek meal for a really good price - £16 for £40 worth of food.

Aegean Restaurant, Cardiff.

We have not been back to this restaurant since it moved from Woodville Road and were really looking forward to the newly re-launched restaurant. Hence, we jumped at the opportunity of dining at this restaurant as soon as we saw a good deal on Groupon!

Menu

Menu

The restaurant looked much more lively and opened with a very Greek deco of blue and white.

Interior

We were really excited and very hungry therefore looking forward to order what we had in this restaurant many years ago.

After waiting and waiting for at least 20 minutes, nobody even came over to take our drinks order. Eventually I had to flag down one of the waitresses to indicate that we were ready to place our order.

Not a very good first impression, but we were quite impressed by the speediness of our starters being served.

Dolmades

I had Dolmades - rice and herbs stuffed vine leaves- very authentic Greek food which I had before in Greek Cyprus. Very nice with a squeeze of lemon juice and dipped into some herbed Greek yoghurt. I was happy with the starter.

However, we were again greeted with disappointment when after finishing our starters for at least 15 minutes, no one came to clear the table and another 10 minutes elapsed before we were served our main courses!

You can imagine how hungry we were then and looking forward to really good food having to wait so long.

Lamb Souvlaki

Our main courses finally arrived! I ordered another very authentic Greek dish - House Special Lamb Souvlaki, served with rice and potato chips.

The grilled pieces of lamb were very tasty and well marinated with a chargrilled flavour but was a bit too dry for my liking as it was possibly cooked for a tad too long.

Fresh Xifias

My friend had the Fresh Xifias - Swordfish fillet grilled with balsamic vinegar, honey and olive oil, served with vegetables and white wine cream sauce. The swordfish has a texture and taste of chicken and the sauce was really nice and tasty.


In conclusion, quite an average experience with OK food and a very long wait! Well, at least we paid a very good price for it.

Griddled Chicken with Lemony Couscous

Looking for a very easy and quick dish to cook, I found a recipe in deliciousmagazine UK. This recipe was another one of the six best chicken dishes from the magazine.

A very simple recipe to follow and quick to cook. The recipe claims that it would only take 10 minutes from start to finish to make. Not quite true, but 20 minutes, in reality, to cook a meal is considered rather fast for me.

Ingredients

Griddled chicken

A very very easy dish to make! First, I beat the chicken breasts with a rolling pin until flat, then seasoned with salt and pepper before frying on a griddle pan. When the chicken is almost cooked, I added some chopped parsley to add flavour.

The cous cous is even easier to make. Cous cous was mixed with hot chicken stock and set aside for 10-15 minutes. After 10-15 minutes I added olive oil, lemon juice, toasted pine nuts and chopped parsley to the cous cous then season with salt and pepper.

Lemony Couscous and blanched green beans

20 minutes later, we get a very pretty looking dish which smells really nice. With a squeeze of lemon juice over the chicken, we were ready to tuck in to dinner. The chicken breasts was nice and tender from the beating before being cooked. The chicken also had nice chargrilled taste and the lemon juice just enhanced the flavours of the meat.

The lemony couscous was also very delicious and had many different textures and flavours from the different ingredients. A perfect match for the chicken!

Yummy! This shows that you can still have a nice and healthy meal even when you are very busy!

Cardiff Food Festival

I have recently been to the London Taste Festival in June, and in July, I went to Cardiff's very own food festival in Cardiff Bay. I have not been to this event for several years and decided to go this year to have a look how it has changed.

It was a very sunny Sunday - perfect weather for a big event like this!

Free entry into the event, lots and lots and lots of people, live band show...it was quite a well organized event! With more stores than the last time I went there and much better food stalls!

Mermaid Quay

Rum&raisin brownies

Lovely looking brownies which tasted equally tasty.

A walking chick in eggshell!

Cakes and puddings!

Lovely display of desserts, cakes and puddings in the glass cabinet was really tempting!

Curry and chick pea

Black Steak Burger

HHHmmmmm.....delicious black steak burger by award winning Graig Farm, topped with onions, mayonnaise and tomato sauce..yummy!

Duck burger

Duck burger, exactly like that one I had at the Riverside Farmer's Market....because it was the same stall! Simply delicious!

 I have never seen so many people in Cardiff Bay!

Fig and Masala Ice cream

A wonderful day out on a lovely day.

Maple-glazed Roast Chicken

Summertime, well...a rainy summer season, I came across this summery roast chicken recipe in the deliciousmagazine.

I have not been updating this blog for many weeks due to a very busy schedule but that has not stopped me from having nice food!

The dish that I made a couple of weeks ago is one of the six best chicken dishes according to the magazine - Maple-glazed roast chicken served with roasted leeks and carrots.

 

Ingredients

A roast chicken recipe with minimal ingredients but fundamentally flavourful and very matching mixture of seasonings.

Seasoned Whole Chicken

A whole chicken was cleaned then seasoned with salt and pepper, also two tablespoonfuls of red wine vinegar was poured into the chicken cavity before being put into the oven to roast for an hour.

Maple-glazed roast chicken

The end product was a shiny and tasty looking roast chicken. To get the shiny look, after roasting for an hour, the chicken was brushed with a mixture of red wine vinegar, cinnammon, maple syrup and sesame seed then roasted for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, the chicken was brushed again with the same mixture and returned to the oven for a further 10 minutes. The end result is....ta~da~ a very shiny and juicy looking maple-glazed chicken!

with Roasted leeks and carrots

The chicken was rested for about 5 minutes before being cut into smaller pieces for serving. As I cut into the chicken, lovely, fragrant juice was oozing out which showed how juicy the roast chicken was.

Resting chicken

Served up

Pieces of maple-glazed roast chicken served with roasted leeks and carrots. The fragrance was nicely over-whelming. The chicken tasted a bag full of flavours from the spicy cinnammon, sweetness of the maple syrup and fragrance of the sesame seeds. The sweet carrots and onion flavoured leeks just complemented the chicken dish very well. A simply delicious roast dinner!