Honey Soy Chicken Wraps

There's been a hint of summer in the air these last couple of weeks, even if it just turned cold again a few days ago.

Such warm tidings get me thinking about crisp salads and food I can take out onto the deck to enjoy in the sun. It might not be quite that way yet, but it's not far off. I'll be blogging stews and casseroles for a week or two to come, but this incarnation of classic honey-soy chicken counts as one of my personal successes.

I've tried time and again to make a good honey-soy mix that I can whip up in the frying pan, only to have the honey burn and ruin everything.

Finally, after much banging of my head against the bench, I had the brilliant thought: Add the honey right at the end.

Ping!

The most obvious solutions are often the most easily overlooked.

Since making this for these wraps, this recipe has come out again and again to make stirfries, applying the same technique, and it has worked every time.

Dip your brush and paint me proud.

Honey Soy Chicken (For Wraps, Stir-fries, etc)

(Serves 2)

Ingredients
1 Fresh Chicken Breast, diced into 1cm pcs;
Freshly Ground Pepper and Salt
1T Balsamic Vinegar
1 dsp Potato Flour
2 Garlic Cloves, Minced
Olive Oil or Rice Bran Oil, for frying
1/2 Red Onion, finely chopped
2T Honey
2T Soy

Heat the oil in a pan. Season the chicken with the salt and pepper, and toss in the vinegar and potato flour. (Normal flour probably works fine, too; I've found the lighter texture of potato flour prevents it from clumping and is a bit less thick and gluggy. Using potato flour won't make this recipe Gluten-Free unless you also have Gluten-Free Soy Sauce, which most commercial brands are not.)

Add the chicken to the pan and brown all over. Add the onion and soften.

Place the Soy Sauce and honey in a microwave-proof dish and heat in the microwave for about 45 seconds (1200w microwave). Remove and mix well.

When the chicken is cooked, add the honey-soy mixture to the pan, mix through, bring to a brief simmer and serve.
We spooned ours into tortilla wraps, with grated carrot, salad greens, beetroot, peppers, cheese, sour cream, and fresh sliced tomatoes. We could almost convince ourselves it was summer already by the looks of them.

Bean Wrappin'

This week is slipping me by, and it's like I've forgotten that I've got a blog to write. D'oh! I'll make my excuses later. Right now, I want to remind you that we do make an effort to cook vegetarian meals, just like I promised I would some time ago.

The fact is, the vego meals I've been cooking don't tend to be very interesting. This, I'm sure, is my fault, not the fault of the food. I was raised eating meat.

I'm not trying to break that habit. We're just trying to do different things.

Eating less meat is better for the environment and our health no matter how you look at it, so the vegetarian options really do matter. They haven't seen their fair share of airtime on this blog however, so today I will remedy that.

Beans are a brilliant substitute for meat. Packed with protein, fibre, and all sorts of vitamins and minerals, they're a one-stop shop for kicking off a vegetarian meal.
Just swap out a serving of Beef Mince (Ground Beef) for mild chilli beans, heated and spread over a third of a tortilla wrap. Season liberally with salsa and chopped salad - tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, cheese, capsicum, grated carrot, whatever - and dress the wrap with sour cream and your sauce of choice.
Just like that, Bean Wraps. Quick, easy, healthy, all those buzz words that make you feel righteous in your eating choices.

Not recommended if you work in confined spaces with other people, mind you.

That's a Wrap

Well, 8.30pm came and went, and the world did not end. As a mad sci-fi fan, I had sort of hoped in a dark and violent way that turning on the Particle Accelerator thingy at CERN might have in fact created a black hole and sucked the whole planet up, just to prove to those ever-so-sensible scientists that sometimes the crazy sci-fi writers can get it right. But they didn't. Oh well. Thankfully, courtesy of Morgue, we can all be kept fully up to date on these developments. If you're at all worried about whether or not the world has been consumed by a greedy man-made black hole, just check this link.

Or take a look out the window. If you still have a window, then its probably OK.

So, even though it would seem that our planet is not on the verge of calling "it's a wrap", that's exactly what I'm going to do. Still playing catch-up from dinners a week or so ago, here's a quick and healthy favourite from our chemical fusion chamber (read: kitchen) to yours.

Easy Mince Wraps

Couldn't be easier. In a pan, fry up a chopped onion and a few sliced garlic cloves, then add about 400g of mince (ground beef, for my growing audience across the Pacific). Brown the mince and add some soy sauce, freshly ground salt and pepper, about 3T of tomato sauce (ketchup), and cook until the mince holds together.

Meanwhile, grate a carrot, some cheese, dice a couple of tomatoes, and finely slice some capsicum (peppers).
Warm a couple of wraps in the microwave (20s on medium - you don't want them to get hot or they'll fall apart) and lay each on a plate. Spread about 1/3 of each wrap with sour cream and chilli sauce, or tomato sauce, or aioli, or chutney, or whatever you like. Spoon the mince onto the sour cream and spread your salad on top. Fold up the bottom section and bring the sides over to form a nice burrito shape. Eat immediately.
Another option which we have really enjoyed is to slow-cook a chicken and shred the meat instead of cooking mince (that's for you, Patrice). Give it a try, you crock-pot fiends out there.

Making the Most of the Roast

Sunday was Roast Lamb Day again, having found another lovely joint for $12.00 at the supermarket. It replaced Roast Chicken on the menu, but that all worked out.

Without labouring the point, Sunday's lamb was much the same as last weekend's Lemon-Tossed Lamb Roast, with a few changes.

I tossed the Lamb with lemon and lime zest, salt and pepper and 2T of honey. Otherwise it was much the same. It came out crispy on the outside and succulent on the inside, and it went down awfully well. Uncle K, who was treated to the now infamous Sugar-Free Stew a few weeks ago, joined us for Sunday Roast and it was good.

What I really want to cover is what we did with the Leftovers.

In our menu we had planned on getting two nights' meals out of the roast, like we usually do with a chicken. For Monday night we picked up a packet of roti breads so we could have...

Roast Lamb and Vege Wraps

Chop up the leftover lamb and roast veges into roughly 1cm cubes and fry quickly in a hot pan. Butter the Rotis very lightly and fry quickly in another hot pan.
In a third pan, fry a hunk of cabbage, some sliced garlic and a sliced courgette in some butter.

Lay the hot roti on a plate and dish a spoonful of the Lamb and Vege into the top quarter of the roti, followed by a spoonful of cabbage and courgette. Fold up the bottom, then each side, and press down. Dish up a pile of fresh steamed veges, sit down on the couch and enjoy. Of course, sauces are an option too. Normally I would go with an aioli or sweet chilli sauce, but since everything was so moist anyway I just went naked, which was superb.



It was quick and easy, and what's even better is that by the time we'd dished up enough for the two of us, there was still enough for another meal of the same. So one lamb roast for $12.00 ended up making 7 adult servings, for an average cost of less than $2.00 per person. That's what we like.

Next post: Will my attempts to make a pizza sauce meet with success or failure?