Cooking meat with a sauce from fruits is not familiar in Vietnamese cooking. That’s why I am always eager to try Western dishes served with this kind of sauce. They are often new experiences to me: cooking fruits in savory dishes. 

When watching Western cooking shows, my fiance is often impressed by the different levels of doneness, especially when it comes to meats. In Vietnamese food, we hardly cook the meat till rare or medium rare but often cook well-done. Seeing a large piece of lamb rack or beef fillet mignon cooked until rare or medium-rare, with the red juice comes out from the very tender inner meat, he always wishes to really try a perfect piece of that meat one day. 

When I cooked this duck breast, the result was as he expected. Following the cooking time suggested, the duck breast was just medium, nearly well-done. When I sliced the duck fillet, a pale pink juice came out of the meat. For the first time, my fiance admitted that this was the most tender piece of duck breast he had been eaten so far. He really liked having this tender meat with orange sauce as well. When I can afford to buy beef and lamb, I definitely try cooking the meat at different doneness for him to try. 

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I am still feeling afraid each time I hear of curry. One of the most typical flavors and tastes of these tandoori chicken is curry. But tandoori chicken is so popular that I was very curious to know how the taste would be like. Since I never dare eat any curried-foods in Singapore for their very strong smells and tastes, but I am willing to cook at home so that I can at least control the amount of spicy ingredients I need to put into the food. For this chicken in particular, because of yogurt is used in the marinating sauce, I felt relieved with the thought that yogurt would make the curry milder.

This tandoori chicken needs to be marinated for a long time, even overnight. So I needed to prepare the chicken on the previous day. It is not troublesome at all because it took just a few minutes to prepare all the ingredients before chilling everything in the fridge. The next day we only need to heat the oven and bake the chicken. 

The curry taste was still very obvious in this chicken, but it is much milder. The chicken was very tender and moist. The recipe uses whole chicken legs, but I had only chicken thighs, so again I cooked with chicken thighs only. 

Ingredients: 

- 4 chicken legs

- 125g natural yogurt, stirred until smooth

- 1 garlic clove, minced

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 1 1/2 tsp paprika

- 1/2 tsp curry powder 

- 1/2 tsp cinnamon powder

- 1/8 tsp cayenne powder

- 1/8 tsp cloves

- white sesame seeds, as needed

Cooking:

- Rinse the chicken well and pat dry with kitchen papers. 

- Combine all the other ingredients except for the sesame seeds. Add the chicken to the marinating mixture, soak well to coat the chicken evenly. Cover and place the chicken in the fridge to marinate for at least 2 hours or over night. 

- Preheat the oven to 350F (180C) for fan oven / or 300F (200C) for convention oven. 

- Place the chicken on baking pan and bake for about 45 minutes. About 15 minutes before the chicken is done, sprinkle the sesame seeds over the chicken. 

This is another recipe with chicken legs from my German cookbook – a gift from my friend. Though the recipe calls for whole chicken legs, I only had the frozen chicken thighs in my freezer. But it’s still okay, just a small difference in presentation. 

These roasted chicken legs are very simple to make. Although it is not necessary to marinate the chicken for long hours, I still prefer to let the chicken in marinating mixture for some time. Still, if you don’t have time, you can go ahead with roasting the chicken right after you finish rubbing them with the mixture. 

Ingredients: (serves 4)

- 4 chicken legs (about 250g/ piece) 

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 1/4 tsp ground pepper

- 1 tsp paprika

- 1 tbs vegetable or sunflower oil

Cooking:

- For fan oven, preheat to 350F (180C). Without-fan oven, preheat to 400F (200C). 

- Wash the chicken legs and pat dry with kitchen towels. 

- Mix salt, pepper, paprika and oil. Rub the chicken legs evenly with this mixture. You can let to marinate for up to 2 hours. 

- Place the chicken on the roasting tin and insert to the centre of the oven. Bake for about 45 minutes.  

My high-school classmate, who is studying in Germany, visited me with a present – a cookbook of German cuisine. I was so excited with this book. I like books, and cookbooks are always what I wish to have more and more. 

Having spent several months in Germany, I didn’t have many chances to try German food. So with this book in my hands, I feel so free to start my adventure into this cuisine. I browsed the book to get the most easily applicable recipes. And I stopped at the poultry chapter with four different baked chicken recipes. All are easy to follow. But I firstly was attracted by this baked chicken with herbs, simply because I like herbs a lot. Herbs and spices play an important part in most of my cooking. So I decided to try making this baked chicken first. 

I didn’t have the whole chicken legs in my freezer, I only had the thighs. So I went ahead with these. The crispy skin was wonderful with breadcrumbs mixed with herbs, which were very flavorful. I only regretted that I could use dried herbs only. There was no way I could get fresh herbs here. After baking, the excess fat from the chicken ran out onto the baking dish, so the chicken became less fat, which made me very happy too. 

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