Japanese Chinese-style fried chicken

This recipe is from Buzzfeed Japan's video, on youtube here. It is fantastically good and unlike a lot of their other yummy recipes does not involve deep frying. I've written it down so that I don't have to go to their video and play and pause it repeatedly every single time I want to make this! I only have access to bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs so I learned how to debone them from here.

Ingredients

Chicken Marinade:

• 8 Skin-on, boneless chicken thighs
• 4 tsp Minced ginger
• 4 tsp Minced Garlic
• 3 tsp salt
• 8 tbsp rice wine vinegar or Sake

Sauce:

• 8 tbsp light soy sauce
• 8 tbsp vinegar (I've used everything from rice wine to apple cider)
• 4 tbsp sesame oil
• 4 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp minced ginger
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 4-5 scallions, finely diced
• 2-3 red peppers finely sliced

Potato flour
Frying oil

Method

1. Debone the chicken and cut off excess skin and fat. Cut small gashes through the skin and meat.
2. Marinate the chicken with the other ingredients under marinade for ~30 minutes. I marinate covered in the fridge if its going to be longer
3. Mix the ingredients under sauce together to make the sauce
4. Coat the chicken thighs in potato flour. 
5. Add a couple of table spoons oil to a frying pan and heat.
6.  Fry the thighs on medium heat, first skin side down for 5-7 minutes and then flip for 5-7 minutes.
7. Cut into slices and serve on rice with the sauce on the side or on top.

Karnataka-style slow cooker pork curry

This recipe is inspired by this recipe. I wanted a genuine, spicy indian pork curry that I could make in the slow cooker. This recipe worked really well! I've made it twice now, once with picnic bog and once with Karre and the karre worked much better. These are both swedish cuts of pork. If you're in the states, boston butt or any pork shoulder cut with adequate fat that works in the slow cooker should work. My variation uses only one pan for the initial step.

Ingredients:

Spice Blend:

• 3 teaspoons cumin seeds
• 3 teaspoons coriander seeds (or two teaspoons coriander powder)
• 6 cloves
• 2" cinnamon stick
• 2 teaspoon fennel seeds
• 20 black peppercorns
• 2tsp brown mustard seeds

Curry: 

• 2" peeled and roughly chopped root ginger
• 10 garlic cloves
• 2 tomatoes, quartered
• cooking oil
• 1 tsp brown mustard seeds
• 2 sprigs curry leaves
• 4 onions, finely chopped
• 3 green chillies, stalks removed, pierced with a knife
• 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
• 2 dried red chillis
• salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 1 teaspoon kashmiri chilli powder, (optional)
• 1-1.5kg pork shoulder, cut into cubes, with some fat
• 0.5 cup vinegar (I've used both apple cider and white, no real preference)
• 1 can coconut milk

Method:

1. Cut the pork into large chunks and salt and pepper the meat.
2. Fry the pork chunks for about 6-7 minutes on each side on medium heat
3. Turn off the heat. In the remaining hot oil, add all the spices under spice blend. After about 5 minutes, scrape the spices into the spice blender and blend. Add vinegar to make the spice blend liquid.
4. Turn the heat back on. Add mustard seeds to the hot oil and when it sputters, add dried red chillis and then the curry leaves. Fry for a few minutes
5. Add the onions and fry until well browned. 
6. Now add in the kashmiri red chilli powder and fry for a minute or two and then add in the spice mix. 
7. In the spice blender throw in the ginger, tomatoes, garlic and red chillis and blend
8. Toss the blended mix into the curry as well
9. Fry this on medium-high heat until the mix begins to thicken and release oil
10. Add this masala and the pork pieces to the slow cooker 
11. Cook on high for 3-4 hours. Test at 2 hours for doneness. 
12. When done, add the can of coconut milk and let the curry cook in the slow cooker without a lid for about 30 minutes.

Slow cooker lamb Rogan Josh

Our grocery store had a sale on lamb and so I picked up a 1.6kg (3.5lb) chunk and didn't know what to do with it. My problem with lamb is that it can taste overwhelmingly of...lamb? wool? Not sure. It doesn't always taste strongly but when it does I'm not a huge fan. So, I decided to go with strong spices and the slow cooker. I combined two different recipes. Recipe 1 which did lots of things that sounded good and Recipe 2 which sounded really authentic. My combined recipe is below. It was super spicy, so I would reduce the number of dried red chillis when I make it again.

Ingredients

• 1.6kg boneless lamb leg, cut into large chunks
• 3 large potatoes (totally optional), cut into large chunks
• 1-2 red onions, chopped
• 1 cup Yogurt
• Vinegar
• Ginger chopped or paste
• Garlic chopped or paste

Masala 

• 1"-2" piece of cinnamon
• 5 whole green cardamom pods
• 3/4 teaspoon whole cloves
• 3/4 teaspoon whole fennel seeds
• 1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
• 5 dried red chillies
• 2 large or 3 small star anise
• 1 black cardamom pod
• 1 teaspoon paprika powder

Method

1. Grind together ingredients for the masala
2. Add the lamb chunks, the spice powder from above and salt to a bowl and shake around until the lamb chunks are coated well. This sat for about an hour and I guess it marinated, but that wasn't intentional. I was mostly chopping other stuff and being lazy.
3. Fry the onions and once they are caramelized, add ginger and garlic chopped or paste and fry for 5 minutes on a low to medium heat. I added about 5 cloves of finely chopped garlic and a tablespoon of ginger paste. The ginger paste was probably about 2" worth.
4. Add the lamb chunks and fry until some of the chunks get some surface. (This is to get some flavor out of the Mallaird reaction, but I wasn't thorough about browning all the lamb)
5. Splash in some vinegar. I had some red wine vinegar. I'm fairly sure the type of vinegar won't matter.
6. Add everything to the slow cooker and toss in the potato chunks and stir to coat and cook on high for 6 hours.
7. An hour before completion, stir in the Yogurt.

I think 5 or 5.5 hours would have been better, not because it dried out, at all, but because the pieces were almost too falling apart. I ate it over rice with Yogurt because I needed Yogurt to cut the heat of the chilies. It was hot and yummy and kept us warm during the snow.

Update October 2016: We have now also made this with pork shoulder as well and it tasted excellent. So either protein is fine to use with this recipe. 

Slow cooker Sichuan pork shoulder noodle soup

I saw this recipe and it looked awesome, so I just made it in the slow cooker. My recipe is adapted for my pantry and the slow cooker.
I used boston butt in mine (it was on sale), but I suspect it would work with other fattier, tougher cuts of pork as well.
It was very tasty and very spicy. If you're going to try this recipe and sichuanese food isn't your fave, I would cut wa-ay down on the chilli paste. My apartment smells like a chinese restaurant and it makes me really happy right now. Specially since its really cold and really grey and this is exactly what I would have wanted to go out for!
We cook a lot of chinese food so we already had toban jiang in the fridge, but its actually pretty commonly available at stores in the ethnic/asian section. If you have sambal olek that works really well too as a substitute, though I personally think sambal is a little spicier. We did not have black vinegar so I googled a substitute and balsamic+some other vinegar+sugar seems to do the trick. I also added a tablespoon of brown sugar instead of one of the tablespoons of white sugar. I have no idea if that helped. I first cooked it for 4 hours and the pork was very done, but not falling apart, so we let it go for another 45 minutes.
If I make this again, I would also dry roast and crush a few sichuan peppers and sprinkle them on the soup after it cooks.

Ingredients

2lbs pork shoulder-cut into 1" pieces
12 cloves garlic, chopped
3" fresh ginger piece, peeled and chopped
4 Tbsp Toban jiang
1/3 cup red vinegar+balsamic vinegar (or chinkiang)
4 Tbsp sugar
3 Tbsp soy sauce
3 Tbsp cornstarch
4 scallions

Method

1) Add a little oil to a pan and on high heat fry off the pork pieces. I waited till they were browned (5-6 minutes). Don't crowd the pan. I actually removed about a fourth of the pieces after they were seared and dumped them into the slow cooker and proceeded with the rest.
2) Toss in the ginger, garlic and chilli paste and toss the pork around to coat. Cook for about a minute, still at high heat.
3) Add in the soy sauce, vinegar and sugar and stir them around for 3-4 minutes until the sugar dissolves.
4) Add everything to the slow cooker along with 8 cups of water.
5) Cook on high for 4-6 hours.
6) Take out about half the liquid and boil it on the stove and add cornstarch dissolved in water until it thickens. Add it back to the rest of the soup.
6) Serve with noodles and chopped scallions.
7) If you prefer to remove some of the fat, let the soup cool either in the slow cooker or in the fridge and then skim off the fat from the top.

Mangalorean Fish Curry

aka Masli Kadi

This recipe is from a gorgeous cooking blog "Tiffin Box" written by (after making and eating this fish curry) what I imagine is a godess in the kitchen. Holy shit, this was good. 

I, as usual, made some changes and these are the only changes to the original recipe. The original recipe mentions a lot of different fish, we used fresh herring, this is quite close in flavor to the other fish originally used in this recipe, sardines and mackrel.

Ingredients 

For the curry paste:

• 2 tbsp coriander seeds (I used 2.5)
• 1 tbsp cumin seeds (I used 1.5)
• 1/2 tsp whole peppercorns (I used 3/4 ish)
• 1/4 tsp fenugreek seeds (I used 1/2 ish)
• 4 long red mild dried chillies (I used 6)
• 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
• 1/2 roughly chopped onion
• 2 flakes peeled garlic (I used 4)
• 1 tsp tamarind paste
• About 50g coconut cream (use the hard packed version, if possible) otherwise, 75 ml liquid coconut cream (We did not have coconut cream, just coconut milk, and I used about a third of the can (400ml can) to grind everything up using the coffee grinder on our food processor.)

For the curry:

• Er...original recipe skipped the fish, we used herring, about half a kilo
• 1/2 onion diced (I used 1.5)
• 1/2 inch piece of ginger, chopped finely (I used 1")
• 2 flakes of garlic, chopped finely (I used garlic paste, 1.5tsp)
• 1 green chilly, slit lengthwise
• Salt to taste (or 1 and 1/2 tsp)

To season:

• 1 tbsp vegetable oil (I used 4 tbsp)
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• 2 sprigs curry leaves (about 10 in total)

Recipe

1. For the curry paste, toast the coriander seeds, cumin seeds, peppercorns, fenugreek seeds and red chillies for about a minute and a half on a hot pan. Put into a blender with the turmeric, onion, garlic, tamarind and coconut milk and blend to a paste.
2. In a pan, add some oil and add the ginger, chilli, garlic paste and onion (about 1 minute between each addition). Pour the ground curry paste into the pan, stir and add more water if required to get a smooth curry. I added the rest of the can of coconut milk and about a cup and a half of water. Season. Let the curry simmer for about 25 minutes. The colour changed and the curry became a browner color than the original yellow. Taste and adjust the seasoning, by adding more salt and/or tamarind paste. I added, all told, about a teaspoon and a half of salt, a dash of red-wine vinegar and about a heaped teaspoon of tamarind paste. 
3. Put the fish into the curry and poach until just cooked (about 6 minutes on a low poach).
4. Temper the curry now. In a small pan, heat the oil, and pop in the mustard seeds. When they start spluttering, put in the curry leaves, stir for about 30 seconds and pour the whole lot into the curry and stir gently.