Quay Po Cooks: avocado

Showing posts with label avocado. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Baked chicken in avocado boat - Featured in Group Recipes

This dish was featured in Asian Food Channel (Official) Facebook page

on 31st October 2012

I got the idea of putting chicken meat into avocado from one of the foodies in Group Recipes. Usually we serve avocados as a dip, in salads, or as a side dish. Very seldom you will find it used in a main dish like this one. I experimented with this recipe and added a touch of oriental taste. I added oyster sauce and fried shallots. I always find fusion food to be interesting and more often than not, they are tasty. This dish definitely qualifies to be served to guests merely because of its beautiful presentation and the experience of a new taste. I served it with chive omellete as a side dish and crusty bread. YUMMY!!

Serving: 4

Ingredients

2 chicken breast meat diced

1/3 cup whiskey
1/2 medium size white onion thinly sliced

2 tbs butter
2 large avacados half lengthwise

2 cups chiffonade purple cabbage
1 tbs lemon juice

2 tbs oyster sauce
5 shallots thinly sliced

Method

Preheat oven at 350 degrees F/175 degrees C. Fried shallots till golden brown. Drain all the oil and set aside. Place diced chicken meat in a baking dish, season with salt, pepper, oysters sauce and add whiskey. Mix well and then spread out diced chicken meat evenly and top with sliced onion. Dot the the dish with butter. Bake for 30 minutes. Half lengthwise the avacados and discard the skin. Slice a little off the bottom of the avocado so that it can stand nicely on the plate. Gently rub avacados with lemon juice and place cut side up in the serving plates. Scoop out the center of the avacados to make a deeper recess to hold the chicken meat. Take out baked chicken from the oven after 30 mins and fill avocadoes with chicken meat, topped with fried shallots and served with cabbage.

A LITTLE ABOUT THIS QUAY PO

Before I was married to my "Quay Lo" (Guaylo) husband, I did not know how to bake or cook. Subsequently I learned some baking and cooking Western cuisine from him, and providing his food for him launched an interest in cooking in general. Many of my Chinese friends and family told me that "Quay" is the wrong spelling for devil in Cantonese. The right spelling should be "Kwai" or "Guay". Well, somehow I like the spelling "Quay" better although I have to agree that it does not sound very Cantonese. Try asking a Westerner to pronounce "Kwai" and you will probably hear "Quay" haha. Whether is "Quay" or "Kwai" or "Guay, just know the devil woman is me when you see Quay Po Cooks. My hubby said if people pronounce "Quay" as "Key" is even better because I am the key to his heart. LOL!

Only now, have I started to learn the traditional Cantonese cuisine of my Mum. She cooks fabulously and all her specialties are divine. These two interests, my husband's Western food, and my mother's traditional food, prompted me to document them so they will not be lost.

Here, I wish to share my cooking and baking experience with my readers. I also hope to inspire those who do not know how to cook or bake to do so because, trust me, if I can, you can too.

Something I'd like to mention is that I find that many people are rather unwilling to share their recipes. However, for me, I think differently. I think good recipes should be shared thus allowing as many people to enjoy it as possible. Unless those recipes are for doing business, I don't see why we want to keep them all to ourselves. So if you are generous in sharing your recipes, you are welcome to share on my blog. Send the recipes to me and better still with pictures of the final products and I will be very happy to post them them with credits to you of course.

Our cuisine is a deeply embedded part of our culture. When two cultures come together under the same roof the results in the kitchen can sometimes be comedic, sometimes confrontational, but more often it is a journey full of surprises and discovery. There is joy in our food. If we think upon this, it is intuitively obvious. This blog is a journey of joy and sharing, reflecting what the French like to call "joie de vivre" (joy of living). No one could be more different from one another then my husband and my mother. Yet one thing they share in common is knowing intuitively that food, cooking, and sharing can be avenues of joy in life itself. So herein, help yourself, to a little joy and , if you like it, share it with your own family and friends. Joy is something that should be shared.