Habanero Pepper Sauce

Almost pure habanero peppers, this sauce has just a little vinegar and salt. The flavor and heat of the peppers really comes through.

First, a word of warning: Only make this on a day when you can open your windows and get full ventilation going in your house. Habanero peppers are some of the hottest on the planet and you will suffer lung damage if you breathe in these fumes. I am not even joking a little bit.

In our house, we eat this on everything. Well, everything savory. It is indispensable and irreplaceable and when we run out and Hock Choon (or Fiesta in Houston, or my little Géant in Dubai) doesn’t have fresh peppers to make more, we are sad beyond belief. When we lived in Singapore those three semesters, I would trek back after visits to KL with a cooler full of these beautiful peppers.

Used to be that I could get the orange ones which I think are somewhat hotter.  
I am happy to get red, if that's all they have. 

The customs guys would make me open my cooler and I looked like a dealer, I had so many. (Fortunately, Singaporeans understand an addiction to chilies and they would wave me through.) We just can’t live without them. If they don’t have habaneros in Cairo, we’re in trouble. (With the current stockpile of sauce, we'll be okay for a few months. After that, I'll let you know. You may need to send peppers.)

Ingredients
800g fresh habanero or scotch bonnet peppers
1/3 cup white vinegar
1 tablespoon sea salt

That’s it! We are talking almost pure-pepper sauce.

Method
Remove the stems and wash your peppers in a clean sink, full of water.

They float!

If some of the stems don’t come off clean, use a knife to remove the green. Likewise, if any of the peppers have a bad spot, cut it off. We are not really cooking this sauce so any bacteria is a bad thing.

Open your windows and ensure good cross ventilation in your house. Avoid inhaling in the direct vicinity of the peppers for the next step.

Grind the peppers in a food processor. They may not all fit at first, so grind what you can fit on your fastest speed and then add the balance.

Stop occasionally to scrape down the sides of the food processor with a rubber spatula. Remember not to breathe too deeply when you open it to scrape.

Meanwhile, wash and sterilize a few old jam jars with lids that close tightly without leaking. Which means, after washing well with dish soap, rinse them and then fill them with boiling water (putting a spoon in each to avoid breakage) and then drain. Avoid touching the inside of the lid or bottle now.

I always sterilize more than I think I'll need. It's hard to tell how much sauce you will get out of your peppers. 

Continue grinding the peppers for a few more minutes on high. Add in the salt and vinegar, scrape the processor vessel down again and put it back on high twirl for another few minutes.

You can see, I have scraped the sides down again. 

When your sauce is thick and pasty, put it in a pot on the stove and heat to boiling. If it is too thick, you can add a little water. You want to see it bubbling.

I added a little water.  About 1/4 cup.

We are not really cooking the sauce so this won’t take long. We just want to be hot enough to further sterilize the insides of your jars so the pepper sauce will last longer.

Meanwhile, set your jars out, with one teaspoon in each one. The spoon will keep the jar from breaking when you put the hot sauce in it. I am sure there is a good thermodynamic reason for this, but all I know is, it works. If you have a wide-mouth funnel, this will make transferring the boiling hot sauce to the jars much easier.

Once the sauce is boiling steadily, remove the pot from the heat and spoon or ladle it into the clean jars.

See that wide-mouthed funnel!  Great for this job.

Using a towel so you don’t burn your hands, tighten the lids as much as possible and turn the jars upside down. Once again, this helps the hot liquid sterilize the lid.

Every once in a while, when you pass the jars, try to tighten the lids a little more.

When the jars have cooled almost completely, turn the jars back upright. The round circle in the middle of the lid should be sucked in, just like when the original jam came from the manufacturer. If any of them don't seal tightly, store them in the refrigerator.

This will keep in a cool dark cupboard for months.  Once opened, keep the sauce in the refrigerator.

Even if you are a pepper eater, I suggest caution when adding this to food. It doesn’t take much!

Enjoy!

Harira or حريرة

Harira or حريرة is a rich soup full of tender lamb, chickpeas, vegetables and noodles, the perfect iftar meal to break a Ramadan fast or a delicious meal anytime of the year.

The western world has the Food Network. Over here, we have the Asian Food Channel. And, as luck would have it, they opened a store and class kitchen in Singapore, just after I moved back to KL. 

The couple of times I've returned to Singapore, there was always an agenda and no shopping or class-taking time.  Imagine my delight when I was invited to go again, all expenses paid – yay, even an executive club room in the hotel, which means open bar and canapés at happy hour! – with my days off and no agenda. 

I immediately got online to sign up for a class.  I really didn’t care what they were teaching; I just wanted to be in the AFC kitchen. The class available on my Saturday there was called Exotic Favorites and we learned to make baklava, a lamb and tomato soup named harira, and the roasted eggplant dip baba ganoush, as part of a traditional mezze.

Now, a confession:  I lost my notes.  All I have left are a bunch of photographs, my memories and this pen.

Pretty cool, huh?

So I am recreating this harira rather slap-dashly and with the help of a few different online recipes.  

I don’t see how it can turn out badly, since all of the ingredients are fresh and tasty but it will not be the same as the one we made at AFC.  For one thing, since we didn’t have two hours for the soup to simmer, the chef had made stock from the lamb and started with that instead of putting it all in together to simmer, as below.  But, hey, all alone here, just me and the hound, I have all the time in the world for simmering.

Ingredients

Olive oil

400g or 14oz lamb

1/2 kilo or 1lb fresh tomatoes

2 medium onions

3 stalks celery – well-washed

1 big bunch cilantro or coriander leaves

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

Good pinch of saffron

Sea salt

Black pepper

Cayenne

60g or about 3 oz tomato paste

1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

30g or about 3 oz fine pasta, broken into short lengths

1 lemon, cut into wedges for squeezing at will (at serving time)

Method

Cube your lamb and brown it in a little olive oil.  Season with black pepper, sea salt and cayenne.

Add two liters or a little more than two quarts of water to the pot.  Bring to the boil.

Meanwhile, chop the celery, tomatoes, onions and the stems of the cilantro and add them to the pot.    Chop up the cilantro leaves and save them for later.

Add in the cinnamon, ginger, saffron and tomato paste.  Simmer, covered, for two hours.  Or more. 

About 10 minutes before serving, add in the chickpeas, dried pasta and chopped cilantro leaves.  Check the seasonings and add more salt and cayenne as needed.  Cook till pasta is al dente.  

According to our AFC chef (I believe his name was Khalil) harira is a traditional iftar soup, originally from Morocco, which means it is commonly eaten during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan as part of the sunset meal. He said sometimes lentils are added as well, for more substance.

In a side note, I love Google Translate.  When I looked up harira, it gave me that lovely word you see in the title. (Arabic is so beautiful. If only I could read it.) When I turned it around and asked what that word meant, the translation was “calorie.” Now I have one thing I can recognize on a nutrition label, should such a thing exist, when we move to Egypt.

For a vegetarian version, forget the lamb and start from where you add water to the pot.  Add vegetable stock (homemade or from a couple of cubes and water) and go from there.  You might want to add the lentils for extra protein. 

Here are a few photos of the AFC kitchen and store. It seems that since then, the Asian Food Channel was bought out by an American company so the test kitchen is no longer open, more's the pit. 

* I paid for my own class and received no compensation for writing this post.

Stuffed Whole Chicken Breast Roast

Once again, I’m trying to empty the freezer but this time I am actually making the dish I had in mind when I bought the chicken breasts.  It’s not often you find whole, by which I mean still attached to each other, boneless breasts, so when I saw these two, I scooped them up.  

I imagined them together, one on top, one on bottom with the stuffing in between, roasted so that the skin on the top and skin on the bottom of both turned a crispy, crunchy caramelized auburn.   When it comes to food, I have a very vivid imagination.

This summer I bought an entire roll of butchers’ roast netting and this seemed like a great opportunity to put it to good use.   I am a little older and wiser now though, so I figured out that I need a tube of some sort to wrap the netting around and then push the roast through.  If we could have filmed my mother and me this summer, struggling with an overstuffed pork roast and that netting, it would have been a YouTube sensation, titled Women Stuffing the Baby Back In, because that is what it looked like.  And the netting was just as unwilling as any new mother. Mercifully, we were home alone so no one caught us in the act.

Ingredients

2 whole boneless chicken breasts, still attached to each other – so four breasts in two pieces – a little more than a pound each – ask your butcher!

20g or 1 1/2 tablespoons butter

4 medium baby Portabella or Swiss Brown mushrooms

160g or almost 6oz frozen spinach, thawed

1 medium yellow onion

2 cloves of garlic

1 medium tomato

1/4 cup or 35-40g couscous – medium grain

1 egg

180g or 6.25oz ground or minced pork

Sea salt

Black pepper

Olive oil

Butchers’ netting or baking string

Method

Chop up your tomato, onion, garlic and mushrooms.

Melt the butter in a skillet and sauté the vegetables until they are soft.

 

Add a drizzle of olive oil, a couple of generous pinches of salt and a couple of good grinds of black pepper.  And then add the spinach.  Mix well.

Make a bowl out of your mixture and put in the couscous.  Add a 1/2 cup of boiling water to the couscous.  Don’t stress if your “bowl” breaks open.  Cover the pot with a lid and turn the heat off.   Let it rest for about 10 minutes.

Pour the stuffing into a large bowl and stir it around until it cools.  Add the egg and the ground pork.  Add a couple of more pinches of salt and grinds of black pepper. Mix well.

Meanwhile, pre-heat your oven to 400°F or 200°C.

Clean the fat off of your chicken breasts and then careful cut them from the middle almost to the outside with a sharp knife, horizontally.   Open the flap to flatten the breast.  Do this to the other side and then the other whole breast.

Put one double breast skin side down and pile the stuffing on top of it.  Use your judgment, if it looks like too much stuffing, just don’t put quite all on.  (Leftover stuffing can be fried up – remember you have raw egg and pork in there – and eaten with a spoon.  Delicious!)

Put the other double breast on top the opposite direction.    If you imagine the breasts as hearts – although I realize they aren’t so heart-like since you spread them out, work with me here – then the pointy end will be skin up on the wide end of the bottom heart.

Here comes the tricky part.  If you have string, here are some instructions.  If you are using the netting, cut the bottom half off of a  very large plastic cup.   Put the netting on the cup like you would a tight sock, leaving one end open and on end with netting hanging off. 

Start stuffing the roast in one end and gradually pull the netting over the roast as it comes out the other.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take photos and do this as well.  I really need a staff photographer for shots like that. 

Poke any stuffing back in and try to straighten the skin out under the netting. 

Drizzle the roast with olive oil and pop in it the pre-heated oven.  Roast for 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 375°F or 190°C.  Roast for 15 minutes more and then turn it over.

After half an hour in the oven.

The bottom after I turned it over. 

Roast for 1 hour and then check the internal temperature.  180°F or 82°C is done for poultry.   If your temperature is at least 170°F or 77°C, you can leave it out to rest.  It will reach the correct temperature on its own.  If it is more than 10°F under, pop it back in the oven for another 10 minutes and then test again.

Carefully cut the netting or string with scissors and gently lift it off.

After about 5-10 minutes of resting time, carve the roast into nice slices.   If gravy is your thing, make some with the pan juices.  You know I did. 

Enjoy!