Spiced eggs in coconut milk

From Spice by Christine Manfield page 193

I think I almost have a new favorite spice paste after this dish.

Or perhaps a new third place after laksa and massaman. (there's green curry paste as well - who can choose!!)

The inclusion of the black-beans in the paste gives it a Chinese angle which is a great combination. The recipe included what I thought was going to be way too much belacan (on top of the belacan already on the spice paste), but the dish was in no way too pungent. The flavours seemed to go really well with the eggs.

I did use a little extra coconut milk which didn't seem to matter as the flavours were quite rich.

Plus I dropped out one of the eggs to keep it to an odd number for presentation.

Happy cooking!

Roasted corn-fed chicken with saffron and cashew rice pilaf and tomato cardamom sauce

From Spice by Christine Manfield page 164

This dish was a straight-forward, built upon a previous recipe - Saffron and Cashew Rice Pilaf.

The 'correct' way to do this dish is to tunnel-bone the chicken, then roast stuffed with the rice pilaf. I'm no tunnel-boner - so I made the 'slightly modified' version - by roasting the chickens basted in the prescribed annatto pepper oil.

The chickens didn't come out looking as red as I expected (a problem with my oil and / or basting I think), and they were a little over cooked (...a problem with my cooking I think).

Either way - a great combination of flavours.

Tunnel boning... one day...