The cook in me craved for a home-cooked meal especially since I’ve had a cooking hiatus more than 2(!) weeks before we settled into our new home. Unless on vacation, it has never been that long. 

Armed with a small stash of regularly used spices in one of our suitcases while waiting for the rest of our shipment and even more stash of treasured spices to arrive, I decided that I’d have enough to make a little meal out of them. We may have only moved in to a barely furnished home, but a bare home does not mean a bare kitchen, no?

Plus, we inherited a pretty decent kitchen too from the previous owner and my mother-in-law has readied several pots and pans.We even have those pots and pans kept in a rotating cabinet. Super cool.   How can I ever not cook? I cannot NOT cook. That’s just preposterous!

Feeling already slightly better from my eye infection, I made sure that we stock the kitchen up with other basics from the local supermarket. The beauty of the Dutch supermarket is that most fresh ingredients have been cleaned and cut,  ready to be cooked. Lots of precious prep time saved. Brilliant! 

The essential spices I had brought along in our luggage weren’t too many; there were those that were left in our fridge untouched by the movers. They consisted of curry powder from Singapore, turmeric (fresh and powdered),  tamarind (fresh and dried) and dried anchovies. Not nearly enough, but I suppose that one could get creative.

With those, I whipped up 2 types of dishes for our very first home-made meal: 

Chicken marinated with curry powder and then baked with mustard-paprika based sauce drenched in coconut milk

A stir-fried vegetable medley of potatoes, long beans and capsicum using only the pre-packed fresh ingredients from the Dutch supermarket.

 

 

It wasn’t like they were the best meals of the century or meals to remember because they tasted out of this world. In fact, I almost didn’t want to take any pictures because I thought it wasn’t that special. But Silver Bullet had had egged me on with this being a meal to remember because they were the very first home-made food I had made in our new home, using only a few essentials and still turned out pretty darn decent.

For that, he thought that they deserved a recognition, even if only for nostalgic reasons.

Here we go with my virgin creation of  Curry Marinated Chicken in Mustard-Paprika Sauce drenched in Coconut Milk. 

The top looked slightly burnt and my chicken looked a little dry there as I was still getting used to my new oven. It was the first time I hung out with it and did not pay much attention while baking it. Duh! I guess it’ll take a bit more tries before she and me sync up.

Otherwise, this dish has been a small delight and this has given me a few more recipe inspiration using a variety of other easy-to-find ingredients as well. Hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did. I’ll be posting the vegetable dish for another time.

Watch this space for more Fabulous Friday Flavours!