Dinner and bento – oven-baked Thai red curry chicken
Dinner
For dinner, Jac baked chicken pieces in the oven, marinated with slatherings of Thai red curry paste – she just wanted to use up what was left in the jar of curry paste. She served the chicken with rice and salad. The chicken was juicy and very tasty. Usually when we cook with red curry paste we’d add coconut milk to make the curry, but Jac used the paste just as is, so it was extra spicy and strong in flavour. I told her she should do this again for sure. Jac cooked 4 chicken quarters (marylands, you’d call them I suppose – the thigh and drumstick). We had a quarter chicken each for dinner so there were 2 quarters left over.
Bento
For lunch the next day I took the meat off the bones of one of the chicken quarters and made us red curry chicken sandwiches.
I threw together a salad – lettuce, cucumber, carrot sticks and green seedless grapes. For sweets, strawberries and a couple of sweet crispy pastry crackers Jac made earlier that week. The sweet crackers were one of Jac’s experiments – she simply cut store-bought frozen short crust pastry into triangles, brushed them with butter, sprinkled a little sugar on top and baked them in the oven. I wrapped them carefully so they’d be protected from the moisture of the strawberries.
Red curry chicken, lettuce and Kewpie mayonnaise all go very well together in a sandwich! Jac really enjoyed these sandwiches, and so did I.
Sometimes I am totally uninspired and struggle to think what to draw/write on Jac’s bento note. This was one of those mornings.