Winter has hit Cape Town. Wet, cold and miserable. The perfect weather for staying indoors and cooking soup.
I found some whole baby clams at the Fruit & Veg. Just the thing for clam chowder (something I’ve been wanting to make ever since having the Real Thing in San Francisco. Problem being that Tanya doesn’t like fishy dishes, so I needed an alternative.
Enter General Tso’s chicken, another recipe that’s been keeping a tab open on Firefox for quite some time.
Basically, you dredge the chicken (breast fillet cubes) in cornflour and fry it, then it goes into a slow cooker with a Hoisin / soy / rice vinegar sauce for four* hours. Add some more sauce at the end and you’re done.
For the chowder, I used Christina’s recipe, except that I had whole clams which I first needed to steam open. I then incorporated the water / clam juice into the white sauce, boiled the potatoes (small cubes) and onions, and added the bacon and chopped clams at the end.
Now I need to figure out how to make a sour dough starter so that I can serve the chowder properly next time.
* Recipe calls for four hours. We were hungry well before the three hour mark, so that’s how much time we gave it. Worked well enough.