Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Super-quick chicken casserole

I can't believe it's been nearly three months since the last time I posted a recipe on the blog. One reason is that I've transitioned from the (relatively) laidback student-life to working 8.30-5 with an additional two hours of commuting each day... I'm not the most creative in the kitchen at the best of times, and when I get home at six-ish now, the last thing I want to do is slave away over the pans for another hour. The man in the house is an okay cook, but his  repertoire of things low carb is fairly limited, so his recipes tend to run on repeat. Also, he has the same crazy schedule as myself, so to have him cook each and every day isn't fair to him either. Therefore, there has been a few too many take-away dinners lately, and I have been resorting to junk-food such as the low-carb pizza from Domino's, which actually isn't very low-carb at all... Can anyone guess in which direction my weight has started to move?

 Out of desperation I googled something like "super easy low-carb dinners" (but in Norwegian), hoping to get some tips on what on earth I could cook that is both LCHF and doesn't require me to spend an eternity in the kitchen on those nights I have a flat battery. The saying goes "When the student is ready the teacher will appear", and that's exactly what happened! I stumbled across the brilliant blog http://www.lavkarbogjortenkelt.net/, which is packed with exactly the kind of quick, no-fuss LCHF recipes I was looking for. A couple of hours of intense studying later I blissfully emerged, armed with twenty or so dinner-ideas which will make my life so much easier in the weeks and months to come. Thanks to the blog mentioned, I've regained the inspiration that I needed to go on eating LCHF in these busy times. Being time-poor is something I believe most Aussies can relate to, and following a way of eating that requires you to cook most things from scratch can further add to the stress. Therefore I will share these quick dinner ideas as I go along, experimenting with new recipes.

This dinner I'm going to share now was an instant success. It also took less than 20 minutes to make.  It's so easy that I can't believe I haven't thought about it before:

Ingredients
1 barbecued chicken (I got mine at Woolies)
1 red capsicum
Almost one whole leek 
1 cup pouring cream
Spices

Procedure
Chop capsicum and leek and lightly fry  in some butter in a wok. Cut the chicken into cubes and throw them in  with the vegetables. Add a splash of cream and some spice and let simmer until the cream has thickened a bit. Voila!  

This fed me and my better half and left one of us with lunch for tomorrow. Next time I will double the recipe as I love the feeling of coming home, realising that dinner will sort itself out after a couple of minutes in the microwave oven. 

Here are some photos. Unfortunately a bit blurry, as they are taken with my mobile. 




The spice you can see in the photo is about half a container (10 grams) of the "Masterfood Perfect for chicken herb and spice mix". with paprika, onion and garlic. It's full of sugar and surely other nasty stuff, but an easy option when you are unsure of exactly what spices will go nicely together. Any suggestions to what spices I can try next time instead of this?