What Laura Loves Today: Tuesday Tasties No.19

Well I cannot believe that February is here already, albeit I must admit I'm grateful that payday certainly seemed to come around fairly quickly! Irrespective of this, I'm still trying to think of cheap and cheerful dishes which I actually look forward to cooking. The recipe below is spicy, sweet and super satisfying.

Chicken Hotpot

I stumbled across this dish late last year and wasn't entirely convinced on first glance whether it would taste of much, the ingredients list is pretty short and the preparation required is even shorter. Here's what you'll need:

Olive oil

2 chicken breast cut into chunks

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

4 star anise

1 red chilli, chopped

1 tbsp of muscovado sugar

400ml chicken stock

1 tbsp of fish sauce

One packet of pak choi

Spring onions, chopped

First step is nice and easy, simply heat the oil and brown off your chicken for around 10 minutes. To build up a more caramelised flavour be brave and don't turn it to often.

Next, stir in the garlic, chilli and star anise and stir for around two minutes until you can start to smell the star anise.

Once you've hit this stage, add your sugar and cook until it starts to caramelise. It'll look like this.

It'll smell pretty good already, but the next step is to chuck in the chicken stock and fish sauce before leaving for around 10 minutes on a low simmer.

Whilst the chicken is cooking, it's time to prepare the pak choi. Chop of the stalks and cut into chunks and keep separate from the leaves. Once the 10 minutes is up, you can pop in the pak choi stalks and the spring onions and leave for a further few minutes.

Then turn off the heat before adding the pak choi leaves and letting the residual heat wilt them down.

Make sure you take this opportunity to taste the broth and add any extra sugar or fish sauce as is necessary. Then it's time to plate things up. I like to serve mine with a dash of chilli flakes for some extra kick.