Somebody submitted a question to me a couple of days ago for advice on what is a good gravy and side dish to go with her baked chicken and here is my answer.

The simplest gravy to go with the baked chicken is as follows.  The most Basic 3 items – Chicken broth, cream and corn starch.  Prepare roughly equal parts of broth and cream to make a good gravy.  For every 2 cups of gravy, you need a spoonful of corn starch to thicken it up in the pot.

Next, think of flavoring.  Base the taste, on what you are serving with.  For baked chicken affair, you may add olive, capers, horse radish; herbs such as oregano, rosemary, thyme or even curry paste.

As a side dish, have a go of white beans and bacon.  Later on you could add baby spinach for greater color and healthy goodness.

Side Dish instruction: Saute chopped onions with bacon and sliced garlic.  Add the rehydrated beans (soaked overnight) and water, plus throw in the herb of your choice.  Cook until the beans are tender.  Don’t forget the spinach. Wilt the spinach right before taking the pot off the heat.

Quick note: For the beans, you need to soak them, often overnight and when cooking, do add water to a couple of inches above the bean in the pot.

Note, adding fresh herbs like basil and rosemary will give you a fresh flavor to the end product.

Dried or Fresh? That is the (first) question.  Herbs like basil, sage, cilantro and peppermint tend to lose their flavor undergoing the drying process, therefore, needed to be bought and used in fresh condition.  Others such as dill, oregano, rosemary and thyme are able to retain their flavor, albeit in higher concentration.  So remember to use half the amount of dried herbs you would normally use for fresh ones.

Some herbs go really well when placed with certain meat or vegetables.  Rosemary, for instance, flavors lamb and beef rather beautifully.  As for fish and seafood, dill should be chosen.  Dill also goes very well with cucumber salad as enhancement to the dressing.

Here’s a quick cucumber salad recipe:

In a bowl, place sliced cucumber and freshly chopped dill.  Add on honey, cider vinegar, ground black pepper and a pinch of salt.  Mix together. Voila! Instant cucumber salad.

Another way to take herbs is as a salad.  Mix fresh ones like peppermint, basil and cilantro into readily-packaged salad to add that extra taste and bite.  When taking herbs as salad, it is best to have fresh uncut leaves, or roughly chopped.

Talking about that extra bite of flavor, we could also throw in as much chopped dill, or any other desired dried herbs as we can take into our bread-baking ingredients.  And what about adding herbs into our favorite cheesecakes? That can be done too.

There are many ways of adding herbs into our dishes, we just need to start slowly and test with them as we go along.

In between making some good bites, he interlaced the show with some historical background on the huge city and the fact that having been conquered among others, by a Sultanate in 1500s, the British Empire (pre 1600s) and lastly the Dutch before gaining independence, you would and should expect a glorious assortment of food influenced especially by the Dutch.  (As the Dutch ruled the longest).  At the same time retaining some of the traditional ways of the Indons.

Among the recipes shown were Semur Daging which is beef cooked in soy sauce infused with various herbs and spices, and Gado Gado – the local blanched vegetable salad with spicy peanut sauce for dressing/dipping.

Semur Daging

Use 1lb/600g of beef – knuckle and slice thickly.  Get 2 large potatoes sliced thickly and half-fried.  This is done to harden the potatoes and avoid crumbling when stewed later with the beef.  Finely slice 5 shallots and saute on about 2 tablespooon of oil.  Add in pounded ingredients – 1 candlenut, 1 inch fresh ginger, 4 cloves of garlic, 2 sticks of lemongrass until the mixture gets fragrant.   Then throw in 2 fresh bay leaves, about 2 tablespoons of coriander powder and the Indonesian thick soy sauce to taste, along with a pinch of grated nutmeg, a few cloves, an inch of galanga (bruised usually using the mortar and pestle), 1 cinnamon stick and the meat.

I was also glad that the episode had something on Rijkstaffel as some years back I had the pleasure of dining in such a manner in the Sheraton Hotel at Bandung, a high-ground resort city south of Jakarta.

And so the story goes, while under the Dutch ruling, Rijkstaffel – a way of serving dinner was invented, purportedly because the Dutch found the traditional way of the Indons eating together in groups, using hands from a huge platter, offensive.  Rijkstaffel is basically having let’s say 7 people lined up in waiting, each bearing dishes in pretty woven baskets, lined with banana leaves, to be served to the diners, one by one.  Usually the first person will carry cooked rice, followed by chicken curry, spicy sambal prawns, stir-fried veggies and so on.  Rijkstaffel is generally applicable for entrees.

The simplest of salad dressing require only 4 items:

A type of acid – vinegar/vinegrette, tangy fruit juice like lime, lemon

A type of fat – EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil)

Seasoning – usually pepper and salt

Once you watch too much “The Naked Chef” the 4 things will be repeated, over and over.  At least for salad dressings, that is.

To add spice to your dressing, do use herbs like fresh sage and basil, rosemary and thyme , depending on what type of salad you have.  And for Asian dressings, an extra element of sweetness is desired.

Now, you can substitute the 4 things thus way:

The Acids – use of tomato juice/ketchup and even orange juice

The Fats – how about sesame oil, truffle oil, even chilli-infused oil or cream.

The Seasoning – for salts, try fish sauce, soy sauce (balance it out if you have dried/salted bacon, cheese etc.) for pepper, choose fresh, chopped chillies, or paprika and again, check for spicy elements in your salad

Here are some ideas of dressings:

Simple Asian Salad dressing:

a) Shallots or onions, peanut, chillies – all of them fried.  It is best pounded together instead of being blended. Add salt, palm sugar and tamarind juice.

b) Chopped green onions and chillies, vinegar, a few drops of sesame oil, soy sauce and palm sugar.

c) Dried/salty anchovies, onions – sauteed quickly. Add coconut cream, salt and white pepper, stir on low heat. Don’t let it boil, or the cream will split.

Simple western dressing:

a) Lemon juice, EVOO, salt and pepper

b) Mayonnaise: egg yolk, EVOO, salt and pepper, lemon juice, sugar or honey – blend everything together, minus the EVOO. While blending, pour in trickling amount of EVOO until properly the dressing is properly creamed.

It can be daunting when cooking with spices for the first time.  For you would not know how much is enough to make the dish taste good and palatable.

According to the Chef at Home, Michael Smith ( I love his show, he always teaches something useful: the variety of flours, the differences of salt types etc) – Spices can come from a plant’s roots, seeds, bark, buds, or berries. (Herbs are produced from the stems and leaves of a plant).

What I love most about using spices is that we can have chicken everyday, but with different spices and using different forms of the chicken, everybody would feel we are serving different menus each meal.

Say on Monday we bake the whole chicken with peppercorns, the next day we could make chicken pieces with sumac in a tagine. (Sumac is generally known as a blend of spices from the Middle East).

The only thing is that, spices should be used according to the recipe and in proportion to the amount of the main ingredient – meat, seafood, vegetables – because if we are unfamiliar with how it would taste in the dish or how much is sufficient, your dish may at worst, be inedible.

So to avoid such disasters, I recommend watching your favorite chef demonstrating the use of that certain unfamiliar spice before attempting to use the spice or mixing it with others.

For example, grounded turmeric, cumin and coriander (and salt) goes well when marinating prawns for deep-frying.  But the measurement for each spice should not be equal to each other.  In theory, for every teaspoon of grounded coriander, you should only use a half teaspoon of grounded cumin and a half teaspoon of turmeric powder.

Having said that, everyone should try at least one new spice every couple of months to expand our cooking repertoire and make the everyday meals something to remember every once in a while.