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Enjoy the homey flavors and aroma of baked apple pie in less than 30 minutes. You won’t miss the traditional flaky crust too much once you taste the crunchy-gritty toasted cornmeal streusel on warm, spicy apples.

I know, I know…you were expecting all the juicy details of my trip to San Francisco two weeks late and all I can offer you today is pie. Oh, and it’s not even a real pie, it’s a crisp! A crumble! I’ve been a horrible updater of this site, I’m so sorry. Worrisome exhaustion >> Blog, in the grand scheme of things. I will make it up to you…

This will make my super-late SF update worth the wait, I promise you.

After being away for more than a month, I sorely missed the local farmers markets. I’m one of those weird gals who enjoy shopping for fruits and vegetables…must be the old-lady streak kicking. Haha. Last Saturday’s excursion was no exception from my market black book, I filled up the baskets with my hoarding eyes. I picked up six Fall apples, the Okanagan Fuji ones, which are were so sweet and crisp. All of them ended up being cooked and baked. Mmm…

Since I am not 100% physically well these days, I usually choose the path to anything that requires less of my time and energy. I really wanted an apple pie a few nights ago, but with an extra trip to the store to get vodka (Oh, that? I still have to tell you about that crust!) for the crust, that’s not going to happen. I stared lovingly at the Fuji apples and thought of what to do with them besides eating them as is. I didn’t dare search Gourmet.com because thinking about the demise of the magazine still brings me physical pain. So I decided to make use of my online membership to dear old Cook’s Illustrated. There was a recipe for Quick Dutch Apple Crisp, which inspired that night of experimentation.

After making Peach Crumble for years and being left with delicious, yet unsatisfying, toppings that become soggy and unappetizing as leftovers, I was hesitant to try another fruit variation. But what can you do? If you have a craving, you must give in to The Craving! I was not disappointed. Cooking the fruit and the streusel separately was a godsend, and the cornmeal in the streusel made it a perfect contrast to the soft apples. Oh…my…god. This is why I always have cornmeal in the pantry: it’s not just for cornbread or coating. Amen.

So here, ladies and gentlemen, is the quickie apple pie that will satisfy your cravings in a jiffy. Go back here and tell me it’s awful if you try it and you’re not satisfied. I just know you’ll thank me once you taste it. :-)

Quick Apple Crumble with Cranberries

Ingredients

Apple Filling

• 3 medium-sized apples, peeled, quartered, chopped into ¼ x ½  x ½ -inch chunks and fills about 5 cups. Use what you have on hand or your preferred variety. (I used Okanagan Fuji apples.)
• 4 tablespoons light brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• pinch kosher salt
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/3 cup dried cranberries
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon triple sec liqueur (optional)

Crumble/Streusel topping

• 1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
• 3 tablespoons light brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon yellow cornmeal
• 3 tablespoons butter, melted

Preparation

1. Place the rack in the lower-middle position and preheat oven to 425°F.

2. For the apple filling

• Mix brown sugar, cinnamon and salt in a medium bowl, and toss the apple chunks in it.
• Melt butter over high heat on a Dutch oven until it begins to turn amber in color and the milky froth from the butter has almost cleared (don’t allow it to burn).
• Add the apples into the pot and reduce heat to medium-high. Stir with a wooden spoon and cook for about 5 minutes.
• Add the cranberries and stir. Cover for another 5 minutes or until the apples begin to soften and break down in the steam. Juice will collect on the bottom of the pan.
• Remove from the heat and pour over a strainer with a large bowl underneath to catch the juice.
• Pour the juice back into the Dutch oven over high heat and mix it with heavy cream and triple sec liqueur (if used). Stir until the mixture is reduced and thickened. It’s done when you drag your wooden spoon on the bottom of the pan and it leaves a trailing line. Turn off the heat and toss the apples and cranberries in it.
• Transfer the fruits and any remaining liquid into an 8-inch square, or circular, baking dish and flatten the top with a spatula. For individual servings, you can pour them into ramekins or other oven-safe bowls.

3. For the crumble/streusel topping:

• Mix flour, brown sugar and cornmeal in a medium bowl with a fork. Drizzle melted butter while continuing to mix it until it forms pea-sized chunks.
• Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and spread the streusel mixture evenly on top of it.
• Bake it in the pre-heated oven for 5 minutes. Watch closely once you hit the 4-min mark. It might start to burn depending on your baking sheet.
• Take it out of the oven and set aside to cool on a trivet for 5 minutes. Toss the crumble around with a small spoon to prevent it from burning if it is already getting dark.
• Sprinkle topping over the dish/ramekins/bowls filled with fruit.

You can skip to #5, as the fruit and toppings should be good to go. Continue with #4 if you prefer the streusel to be deep brown and/or want to warm up the dish.

4. Set the pie plate/ramekins/bowls on the now-empty baking sheet and place in the oven until the streusel is a deep golden brown, about 5 minutes.

5. Cool pie plate/ramekins/bowls on a wire rack for 10 minutes and serve apple crumble warm, preferably with vanilla ice cream on top, paired with a warm cup of coffee or tea.

You might also want to check out other food bloggers’ recipes:

• Alice’s Cranberry Apple Crisp Recipe or 10-minute Apple Crisp — that girl knows her desserts, and knows how to dessert. That’s right, I just used the word as a verb. :p
• Kalyn’s Low-Sugar Pumpkin and Apple Crumble — Pumpkin? Who would have thought? I love it already.
• Shaheen’s Crispy Apple Crumble with walnuts. I’m making a note here to try adding nuts next time I make a crumble.
• Annemarie, on the other hand, uses almonds and ameretto in her Apple and Almond Crumble. She’s not shy about putting 1/4 cup of liquor in her fruit mix. Adult crisp it is!
• Haalo’s Apple and Rhubarb Crumble with stewed rhubarb! and shredded coconut! makes me want to take a moment of silence to pause and ponder at the wonderfulness of it.
• Helene’s Crystallized Ginger Apple Crumble had me at ginger.

Ok, I’d like to see a show of hands:

How many of you have procrastinated on something this week? Spill! :)

If you can only see me now, my hands and arms couldn’t be any higher! In August, my brain slows down, my discipline goes on vacation and I am stuck with a mid-summer love affair with someone called Procrastination or Cunctation. I call him CunkyPunky. (See? This is beginning to sound more fun than it really is.) I just have to accept that August is CunkyPunky time and I should just breathe and relax. Aside from procrastinating with CP, I’m also trying to balance bank accounts and to keep sane in the midst of paying even more taxes. I don’t even want to think about it, because aside from my already-planned trip to Blogher Food, there’s another event that I would love to attend: Foodbuzz in November. (I call it an injustice that they are both held in San Francisco! Woe is me, who lives across the north border.) Just when I need to “kick ass” in the making-money department, all CP wants to do is drag me to graze in the grass like spoiled cows living in a luscious Hawaiian ranch–that kind of downtime. I have to remind him that traveling involves money, which involves doing something.

Ayayay.

This super simple breakfast post was supposed to be up last week, but CP and I had a week-long rendezvous. I’m sorry. But I hope you’ll forgive me. It is very easy to do anyway:

Just cook berries in simple syrup of 1 sugar :1 water proportion, wait for it to thicken, then set it aside to cool down. Serve generously on top of your favorite yogurt.

In my case, it’s the Fage 2% greek yogurt. That’s it. No theatrics, just plain and simple food. I eat this for breakfast, as a dessert or as a snack. It’s a great way to save berries that might otherwise go bad this summer, especially if you happen to haul big boxes of them from the farmer’s market.

I’m still rallying to have Fage here in Vancouver. I have never seen it here. Hello– Fage?!?!?!

In case you were wondering– No, Fage isn’t a sponsor of this blog. I just happen to love it so much that I milk my parents, who cross the border several times a month, to bring me Fage. It’s that good.

I have had several requests from friends to make cream puffs but kept putting it off (for almost a year!). I procrastinated until I found one more reason to: being featured on the Julie & Julia movie website, quite a compliment to foodies like us. I thought that made perfect sense. Waiting is a good thing, I tell myself…

It physically hurt me to take photos and wait patiently before devouring these.

…until I realized that I have been without cream puffs in my life for such a long time, and it all went downhill from there. Sensible eating begone as I questioned why I kept popping one puff after another into my mouth, and at the same time not really thinking about it. Don’t you have those moments? I can’t even tell you how many I’ve eaten, because I don’t know. A few friends were lucky enough to sample these, and God bless them for saving me from making a complete a Puff-woMan of myself (get it, Pac-Man?).

The cream filling I made is almost like Bavarian Cream. I can make an excuse that this is "healthier" than deep-fried donuts. A tiny bit? Right?

My history with cream puffs go all the way to when I was a very young child of six or seven. My mother (’Mama’), once an avid baker, had three specialties: brownies with sticky and nutty tops, fruit tarts and cream puffs. [For all these, she used recipes by Nora Daza, quite possibly the Julia Child of the Philippines.] My mom even got orders for her baked goodies at school. I have vivid memories of our dining room looking like an assembly line of baked goods. Like pets waiting for their treats, us siblings hounded the table for the bowl and spatula leftovers of brownie batter, custard for the tart and the cream for the puffs. I was Mama’s Little Helper: from pressing the tart dough onto the metal molds to evenly placing the fruit pieces on the tarts’ custard, but when it comes to the cream puffs it’s an All-Mom Turf. Nobody messes with my mom’s cream puffs. On weeknights when she baked them for the school, I would finish off my homework early so I watch her as she carefully shaped each little mound of paste with her orange mechanical pastry bag (like this one). The craft fascinated me. The next morning she would be dressed up for work early and already filling the baked puffs (that’s already been glazed with caramel) with cream by the time we woke up to shower and get into our uniforms. Then she would drive us to school and I would be at the backseat with the big responsibility of keeping the army of brownies, tarts, or puffs nested in paper cups on pans from sliding off during the drive. Sometimes I would be allowed to eat one. I can still remember everything like it was yesterday. Come to think of it, a lot of my childhood memories include food.

You’d think that I had been baking since I was young all the way to Gourmeted.com. I didn’t. I’m a late-blooming cook/baker, like Julia, and had no interest whatsoever in anything that has do with the kitchen until my late twenties (I’m turning 31 next week). I have always enjoyed eating, though. :-)

As an homage to my two worlds of the East and West, I made cream puffs ala Julia & Nora. Also, as an homage to my mother, Mother of Cream Puffs (hehe) – it’s my mom’s birthday today!

Happy birthday Mama!

Now onto the recipes…

Julia, in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, described choux pastry/paste or pâte à choux [pronounced paht ah SHOO, literally translates to "cabbage paste" as when made to the original method it resembles the vegetable] as a very, very thick white sauce into which eggs are beaten, which make the paste swell when cooked. It can be used for hors d’oeuvres when mixed with cheese, or for desserts as cream puffs when sweetened with sugar.

L-R: Cream Puff, Cream Puff with Blueberries (aka Blueberry Monster), Chocolate Dipped Cream Puff

Julia Child’s Pâte à Choux
Adapted from the book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol 1 by Julia Child, Louisette Berthole, and Simone Beck

Ingredients (makes 36-40 small puffs)

• 100 grams unbleached all purpose flour, sifted
• 1 cup water
• 5 large eggs, divided (1 beaten in a small bowl, for egg wash)
• 3  oz or 6 tbsps butter, cut into pieces; plus extra for greasing the baking sheets
• 1 tsp salt
• pinch of nutmeg
• Extra butter to grease the baking sheets and 1 egg, beaten,

[Note: Julia suggested adding 1 tsp of sugar and reducing the salt to a pinch for dessert puffs. I opted to use salt as above to contrast with the sweetness of the cream filling.]

Preparation:

1. Boil water, butter and seasonings in a 1.5-quart heavy bottomed saucepan.

2. Remove from the heat and quickly mix the flour in one go. Stir vigorously and blend thoroughly. Continue to stir over med-high heat for 1 to 2 minutes, until the mixture separates from the sides of the pan forming one mass, and it begins to film the bottom of the pan. Remove from heat.

3. Create a well in the middle of the paste and break an egg into it. Stir for a few seconds until the egg is incorporated and continue to add the rest of the eggs in the same manner. The third and fourth eggs will be absorbed more slowly. Mix until smooth.

4. Preheat oven to 425°F with one rack placed on the upper third of the oven and another in the lower third. Prepare two baking sheets by rubbing butter on the baking surface.

5. To create small puffs: You can drop the paste on the baking sheet with a spoon or pipe with pastry bag (with 1/2-inch round tube opening) into mound about an inch in diameter and half an inch high, 2 inches apart. Dip a pastry brush into the egg wash and lightly tap each mound with the side of the brush. Avoid dripping down the puff and the sheet, because that prevents the puff from rising.

6. Place the sheets in the preheated oven, one on each rack, and bake for about 20 minutes, or until they puffs have doubled in size, become gold brown, and are firm and crusty to the touch. Take them out of the oven. Using a sharp knife, pierce the side of each puff to prevent the crusty outside from getting soggy. Return the baking sheets to the now turned off oven, with the door ajar, and leave for 10 minutes. Continue to cool the puffs on a cooling rack.

Freezing unfilled puffs: Wait for the puffs to completely cool before freezing. Just place in ziploc bags. Warm it up in a 425°F oven for 3 to 4 minutes to thaw and crisp before serving. When using a toaster oven for a few pieces, 400°F for a minute or two does the job as well.

Cream Filling
Adapted from Let’s Cook with Nora by Nora Daza

• 1/3 cup sugar (you can increase to 1/2 cup if you like it really sweet)
• 1/3 cups all purpose flour, sifted
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 cups milk
• 2 eggs yolks from large eggs, placed in a bowl
• 1 tsp vanilla

1. Combine flour, salt and sugar in a sauce pan. Blend in milk and stir until most of the lumps have dissolved. Using a whisk helps.

2. Cook in medium heat, stirring until it boils. Boil for 10 minutes then remove from heat.

3. In a separate bowl, stir half the heated mixture into the egg yolks. Mix well before adding back to the saucepan. Stir until well blended.

4. Cook on low heat for 10 minutes or until the mixture coats teh back of a spoon.

5. Cook the mixture and add vanilla.

To fill the puff shells: You can slice the puffs horizontally in half and spoon the cream into each, or you can use a pastry bag to puncture and fill each shell.

Dust with confectioner’s sugar, dip in chocolate, add fruits if you like. It’s all up to you!

For those of you who have been put off by the thought of making cream puffs because they are hard to make, don’t be! They’re not. They’re very easy to make, just take it one instruction at a time. Hands-on time for the puffs was probably 15 minutes or 20 minutes tops. You’ll be a pro in no time. :) Enjoy the recipes. Please let me know if you try them.

Hello Friends! I’m doing this year’s Blogathon on July 25 and blog every 30 minutes for 24 hours to raise money for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society. If you are able, please sponsor me and make a donation pledge.

Butter. I love it and there’s no denying it. When I was really, really young, vegetables (snow peas, carrots, green beans and corn) cooked in butter and served with a sprinkle of salt blew my mind. These days I enjoy adding butter to meat and fish. It makes everything much better, just like bacon. I think they’re siblings.

Here, instead of frying basa fish, I baked it in butter:

Oh, and it was so good with the coconut rice!

Baked Basa Fillets in Garlic and Butter

Ingredients:

• 2 fillet slabs of basa fish (mine was 1.4 lb in total), or any white fish of your preference
• 3 tbsp butter, melted
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/8 tsp fresh ground pepper
• 2 tbsp chopped garlic
• 1/2 a lemon, cut in 1/2
• a handful of cilantro, roughly chopped, for garnish

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 400°F.

2. In a baking dish, mix the butter, garlic, salt and pepper. Place the fish fillets into the mixture, and then turn them so both sides are coated. Cover the dish with aluminum foil.

3. Bake for 10 minutes, then take out of the oven and turn off the heat. Squeeze the lemon, a quarter lemon for each fillet. Sprinkle with cilantro and cover again with aluminum foil. Place back in the oven for another 5-10 minutes, until the meat becomes flaky and the thinner edges begin to have some color. You will notice that you might end up with a lot of juice in the pan. That’s fine. You can either toss it, or spoon a little over the fillets to be served.

4. Slice and serve with rice.

To make coconut rice, use this proportion: For every cup of uncooked white rice, use 1/4 cup coconut milk (canned is perfectly fine) and 3/4 cups water.

I rarely make lists as posts, so consider this a treat.I didn’t even make one for Canada Day! Shame shame. Anyway, if you’re still looking for ideas for the weekend, here are some easy peasy suggestions, ye American neighbors.

• Summer Strawberry Fro-Yo or Honey Peach Fro-Yo will beat the heat, the ice cream craving and that stupid weight-loss diet. Eat with little guilt. Savor it.
• Baked Garlic Rhubarb Wings features the season’s rhubarb. Plus it’s baked! I have no doubt this will be a surprise hit at your party.
• If you do not care about having greasy, fatty wings (didn’t I just make it the most appetizing thing in the world?!), say hello to our Homestyle Buffalo Wild Wings. Yes, that B-W-W. I guarantee it’s that good.
• For something that looks a little fancier — and still healthy — try the Tuna-Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms.
• What about some Baked Potato Beet Salad?
• For a good dip for your chips or crispy breads, make this Spinach and Artichoke Dip. I can still remember how good it was. Mmm.

Here are recipes for dessert (or snack) that require a little more work, but you will get a lot of love from the people who will enjoy it:

• Bailey’s Cafe Mocha Cheesecake
• Caramel Cinnamon Rolls with Cream Cheese Glaze

Or if you want to bake something that’s easy and still be good, try these Eggless Chocolate Cupcakes or Honey-Cheese Corn Muffins.

Yes, it’s true, when you come to my party you won’t see the usual fares. :p

Happy Independence Day weekend, friends!

Sorry about that long title, but serves its purpose of telling you exactly what you get. :-)

As I said earlier, I am participating in this summer week’s “Eating Down the Fridge” over at Kim O’Donnel’s A Mighty Appetite. I have to admit that this is indeed a “challenge” for me. When I am cooking for one or two, it’s very easy to slide into that It’s-Easier-To-Eat-Out Zone, especially when the weather is just plain seductive and it feels criminal to stay home.

If you only have a few weeks of semi-uninterrupted sunshine (as I type this, it is raining…welcome to our world), you enjoy every bit of it.

See what I mean?

We do our best to appreciate the glorious summer days of Vancouver. :-)

And then I find myself with a well-stocked fridge and pantry at the end of the week, except that 50% of the fresh food will probably go bad soon. Does that sound familiar?

I go back and forth this same old story. I’ve already confided on this blog that I still have this Waste-Not attitude with food because of the way I was raised. It’s really just common sense and practicality: simply eat what you buy.

I’m already seeing the benefits of Eating Down the Fridge:

1. I make an effort to eat breakfast these days. Usually, I’ll just skip it, which I know is bad, but I couldn’t help it. Now, I try harder. I want to finish the loaf of whole wheat bread instead of offering it up to the mold gods. And I pay more attention to the gala apples I bought that I meant to eat for breakfast or as snacks.

2. I am starting to remember stuff I froze that I still need to use. For example, the fresh-now-frozen thyme that went into this simple salad. I still have frozen peeled bananas that could easily go into banana bread or muffins.

3. The ‘limit’ of not going out to shop for more food, is stirring up my creative juices. What can I do with what I have? I still have a box of strawberries, a lonely floppy stalk of rhubarb and lots of gala apples. I can smell something in the oven already. :-) Have I told you I haven’t made any dessert out of rhubarb?! Never. So here’s my chance to prove to Amy that I am from this planet (she jokingly asked from which planet I was when she learned of this…haha), just that I’m discovering food that are common to most of you, but so new to me!

4. I resist the compulsion to buy more and more food. It’s like with clothes, you keep buying them because one day you think you have nothing to wear. You just have to look into your closet (in our case, pantry/fridge) to see that you have a lot!

5. I am more thoughtful of food. Sometimes life gets really too busy that the kitchen is acts like a pit stop where you grab something you can instantly eat and leave empty-handed and go to the store if there’s none. I think about food, what to prepare so I wouldn’t go hungry in the middle of the day (I work from home) and commune with food. Food is something to enjoy sitting down on the table, with friends and family.

6. That said, I feel like a child finding ingredients in the kitchen that I didn’t know I had. Two jars of baking powder anyone? I see things in doubles and not because of my eyesight. Time to do some inventory around here.

7. At the end of the week, I will have an almost-empty fridge that’s much easier to clean. A clean fridge to work with! I love it already.

During the day, I eat toasted bread with sunflower butter or butter. The other night I just cooked the flank steak with salt and pepper and a wine-soy gravy (still debating if I should post the bad photos…haha). I also had plain red-leaf lettuce salad with garlic dressing (that my brother calls my “Shawarma sauce” when he tasted it during our family dinner a few weekends ago). I’m proud to announce that I also saved that tub of organic vanilla yogurt before it expires in a week, and started eating it. I always get hungry and I didn’t realize I had all this food enough to satiate my every-3-hours hunger.

Last night, I made this simple salad of roasted Yukon Gold potatoes, boiled beets and a homemade garlic-lemon-thyme dressing made with those ingredients glended with olive and coconut oil and just salt and pepper. I love food that is easy to prepare and yet captivates you with comforting flavors and textures — homey, not complex.

A  little something about Yukon Gold Potatoes:

These are yellow-fleshed potatoes, compared to the whitish ones. Yukon Gold is a crossbreed between the North American white potato and a wild South American yellow-fleshed variety and was registered in Canada in 1980. They are good for boiling, baking, french-frying, but unsuitable for chipping. It has medium starch content and disintegrates when overcooked. Excellent for storage and holds well for long without sprouting (bonus for me).

I love their thin, smooth skin and buttery flavor. I overcooked some of the smaller pieces and the flesh separated from the prime real estate of a skin (read: roasted Yukon Gold potato skin is like flavor bling to my taste buds), into a soft, pillow-y mulch. It didn’t bother me at all because it was a nice kind of mush, and you’ll forget about it once you taste it. I should remember to buy more of these, seeing that it stores well and my sprouting russet family in a bag is testament to why I shouldn’t rely on them all the time.

Once I baked it, I tossed the thyme sprigs and the dressing while they were hot. Mmm. Once it cooled, I put some in a bowl with beet chunks and some greens and enjoyed it with a glass of chardonnay. What a great way to spend the rainy evening.

Oven-Roasted Yukon Gold Potatoes and Beets with Garlic-Lemon-Thyme Dressing

Ingredients (serves 2 to 3)

•    8 Yukon Gold potatoes, cut in quarters (or more if they are big). Try to cut them about the same size.
•    2 whole medium beets, boiled and cut into chunks the same size as the potatoes (you can boil it at the same time you are oven-roasting the potatoes)
•    1 1/2 tbsp coconut oil
•    1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
•    1 tbsp olive oil
•    3/4 tsp sea salt, divided
•    1/4 tsp fresh ground pepper, divided
•    1 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice
•    4 large cloves (or 6 medium) of garlic
•    8-10 sprigs of thyme
•    Optional: fresh greens

Preparation

1.    Pre-heat the oven to 400°F. In an oven safe glass baking dish, mix together potatoes, olive oil, 1/4 tsp ground pepper and 1/4 tsp sea salt making sure all the surfaces of the potatoes are coated with oil. Add more oil if needed. Carefully position potatoes with the flesh down, not the skin. The skin is too precious to have to stick to the pan.

2.    Place in the oven for 15 minutes then turn the potatoes and bake for another 10-15 minutes until the corners and skin of the potatoes. Total baking time depends on the sizes of your cut potatoes.

3.    In your small food processor (or magic bullet), blend together extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, 1/4 tsp salt, 1/8 tsp ground pepper, garlic cloves, and 1 1/2 tsp lemon juice. Add more salt and pepper to suit your taste I personally just add more pepper, because I like the flavor of the garlic and lemon to take center stage). Pulse until the dressing is smooth and uniform. Set aside.

4.    As soon as you take the dish out of the oven, toss in the thyme sprigs and dressing with the potatoes in the dish. Let it cool down before serving with the beets and greens.

I forgot about this recipe that should have been posted over a month ago. Today’s a lazy Sunday for me and what better way to commemorate such a fabulous day, I’m going to post a really easy recipe with a really short intro. Hope you’re enjoying your Sunday!

Baked Butter Chicken Fillets

Ingredients

• .85 lb (about .4 kg) of chicken fillet (chicken tenders sliced crosswise in half for thinner meat)
• 1/4 tsp salt, plus additional salt for sprinkling
• 1/4 tsp fresh ground pepper
• juice of a quarter of a lime
• 3 tbsps unsalted butter, softened enough to spread with a brush or spoon over meat
• 1 sprig of rosemary, remove the leaves and chop

Preparation

1.  Mix 1/4 tsp salt, pepper and lime in a medium bowl. Mix chicken in the mixture, cover with plastic wrap and marinate for half an hour in the fridge.

2. Pre-heat oven to 350°F. Take out chicken from your marinade and lay the pieces flat (smooth/pretty side up) on an oven-safe glass dish. From about a foot above the dish, lightly sprinkle the fillets with salt. Turn over, and sprinkle again.

3. Brush the top of each chicken fillet with softened butter.

4. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes. Turn off the oven and take out the baking dish. Sprinkle the chicken with rosemary and cover with aluminum foil. Place it back in the oven (still turned off) for 10 minutes. Serve with vegetables and/or rice. The chicken is tasty enough to be eaten without the need for gravy.