Braised Chinese Chestnut Chicken

by Liv | Feb 11, 2013

Braised Chinese Chestnut Chicken

Hello everyone, I’m back!

It has been a very long time since my last blog post. I’ve finally completed my Lauriston Castle 2013 workshop brochure for Edinburgh council. That project went very well and I’ve learnt a lot and gained a lot of interesting and valuable experience working as an illustrator. Here is the link for the images I created for this brochure. Please have a look if you have interest.

My life has been very busy with Amelia, work, college and building up my freelance illustrator business. A lot of the time I really wish I have 36 hours in a day instead of 24 hours. Because of deadlines for various projects as well as work and family commitments I haven’t even been able to celebrate Chinese New Year this year. But even though I didn’t celebrate Chinese New Year in the traditional way I still managed to cook a couple really simple recipes, one of which I’ll share with you now.

Do you remember my Chinese new year dishes last year? I explained that Chinese people like foods that have a lucky meaning behind them, especially when celebrating Chinese New Year.

Today’s dish is Braised Chinese Chestnut Chicken. In Chinese language, chestnut is pronounced “li-zi” (栗子) and “Li” sounds like the other Chinese word, which means “profit” also could mean “mean”. So people will feel really happy when they have this dish in Chinese new year dinner.

Here is the recipe for Braised Chinese Chestnut Chicken and I hope you will be very happy, very healthy in this coming year.

Braised Chinese Chestnut Chicken

Course Main Dish

Prep Time 10 minutes

Cook Time 20 minutes

Total Time 30 minutes

Servings 3 people

Ingredients

8 chicken thighs de-bone and cut into big dice
1 pack chestnut I like Merchant Gourmand whole peeled chestnuts
2 pieces ginger
3 spring onion
3 cloves garlic

Seasonings

1/2 cup soy sauce
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp salt
1 cup rice wine
2 tbsp water

Instructions

Heat up 1 table spoon oil in the wok and stir fry ginger, spring onion and garlic. Add sugar in the wok when you can smell the fragrant.
Add chicken after the sugar is melted. Stir fry it until chicken’s colour turn into golden brown.
Add all the seasonings and boil it. Add chestnut once the sauce is boiled.
Reduce down the sauce until it’s nearly dry and it’s ready to serve.

Liv Wan Illustration

by Liv | Sep 30, 2012

If you follow this blog, as a lot of you will know I have spent quite a few years working as a professional chef. While I love working as a chef and love working with food, love working with my colleagues and so forth, starting a family has made me have serious thoughts about my future.

Working as a chef can be great but it involves long hours, up to 70 hours a week, in a really busy environment with few breaks. Last year I made the decision to go back to college to study Illustration, one of my other main loves apart from food, to see if I’m any good and to see if I can start working as a freelance illustrator.

Naturally creating works as an illustrator is completely different to anything I’ve done before. Creating works takes a lot longer than say, take a photograph or cook a meal, but I find it a really therapeutic process and this is what I want to do full time somewhere in the future. The illustration work I do is also one of the reasons I don’t update this blog as often as before. With having a six month old daughter who demands attention whenever she’s awake, my husband is out working nearly all the time now and with college I’ve been struggling to cook any new dishes. Most of the food we eat nowadays is much simpler than before, things like fried rice, chow mein, beef noodle soup, these are fairly normal dishes for us.

As and when time allows I’ll be updating this blog also and I have some time off from college soon so I’ll be cooking a lot more dishes. Also Amelia is much easier to manage nowadays. I’m sure I mentioned elsewhere she’s now going to nursery which has been an absolute god-send. This means for good periods of time both Chris and myself can focus on work (more so for him giving me free time in the evenings) and get everything done that we need to.

So to end this blog post, I’ve created an illustration website, Liv Wan Illustration showcasing my work. I got a little help with the coding from Chris but everything on the website was designed by myself from all the illustrations, the layout and the buttons. The link for the site is right below but I hope you like my work and really appreciate feedback about my work and website. If you’re also interested in commissioning me please get in touch.

My website: Liv Wan Illustration

Below are some of the works from my website. The website is being constantly updated as I have new work to put on it but my style is bold, colourful and often humorous. Hope you like.

Ma Po Tofu Sichuan Recipe

by Liv | Sep 23, 2012