January results: What’s in the box?

Can you believe it? A week has whizzed by already and it’s time to unveil what January’s What’s in the box? champs cooked up. We hear they delighted at the opportunity to throw caution to the wind and cook up meals fit for friends (and kings).

You’ll recall that both of our parties received a box containing the following:

Barrett’s Ridge Beer Bread and beer
Chicken
Tomatoes
Mangoes
Sweet potatoes

What did Sam make?

Sam is one of our customer service champs here at Yuppiechef. She decided to cook a chicken curry with basmati rice and mango salsa. Nice, hey?

‘An eager-to-be-chopped coriander bush, making a nuisance of itself on the balcony, and the warm summer rain, were responsible for inspiring notions of a sweet and tangy curry. The fruit bowl, containing one lonely pineapple and two bananas, formed the accompanying cast of salsa and side serving.

The bird, as a whole, wasn’t going to cook very quickly so we dismembered and skinned the chicken and along with a little butter, set it on its way to cook in a large pot. We diced up the sweet potatoes and some onions and added those to the pot to simmer in the juices.’  Follow Sam’s recipe here.

What did Tudor make?

Tudor Caradoc-Davies is one of our regular contributors here at Yuppiechef. He’s a pretty phenomenal writer, drawn to stories about travel, food and interesting people. He’s also an agony uncle. Fact. Tudor used his ingredients to make braaied spatchcock Asian chicken with twin-tuber fries and a Sri Lankan inspired braai-salat.

Inspired by Anthony Worral-Thompson from the original Ready Steady Cook TV show, I was tempted to grow a beard overnight and develop a lisp, but it seemed more pertinent to apply my mind to the box. Merely opening it was a minor thrill considering it’s been a month since Christmas. There were six people coming for dinner so I bought two more thigh portions of free range chicken and added a few conventional potatoes, vine tomatoes, baby aubergines, spring onions and chillies into the mix. For the mangoes, I knew I wanted to do something interesting. I lived in Germany for a bit and something I admired about the Germans was how they would call anything a ‘salat’, even if it was cold shredded wiener drowned in mayonnaise. Follow Tudor’s recipe here.

What did you make with these 5 ingredients?

Our first What’s in the box? post last week generated such a buzz of eagerness, that we’re working on turning this concept into something even bigger and more dynamic. It seems the urge to cook with reckless abandon is strong among us all. Watch this space for future challenge sign-ups.