This risotto is ok and makes a huge quantity. For the first time, I typed in two ingredients into the search bar for the community to bring up recipes using those ingredients. This is a brilliant feature of the recipe community site but need to read the comments carefully before selecting a dish from the recipe community. Also have to bear in mind we had eaten a lot of chicken spread on crackers before dinner so nobody was particularly hungry when the risotto was served.
Looks like Dad is going to have alot of risotto for lunch tomorrow.
Will be using this method every week to steam chicken and shred. (See link above)
It’s so simple .. just place chicken breasts in varoma dish for 25 mins, varoma temp, speed 2. ( with a litre of water in TM bowl). Pop back into TM bowl and shred 4 sec, reverse speed 4.
Enough shredded chicken for sandwiches and salads during the week and can freeze in smaller bags to take out when needed. The recipe shredded for 7 seconds, comments below the recipe suggested 4 seconds long enough which I will follow next time to have a chunkier spread. Now it’s so easy to mix the shredded chicken with a little mayo/sour cream and herbs for chicken sandwiches. Just had as a dip after school on crackers with some chopped nuts, cucumber, and celery all chopped in the thermomix. Perfect if you don’t want to get your hands dirty!
Everyone loves food that can be picked up and eaten straight off the oven tray. This easy recipe came from Something for Everyone cookbook by Louise Fulton Keats. But found the same recipe in the recipe community, link above. Notes: Added salt to the chicken mince and used approx 500g of chicken thighs for this recipe and oven baked at 180C for 25 minutes. Next time add some hoisin sauce and sesame oil instead of tomato sauce and it will be very close to our family favourite chicken popcorn. Can just roll the balls in the crumb without coating in flour and egg first if pressed for time. Before mincing the chicken, removed any fat from the thighs ensuring the mince is as lean as possible.
Used thermomix to precook the noodles by adding boiling water and noodles to TM bowl followed the boiled pasta guided recipe. Tipped cooked noodles into a thermoserver to keep warm. Then used the chinese style stir fried vegetables guided recipe to cook vegetables ( left out chillies ). Whilst the Thermomix was cooking the vegetables, mixed sliced pork with cornflour, salt and white pepper. Fried the pork in pan, added seafood and fried altogether until cooked. Flavoured with soy sauce, salt , oyster sauce and sesame oil. Once the vegetables are cooked, combined with meat and seafood, and tossed into noodles. Notes Can add sesame oil and some toasted sesame seeds. Can add a little chicken stock, water and cornflour to make a sauce with pork and vegetables.
Used Pete Evans Family Food recipe for this Jamaican Jerk Chicken. The spices used are thyme, paprika, allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg on a base of red onion, garlic, lime and tamari. All combined in Thermomix to make a paste for marinating the chicken. Left out chillies served with salad and his green goddess dressing. Notes for next time: process spices first before adding other ingredients. Good flavour, recommend fry to seal and brown chicken first before roasting.
Super quick meal. The thermomix has made food preparation so fast that now if the meal can’t be prepared in 10 minutes, it’s usually not on the weekday menu. Finding it more difficult to recall the meals made pre thermomix. This meal is what happens when one ingredient is missing. Tonight’s dinner was supposed to be wonton soup or dumplings. The filling had been premade in the thermomix earlier but on discovery my packet of wonton wrappers was well past expiry date, had to think creatively. Stuffed peppers is one of my mums favourite meals. So I used the chicken and prawn filling to stuff halved and deseeded bell peppers. The peppers filled both layers of the.varoma tray and dish perfectly and steamed for 20 minutes at Varoma temperature. Dinner was cooked while I cleaned up. Served with rice and a small salad for the kids. Neither of them are keen on cooked capsicums yet but greedily scooped out the filling from the peppers. Delicious, the first time I made these the peppers were slightly over cooked, this time with slightly less steaming peppers still had a lovely crunch factor. Note I used 1.5 ltr hot water in the TM bowl before turning to Varoma temperature.
Steamed nasi goreng… This quirky cooking recipe by Jo Whitton is definately a healthy take on the Indonesian dish. The Varoma is used to steam vegetables and eggs while the TM bowl cooks the sauce and the rice steams in the TM basket. After 15 minutes the rice was undercooked , I would add 5 minutes extra to the cooking time next time and make sure the liquid covered the rice. Found it easier to add boiling water and microwave a few more minutes just to the rice. The overall verdict is it doesn’t really taste like nasi goreng but it was a lovely healthy meal. There’s no extra oil in frying rice and vegetables so it’s definately a “lite” flavoursome fried rice. And the thermomix chops all the vegetables so the kids ate more vegetables in this rice then they normally would. If you’re expecting authentic nasi goreng you might be disappointed but I will definately try these takes on nasi goreng again with a couple of recipe community recipes next.
Used this recipe (link above) just as a base, added some herbs and spices. Didn’t have kale to add to the patties. Was great to have easy snack and dinner food after school before kids go off to sports. Added some breadcrumbs to the mixture as the consistency was a little wet as one member commented at the bottom of the recipe. Super easy to make the patties in the thermomix.. Always test a small tsp in pan for seasoning before I make the lot.
This recipe was demonstrated at the last thermomix course. The Varoma is used to steam the pumpkin and chicken and cous cous while the bowl cooks the lentil and sweet potato soup at the same time. Some things I did wrong.. I used green lentils from a can instead of dried red lentils so the soup was a bit watery but still tasty. Should have decreased the water added. And the cous cous was still very hard after steaming so had to finish off cooking on the stove. I note this comment was made by a few other members under the recipe. The sundried tomato dip converted to dressing was quite thick but with a little water and extra olive oil was easier to mix through the salad. Will try the Italian option next time. Overall still a good meal, very healthy, and kids ate it. Great if you’re feeding a large family but you could chose to prepare just salad and dressing if you didn’t want soup.
The picture doesn’t do this meal justice. We were surprised by how flavoursome simple food like this can be, the chicken is just popped onto a few herbs and lightly seasoned and then steamed over vegetables. It’s a nice change to eat food au natural with no marinades and extra flavours. From another guided thermomix recipe, chicken velouté is a lovely meal for two reasons 1) steaming the chicken and vegetables makes this meal very light, perfect healthy gluten free summer food and 2) two courses are cooked at the same time in the thermomix within 20 minutes. Leek and potato soup cooks in the tmx bowl while the chicken and courgette and carrot tagliatelle steam in the Varoma tray above. Still can’t get over how clever this machine is, no stirring, no standing over the stove. The only tricky part is peeling the vegetables into ribbons without cutting your fingers. And the best thing is the soup and the vegetables catch any flavour from the chicken that drips from steaming into the bowl and Varoma dish. The chicken and vegetables were supposed to be topped with a creme fraiche and Dijon mustard dressing but we didn’t have any creme fraiche. We were all just happy to dip the chicken and vegetables into the soup. Left the skin on the chicken to keep it even more moist and removed it before slicing. Comments like “I really like the vegetable noodles” and “can we have this again” make this a rewarding meal that was easy to put together. Normally my kids have an aversion to cooked carrots but not this way. The leek and potato soup is delicious, so creamy and smooth, possibly mine and miss 8’s favourite thermomix soup. The only alteration I made was to cook the onions and garlic for 4 minutes instead of 3 to eliminate any raw onion flavour. Also pre cooked this meal earlier in the day and just resteamed for 10 minutes to reheat. The recipe makes a large quantity and there’s plenty leftover for lunch tomorrow. And the kids even snacked on it for afternoon tea. Another big tick for a thermomix guided recipe.
Nb if you want to cook a larger quantity of leek and potato soup, like when all we want is soup for dinner, try one of these recipes from the community. Both are fantastic and commented another post in this blog, under the heading Bacon leek and potato soup.
NZ thermomix mum's blog 