Chicken and rice muffins and what we learnt in home economics.

Last Friday my home economics class had our first practical. Below is the recipe that we used to cook chicken and rice patties/breakfast muffins.

Ingredients 

• 2 cups of jasmine rice
• 1 chicken breast
• 1/2 Tbsp of olive oil
• 1/2 a large carrot
• 3/4 cups of grated cheese
• 2 spring onion stalks
• 1-2 eggs

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200 C and set your rice to cook.
2. Slice chicken in half width way. This causes the chicken to cook faster.
3. Heat oil in medium heated pan. Proceed to cook chicken in pan. Once brown remove chicken from pan and shred with fork.
4. Grate carrot and finely cut your spring onion.
5.  Lightly beat your eggs then add carrots, spring onions, eggs, cooked rice, chicken, and cheese to a large bowl.
6. Spray muffin trays with cooking spray and proceed to spoon mixture into tin.
7. Sprinkle a bit of cheese on top and then cook for 15 minutes.
8.  Once finished remove from oven and let stand for a couple of minutes.

Tips for food safety

• Use the correct cutting boards for food to prevent cross contamination. Colored boards are yellow = chicken, red = red meat, green = vegetables and fruit, 
• Wash your hands and under your fingernails before you begin.
• If you are defrosting chicken for this recipe, then defrost the chicken in the fridge. While this doesn't stop bacteria from growing and multiplying it does slow it down.
• Clean your work space before placing food on the surface.

Reflection

Our first practical was fairly easy as the rice and chicken were already cooked and ready to go. This meant that all we had to do was a little bit of mise en place. Mise en place is a french word meaning "putting in place". In a professional setting mise en place is used to describe the preparation of food before you begin cooking. We had to prepare the vegetables, cheese, eggs, and then mix everything together. We also had to change the recipe as the original rice needed to be halved (which is the recipe above), and we changed how we were originally going to cut the chicken. We were going to cut horizontally and instead just sliced it in half. I really enjoyed this practical but I do hope that the next one is a little more harder.

The good things 

Some of the things that went well was our time management. When we finished we actually had a decent amount of time left. I also think that my group worked together really well and the class as a whole was behaving well and paying attention to the teacher. The patties/bruffins were also really nice.

The bad things

The only things that went wrong was the fact that some groups were a little bit messy and had trouble tidying up. Fortunately a lot of people had finished cleaning up early and were able to lend a hand.

Overall

Overall I really enjoyed this practical. I like how you can change ingredients out for something else i.e switching the carrot out for mushrooms or the chicken with for fish. Next time I'll probably add some more herbs and spices just so it doesn't taste as bland. I'll also probably have it with a nice sauce/relish i.e capsicum relish or sweet chili sauce (which I heard is very nice with this recipe). Overall I thought this practical went very well and I'm excited for the next one.