Author: Davin Lewis

Nando’s Peri-Peri Chicken Wings Recipe

by Davin LewisFood / RecipesLeave a Comment on Nando’s Peri-Peri Chicken Wings Recipe

For those who are not familiar with Nandos, it is one of our favourite food chains. It is a grilled chicken serving restaurant which lets you indulge in a variety of chicken dishes with a feeling that you are eating healthy as majority of the dishes are grilled. The restaurants have a good ambience, well sized portions and most importantly reasonably priced.

Coming to the Nando’s chain and brand, it is a South African restaurant chain that specialises in Portuguese-African food, such as peri-peri style chicken dishes. Founded in Johannesburg in 1987, Nando’s operates over 1000 outlets in 35 countries. Their logo is the famous Portuguese symbol, the Rooster of Barcelos.

A couple of weeks back after a quick registration on their site, Nando’s delivered a little fun kit with the marinade sauce, tissues, recipe card and a take way bag. On the recipe card was the step by step guide to one of my favourite dishes “PERi-PERi Wing Platter” which is described as “24 flame-grilled PERi-PERi wings” on the Nandos UK menu.

What is Peri-Peri ?

PERi-PERi, also known as the African Bird’s Eye Chilli, is the key to the flame-grilled PERi-PERi chicken.

PERi-PERi chilli seeds are rich in Vitamins A, B, and C.
They also have capsaicin, which enhances mood: your pupils dilate, your metabolic rate increases, and there’s a rush of endorphins when you consume it! PERi-PERi is also a natural preservative.

PERi-PERi when mixed with salt, garlic, lemon, onion, oil, and vinegar to goes on to make the signature sauce which is readily available at several retail stores.

Official Recipe Video

You’ll Need:

Nando’s Medium Peri-Peri Sauce
  • 12 Chicken wings
  • Nando’s Medium Peri-Peri sauce (125 ml bottle)
  • 1 tbsp baking powder
  • 1 tbsp salt

Marination Time – 1 hour or overnight

What to do:

  1. Put the wings in a bowl and rub all over with the Peri-Peri Sauce, salt and baking powder
  2. Cover the bowl with clingfilm and put in the firge for at least 1 hour to marinate, or preferably overnight.
  3. Pre – heat the oven to 180 degrees (not fan) or gas mark 4
  4. Transfer the chicken wings to a roasting tray (image of a roasting tray below this recipe)
  5. Cook for about 30 mins until the wings are just cooked.
  6. Heat up a grill pan on the stove (or fire up your BBQ!)
  7. When it’s smoking hot, put 6 wings in the grill pan
  8. Leave the wings without moving them to get Nando’s unique grill marks.
  9. Turn over once the skin has grill marks and repeat on the other side.
  10. Generously brush over your chose Nando’s sauce on both sides
  11. Turn the oven down to 100 degrees (under gas mark 1) and keep the grilled wings warm while you repeat with the remaining wings.

That is all folks, there you have it the Nando’s Peri-Peri Chicken Wings Recipe.

Roasting Tray

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Ciccionateland – a celebration of food

by Davin LewisFoodLeave a Comment on Ciccionateland – a celebration of food

Just bumped into a wonderful blog, with like minded symphony of food, travel and delightm. Ciccinateland is a blog with an intriguing name.

First dashed to it’s “What is …” page to quench my intrigue. The interesting name has an explanation, and supposedly is “a brand-new Italian slang for delicious and high-fat food.”

The author is clearly upto to something different and there is a clear departure or intent to deviate from normal. This curiosity took me to the vivid pages which cover Venice, Verona, Manchester, China & Stockholm. Indeed, a variety.

I did run through the latest article about Venice and it presents a very interesting suggestion about gelato, something that has clearly eluded me. A side of Venice, personally would not stumble into. The vivid images prove a point that the author is sincere to his subject and did enjoy the variations of gelato to his/her heart’s content.

Look forward to more such content and twists on travel and food. Just one other remarkable thing about the blog, its content was completely translatable through a simple browser, so no user difficulties there. Please do like, share and subscribe the creativity – Ciccinateland.

Mangalorean Pork Chilly Recipe

by Davin LewisFood / RecipesLeave a Comment on Mangalorean Pork Chilly Recipe

Mangalorean Pork chilly is a spicy and typical side or starter dish which sends the taste buds racing. Much to my amazement, this dish is a signature manglorean / goan dish and the google search reflects that. There are definitely other references to Chinese and Bong variations. Chinese was a more sweeter variation. Sweet and meat do not go hand in hand for me.

One of the first time I tasted this amazing dish was my last trip to Mangalore and would highly recommend visiting Managala Bar, Mangalore. It serves and amazing pork chilly with a chilled beer with an amazing ambience. For more details there is a helpful zomato link below.

You’ll Need:

  • 1 kg Pork
  • 1 Green Bell Pepper or Capscicum
  • 2- 3 medium onions
  • 6 green chillies
  • 3 tablespoons of ginger & garlic paste
  • 6 flakes garlic
  • 1 tsp bafat powder
  • 1 tsp pepper powder
  • 2 tablespoons soya sauce (Preferably Dark Soya Sauce)
  • 1 tablespoon chilli sauce / schezwan sauce
  • Salt
  • Vinegar (1 tablespoon)
  • Optional : Garnish with spring Onion

What to do:

  • If you have the luxury of a friendly butcher ensure the meat pieces are cut into small chunks or use the favourite words “curry pieces” and wash. (Some butchers will magically know what you need)
  • After washing the meat, ensure the excess water is drained in the colander.
  • Transfer it to a glass vessel and add add ginger garlic paste, salt and vinegar and let it marinate for 30 minutes at the max overnight. Marinating some food too long can result in tough, dry, or poor texture.
  • After marination boil for 20 minutes adding very little water. 
  • Optionally, once the meat cools down, if needed slice pork further into thin slices and keep aside.
  • In a pan with 3 tablespoons of oil, fry the thinly sliced onions, green bell pepper and green chillies and the flakes of garlic for 2 minutes. Once done keep aside.
  • Now in the same pan, add sufficient oil for a shallow fry, (for those who are little lost – shallow fry means the oil / fat covers only the lower part of the food in contact with the vessel.). Fry till the meat slices are light brown on both sides.  Ensure the meat is cooked while wrapping up this stage.
  • Now it is time to bring everything together, in a seperate non stick vessel add the vegetables followed by the bafat powder, pepper powder and soya sauce and chilli sauce.  Mix well. Cook on medium flame for 2 mins.
  • Add the fried meat to this saucy mixture and let it cook for 5 more minutes. 
  • Optionally garnish with spring onion.

Enjoy !

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Best options to tranfer money abroad

by Davin LewisUncategorizedLeave a Comment on Best options to tranfer money abroad

Recently stumbled on a very neat solution which compares pretty much all the options available in the market to transfer money from country to country and then produces a list of the best sites at real time. The market is flooded with options and you will be shocked to see that a good option on a particular day does not remain the same on the next day.

Firstly I would like to clearly callout this is not a paid review. Something I found really helpful and believe it help a lot of students or people who need to transfer for savings, maintenance or medical purposes.

“Monito is a comparison tool that enables people to find, compare and review money transfer services”

monito.com

Factors that influence money tranfer at real time

  • Total cost
  • Fees
  • Margin on the exchange rate

Monito search engine compares all the options and simply presents a neat view of the best options to tranfer money abroad and funny enough they do not transfer money at all and just give you links to the site.

Over and above they clearly call out the pesky promo codes which you need to hunt for ages. In short you are armed with the best options and this did save me a good amount of money and made me understand that the market.

A little sneak peak of the site –

Example : UK to India Transfer worth 1000 GBP

Other interesting views provided –

Cheapest

Fastest

Best Rated

Best Rate

They are already covering 154 countries and over 300 providers which is a massive amount of content and value.

With their experience in the industry, they have launched the Monito Score, a composite evaluation based on 56 criteria organized in seven categories:

  • Fees & Exchange Rates
  • Ease of use
  • Credibility & Security
  • Service & Coverage
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Customer support
  • Transparency

I must say I am simply in love with the solution they have delivered and very inspiring. Please do make use of it.

Money Transfer Promo Codes / Free Cash Offers

Referral Links which will give you a kick start for your tranfers with some free cash to start with.

Click on the links to get started

Terms and Conditions of the rewards are as per the money transfer sites and could change.

World Remit – Once you’ve sent 100 GBP using the above link, you’ll be emailed a 20 GBP WorldRemit voucher code

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Interacting with Google Cloud Platform

by Davin LewisCloud Computing / Google Cloud PlatformLeave a Comment on Interacting with Google Cloud Platform

There are four ways you can interact with Google Cloud Platform, each of them are listed below :

  1. GCP Console
  2. SDK and Cloud Shell
  3. Mobile App
  4. APIs. 

 1. GCP Console

  • The GCP Console is a web-based administrative interface. If you build an application in GCP, you will interact with it and not exposed to the end users of your app.
  • It lets you view and manage all your projects and all the resources they use. 
  • It also lets you enable, disable and explore the APIs of GCP services. 
  • It gives you access to Cloud Shell. 

2. A. Cloud Shell

That’s a command-line interface to GCP that’s easily accessed from your browser. 

From Cloud Shell, you can use the tools provided by the Google Cloud Software Development kit SDK, without having to first install them somewhere.

2. B. Google Cloud SDK – Software Development Kit 

The Google Cloud SDK is a set of tools that you can use to manage your resources and your applications on GCP. 

These include the gcloud tool, which provides the main command line interface for Google Cloud Platform products and services. 

 GSUTIL

gsutil is a Python application that lets you access Cloud Storage from the command line. You can use gsutil to do a wide range of bucket and object management tasks, including:

  • Creating and deleting buckets.
  • Uploading, downloading, and deleting objects.
  • Listing buckets and objects.
  • Moving, copying, and renaming objects.
  • Editing object and bucket ACLs.

BQ

bq is a python-based, command-line tool for BigQuery.

A virtual machine with all these commands is already installed. You can also install the SDK on your own computers – your laptop, your on-premise servers of virtual machines and other clouds. The SDK is also available as a docker image, which is a really easy and clean way to work with it.  

3. API’s

The services that make up GCP offer application programming interfaces so that the code you write can control them. These APIs are what’s called RESTful. In other words they follow the representational state transfer paradigm. 

Basically, it means that your code can use Google services in much the same way that web browsers talk to web servers. 

The APIs name resources and GCP with URLs. Your code can pass information to the APIs using JSON, which is a very popular way of passing textual information over the web. 

And there’s an open system for user log in and access control. The GCP Console lets you turn on and off APIs. 

Many APIs are off by default, and many are associated with quotas and limits. These restrictions help protect you from using resources inadvertently. 

You can enable only those APIs you need and you can request increases in quotas when you need more resources. 

The GCP Console includes a tool called the APIs Explorer that helps you learn about the APIs interactively. It lets you see what APIs are available and in what versions. 

These APIs expect parameters and documentation on them is built in. You can try the APIs interactively even with user authentication. Suppose you have explored an API and you’re ready to build an application that uses it. Google provides client libraries that take a lot of the drudgery out of the task of calling GCP from your code. 

 Libraries

There are two kinds of libraries. 

  • Cloud Client Library
  • Google API Client Library

The Cloud Client Libraries are Google clouds latest and recommended libraries for its APIs. They adopt the native styles and idioms of each language.  Google Cloud Client Libraries are our latest and recommended client libraries for calling Google Cloud APIs. They provide an optimized developer experience by using each supported language’s natural conventions and styles. They also reduce the boilerplate code you have to write because they’re designed to enable you to work with service metaphors in mind, rather than implementation details or service API concepts. 

On the other hand, sometimes a Cloud Client Library doesn’t support the newest services and features. In that case, you can use the Google API Client Library for your desired languages. These libraries are designed for generality and completeness. 

Following are the Cloud Client Libraries available,

  1. Java
  2. Node.js
  3. Python
  4. C#
  5. Go
  6. Ruby
  7. PHP

 Mobile App

There’s a mobile App for Android and iOS that lets you examine and manage the resources you’re using in GCP. 

It lets you build dashboards so that you can get the information you need at a glance.

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Casereccia Pollo Piccante

by Davin LewisFood / RecipesLeave a Comment on Casereccia Pollo Piccante

Considering the overwhelming response to our first blog article on one of my favourite pasta recipes – Strozzapreti Pesto Rosso, it is only apt that we tempt your taste buds with another special one. An Italian chicken pasta preparation which adds to our another favourite to the collection. Most importanty can cook this beauty in under 8 to 10 minutes, with all the ingredients chopped & in hand.

Whenever I visit a Zizzi restaurant in the UK, my choice is pretty clear for mains it is reserved between two types of pastas and one rissoto. Call me predicatable. But they are clearly irrestiable. A quick peak into my “main” targets.

Strozzapretti Pesto Rosso – Spicy chicken, red pesto, mascarpone & spring onions.

Casereccia Pollo Piccante – Spicy harissa chicken in a creamy sauce with heritage tomatoes & spinach.

Risotto Pesce – King prawns, mussels & squid rings, with tomato, chilli & white wine.

Breaking Down the Recipe

Casareccia Pasta is a Sicilian twisted tube-shaped pasta. From the end, it looks like an “S.”
Its shape catches and holds sauce very well. This helps to make it a particularly good pasta for baking, as there is less chance of it being dry.

Piccante represents spicy hot or sharp and I believe it used to refer to the roasted chilli half which is used to dress the dish finally.

You’ll Need:

Serves 1 :

  • 200 gram Casareccia Pasta
  • Cooking oil
  • Torn Cooked Spicy Chicken
  • 5 Cherry Plum Tomatoes
  • 10 gram Harissa Sauce
  • 115ml Double Cream
  • Salt
  • Peper
  • Spinach
  • Roasted Chilli Half

What to do:

  • Tear your chicken breast in to small pieces – and lightly coat with chilli paste (at times I make use of sirancha sauce or schezwan sauce, ensure it is used in moderation, as it will affect the taste of the dish).
  • For added flavour season the chicken with freshly ground pepper and a little salt.
  • In a pan, add the olive oil and sauté the chicken breast for about a minute or two. Ensure the chicken is cooked.
  • Take 200 gram casareccia pasta cook the same for 8 to 10 minutes seperately in boiled water with salt. Once it is cooked drain the pasta and mix with table spoon of olive oil in a strainer and leave to settle aside.
  • Add 5 cherry plum tomatoes and stir in the pan.
  • Add 10 gram harissa sauce and stir for a minute.
  • Add 115ml double cream and stir for a minute.
  • Mix all the ingredients together until the cream turns a nice orange colour
  • Add salt and paper to taste.
  • Reduce the sauce as per your favoured consistency.
  • Finally add the cooked pasta into the pan and add few leaves of spinach
  • Add a roasted chilli half to decorate the dish.
  • Voila! You have the beautiful Casereccia Pollo Piccante ready in under 10 minutes (if you have all the ingredients ready)

Live in action:

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