Recipe testing

I've spent today - well, part of today - making a green curry. It's to test a recipe for the new Leon cookbook (which I may have mentioned 80 or 90 times), which is out in September.

I asked if I could write about it, because I like nothing more than sneak previews, and they said hell yes! Write about it! But don't include the recipe. And I thought, oh right. Um. So I've done some really blog-worthy cooking but I can't give you the details.

But I think I can get around it by saying that if you were to add three good lumps of green curry paste to about 200ml of coconut milk and stir in strips of chicken and some bamboo shoots and a slug of nam pla - or fish sauce - and some soya beans and then cook it for about 10 minutes you might get something really delicious. I have changed the recipe very slightly so this is NOT the one from the Leon cookbook, but it may very well bear similarities.

I have also today been reading up on Thomas Keller's deep-fried chicken that was so out of this world, which I'm going to make tomorrow night for the deep fat fryer's last hurrah before it goes to Oxfam.

The secret, I read, is to brine the chicken in a salty mixture for 12 hours before cooking. I really don't know what the rule is about copying recipes out on blogs. I've done it before and no-one seemed to care, but Keller is American and therefore I fear he may be wildly litigious. Anyway, I'm just going to go for it and hope that it's just totally fine. Or that no-one notices.