Pri Pri Sauce

I'd repeatedly heard from my coeliac support group that Nando's sauce was gluten free, and craving some of that Nando's taste, included a bottle in my online grocery shopping only to find that it contained 'lactose' (the bane of the lactose intolerant, and an extract of milk for all out allergic people, like me) and was made "in a factory that handles everything your allergic to, why didn't you read the label?!".

So, no matter what anyone tells you, always read the label.

Fortunately, it's pretty easy to make pri pri sauce. The following is adapted from various online recipes and tweaked to resemble the Nando's label recipe, which adds some extra herbs, tomato paste and uses molasses instead of sugar. I've used vinegar instead of lemon juice since I had that to hand and the majority of recipes called for it, but if you're trying to duplicate Nando's, use the same quantity of lemon juice.

Ingredients: 

• Red chillies. This is a very personal taste, so use your best judgement for how hot you and your guests can handle it. I used some pre-chopped chillies which are a lot less hot than fresh so felt ok to use half a teaspoon, which was still not hot enough so I tossed in some Cayenne pepper later. 
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• half a teaspoon of molasses
• 1 tsp kosher salt (chunky sea salt)
• 1/2 tsp oregano
• 1/2 basil
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tbsp sweet paprika
• 1/4 tsp smoked paprika - this also adds heat. Factor this in when adding your chillies! You can skip this if you like, I just added it to give the sauce more depth.
• 100ml olive oil
• 50ml cider vinegar, or red or white wine vinegar.

Method:
Heat olive oil in a frying pan and gently fry the chillies, garlic and onion, then add the paprika. Add the tomato paste, and all other ingredients and simmer for 5 minutes, then allow the mixture to cool and put into jar. This recipe develops more flavour if it's left a day or two to mature but it can also be used straight away as a marinade.

Sweet Moorish Pilaf

This is an easily convertible recipe from veggie to non-veggie depending on your mood or diet preferences. I try and make sure I have at least two meat free days a week so I like the option of beefing up the protein content with nuts for meat free days, or chicken for meat days. You could go all out and add both if you like, but I usually try and not over-use nuts in case I become sensitised to that too, so I probably won't be doing that too often.

This recipe is taken from the lovely book Quiet Food, which generously considers it's contents copyright free.

Ingredients:

• 250 ml white rice
• 25 ml butter replacement or olive oil
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 600 ml vegetable stock
• 1 star anise (whole)
• 5ml tumeric
• 250 ml peas, fresh or frozen
• 125 ml chopped dried apricots (or peaches)
• 125 ml chopped dates
• 15 ml lemon juice
• 5 ml sugar
• 30 ml chopped fresh mint
• (optional) cashews or toasted almonds
• (optional) 2 chicken breasts, sliced thin
• salt, to taste

Method:

1. Gently sauté the onion in the butter until soft
2. If using chicken, fry gently until brown and set chicken aside
3. Add the crushed garlic and cook for another two minutes while stirring
4. Add the rice, stock, dates, apricots, turmeric and star anise (add chicken back back to pan now, if using)
5. Simmer for 10 minutes until almost dry
6. add the peas and steam until there is no more stock in the bottom of the saucepan
7. garnish with mint and serve

Chickpeas also work well in the vegetarian version of this recipe to add texture alongside the nuts.