Chicken with Coconut and Sesame Sauce

This easy and delicious dish has a slightly Asian flavour but it’s not overwhelming. It uses coconut milk, sesame oil and lemon juice to make a thick sauce that’s a wonderful base for the other ingredients.

I’ve used chicken and sugar snap peas here, but you could equally well do a completely veggie version, and use something like baby marrow, spinach, sweet potato, butternut, carrot or a mixture of just about any other veggies. I’m not sure about beef, but I can imagine that pieces of pork with veggies would also work really well.

Star Ingredient: Coconut Oil

I first heard about coconut oil when I attended a raw food course run by Soaring Free Superfoods a few years ago. It’s a key raw ingredient and is known as a ‘superfood’ as it’s so good for you. It’s not only for raw food ‘cooking’ though – it’s extremely versatile and I use it all the time in many different ways.

Coconut oil has been widely used in the East for thousands of years, but here in the West we have been lagging a bit behind (as usual with this sort of thing). For many years, we were told that all saturated fat is bad for us and causes high cholesterol. Research has now more finely tuned this information though and, as it turns out, it’s only long-chain saturated fat that’s harmful.