I was recently reminded about a recipe I cooked in my Angela Day days. Angela Day, for those who are old enough to remember the food section of the same name, featured in The Star newspaper. I picked up the idea on a food trip to Australia in the mid-1990s. The recipe had strong Asian influences, which at the time were fairly novel in South Africa.

I found one that prompted the memory in the recently published Loadshedding Cookbook, produced by the Woolworths Taste team — No-cook soya-poached chicken. When I first discovered the idea in Oz, the unique flavour and deliciousness of the chicken became my go-to dinner-party dish, with much applause. Imagine a juicy, tender chicken bathed in soya sauce, garlic, ginger, star anise, chilli, lemon grass and Szechuan peppercorns, the flavours permeating skin and flesh cooked until it almost fell apart and served with jasmine rice to soak up the delectable juices?

Ok, so my recipe baked slowly in the oven in the days when load-shedding didn’t exist, but the Taste one cleverly uses the Wonderbag to do the majority of the cooking.

Here’s my recipe, which can just as easily (without power) be prepared in the Wonderbag. Because it needs at least five hours in the bag, I suggest preparing it the night before or first thing in the morning to be enjoyed for dinner.