100: Chicken with vermouth, tarragon and cream, p143

Recipe 100!! I WILL finish this challenge this year...

A nice creamy, herby sauce, made super creamy by the addition of lots and lots of cream... Yum! Lots of tarragon, and finally used the tarragon vinegar I made back in January again. Phew, just the remaining 90% of the bottle to get through... Took longer than 15-20mins to cook the chicken thighs through, nearer 30-40mins, and the sauce got very thick and started to brown, but hey, it all tasted darned good. Served with new potatoes and steamed baby spinach.

97: Grilled chicken with garlic and lemon butter, p262, and 98: (A lunch of) baked tomatoes, p221

And I'm over HALFWAY!!! :)

184 recipes - 98 done! And it's only just July - phew!

The recipe specified poussin, irrespective of the title, and poussin is what I got! Albeit one poussin instead of four, only me home for dinner this evening.

Ooooh, poussin! A revelation! So sweet, and succulent. 30mins under a fairly low grill and it was perfectly done. Scrummy. Probably didn't need the herby lemon butter, as it was plenty moist enough (grilled with the skin on, oil in the marinade), but that was good too. Spatchcocking was easy ('ask your butcher to do it' Nigel?) - easy peasy couple of snips with a poussin, didn't need to have got the poultry shears out.

And the tomatoes were scrummy - very simple, and very similar to these ones from last month, just with parmesan (or Grana Padano...) on top. Like the rosemary too.

80: Roast chicken wings with lemon and cracked pepper, p138, and 81: Sweet and sticky chicken wings, p323

Two-in-one here - two recipes using chicken wings in the book, so I made both, and roasted the chicken wings (and thighs) in two separate roasting tins. Scrummy, tasty, sticky wings, as promised, but would definitely have benefited from being left to marinate for a few hours as the flavour was mainly on the skin and so the meat underneath was fairly plain - especially the lemony ones, where the lemon was a bit too subtle, we both thought.

Served with mangetout and homemade new potato oven chips.

77: Grilled chicken with lemon and couscous, p258, and 78: Zucchini cakes with dill and feta, p228

Another nice, fresh tasting, summery salad to go with recipes 75 and 76. I didn't have a preserved lemon. I did have some - I bought a whole jar of the damn things some time ago (they only come in huge jars...) but the wretched things had gone a little... furry... at the back of the fridge (note to self: look inside jars at back of the fridge when cleaning aforementioned fridge...), so ditched that idea midway through the recipe (too late to turn back now!) and added a bit more fresh lemon, in the form of a bit of the flesh, not just the juice. I can imagine the salty, intense lemony flavour of the preserved lemon would have been better and would have been good, but there are limits. Esp when grilling chicken, roasting aubergine, frying zucchini cakes, and toasting pine nuts, all at the same time...

Now, the courgette cakes. Not great. Ultimately I wouldn't make them again. Nor choose them on a menu. However, if served them at a vegetarian friend's house, I believe I would be able to eat them. They weren't as bad as I thought they might be, so was pleasantly surprised. Too courgettey, too dill-y, and too feta-y, if I was asked for specifics, but that rules out all the main ingredients, which is a shame... On the plus side, they didn't fall apart as easily as the recipe suggested and I made nice little round cakes, only slightly 'chargrilled' on the one side (see above mentioned multi-tasking issues). The chutney they were served with was a good thing, went really well, but possibly because it disguised some of the courgette taste. And feta. And dill. Apricot jam probably would have had a similar effect.

65: Chicken and rice salad, p187

Am on a roll! Today used up some of the roast chicken from the other night in another salad to take to work. This one certainly didn't look very special - predominantly being rice and chicken, it was rather beige, and only a few bits of red chilli to jazz it up - no leaves*! Not even coriander (which I don't have anyway!). The fish sauce and lime went beautifully together, as always, but I would put more chilli in in the future as there wasn't as much kick as I'd have liked. And some coriander :)

*Except the mint, there was a small amount of mint in there... which went rather nicely with the savoury/sweet/zinginess of the other ingredients.

63: A chicken roasted with new garlic and a fresh pea pilau to go with it, p184

Yuuuuuum. Can't beat a roast chicken. Especially not on a weeknight, what a treat! I had the cunning idea of chopping the legs/wings off and freezing them to use another day for other recipes, since it was only me and T for dinner - and having the added advantage of meaning the chicken cooked quicker too, about an hour plus 30mins resting. Perfick! Who says a roast is a faff and takes loads of time?

This was a very easy, quick way of roasting the bird, very similar to how I normally do it (upside down to start with, stops the breast meat drying out, and then right way up for last 30mins or so to crisp up on top), but rubbed with oil instead of butter as I usually use. Really super tasty, crisp skin - not sure that's a good thing though, as it means I eat more of it...

The new (green) garlic was amazing. Bit of a faff to parboil it first, and it ended up burning in the pan around the chicken anyway - not sure what I did wrong there, but it was a shame, and meant there wasn't much squidging of soft roasted garlic to be done, but it did manage to massively infuse the chicken and the gravy with incredible garlickiness. Yum! The gravy was amazing - mostly alcohol, and what wasn't alcohol was garlic :) Good times.

The pea pilau was a mini cheat... instead of fresh peas (in May?? Yes, I should be trying to be more seasonal... this recipe is from June in the book...) I used Bird's Eye's finest... but they were petit pois! And they are peas. Honestly, does it really matter that much? Hmm. Maybe it does? Ho hum. Ignorance is bliss. And the pilau was a different, but very good, accompaniment to the chicken. And the gravy. Mmm. Did I mention how good the gravy was?

62: A crisp salad for a cold day, p343

Have been slacking again, I'm afraid - a long family weekend, a conference abroad for much of a week, and returning home to find there's no food in the flat, let alone Nigel-style food, makes for a poor show. Must step things up again! (Ignoring the fact that the next two weekends are chocka too... weeknights it is then!). Order has been restored, with the arrival of half of the contents of Tescos being delivered yesterday, including such goodies as lamb steaks, lamb chops, a chicken, pork spare ribs, chorizo, new (green) garlic, kaffir lime leaves, taleggio cheese, etc, ready for some serious Nige'ing (To Nige: I Nige, You Nige, He/She/It Niges).

This was a bit of a cop-out, but I needed lunch to take in for work... Simple enough salad, crisp as the title would suggest, and cold day provided (where has May gone???) although I felt this could have been optional... It was fine for a lunch but didn't knock my socks off (more chilli needed, I think...), and although the very gingery and shalloty dressing was rather nice I'm sure it hung around a little more than was perhaps welcome...

I must also confess, I had the missing ingredient problem again. Halfway through preparation (more than halfway actually) I found that the coriander plant had died and gone to the compost heap in the sky some weeks ago, and what was masquerading as coriander on the windowsill, tucked behind the flat leaf parsley, was infact... another pot of flat leaf parsley. Why have I got two pots of flat leaf parsley? More importantly, what kind of dufus can't distinguish between flat leaf parsley and coriander?? Me, clearly. Embarrassed. But a quick google made me feel better, apparently they can look VERY similar... :(

So we ditched the coriander and imagined fresh coriander sprinkled on top whilst eating it. I did consider walking into town during lunch to get some coriander... but ditched the idea. Maybe it would have lifted the end result from being a fine lunch to something scrummy. Maybe... but for now it was just a good leftover user-upper.

40: Grilled chicken with harissa and mint, p203, and 41: A tomato curry, p292

Had two friends round for dinner on Friday night and even though one brought the starter and the other brought the pudding, I managed to get two recipes in. Think they were initially a bit bemused about the challenge but they liked the idea, and the food was definitely a success. The chicken was very simple - I'd normally marinate the chicken overnight but the recipe said just to roll the boned chicken legs in it before grilling. Yum yum yum. Very simple, but good grub - especially with the simple salad suggested in the book - spinach dressed with toasted pine nuts, lime juice and oil, and the tomato curry on the side. The tomato curry was easy too, and tasty, although it came out a bit more liquid than I expected. If I'd had a bit longer, and I wasn't following the recipe to the letter, I'd probably have reduced it down a bit. I like the idea of adding the fresh tomatoes whole and letting them cook and collapse down by themselves, saves some chopping! Served with some homemade naan breads (not a Nigel recipe, but out of the book for my breadmaker) - another new recipe, and soo easy, and really scrummy. Nearly forgot to take a photo - hence the 'half-devoured' pictures below...

36: Chicken with mustard seed and coconut milk, p110

Another deceptive recipe title - this one is a lovely spicy, creamy chicken curry, with quite a kick to it! I reduced the quantities (a whole, jointed chicken, for a recipe serving three?), so used two red chillis instead of three, but it was still rather fiery. Gorgeous tumeric yellow sauce with chunks of red from the chillis and tomatoes, and dark green from the curry leaves. I used the legs/thighs/wings/the inner fillets from a whole chicken, saved the main breast meat for another day, and used the carcass to make a few bottles of good stock for the freezer (I use empty coke/juice bottles to store stock/thin soups in, fit nicely in the freezer and divides it up into c.500ml aliquots nicely). Apart from the fact there's only two of us, I couldn't fit a whole jointed chicken, plus all the other ingredients for this recipe, into my biggest casserole - a large Denby one. Nigel must have some pretty hefty dishes in his kitchen!

24: Chicken patties with rosemary and pancetta, p39, and 25: Roast pumpkin and spicy tomato sauce, p47

More little patties - Nigel does like his patties, burgers, meatballs, fishcakes, etc. I don't often make them as I like to prepare food quite quickly and simply, and chopping everything up, mincing the meat if it's not minced already, mixing, chilling, shaping, then cooking... always seems like a lot of extra steps and extra washing up to do for an okay return, but just as good as doing something simpler. Maybe when I've got a decent sized kitchen, with more than 2ft of half-depth worksurface and a dishwasher, I'll change my mind! Or maybe some more of these recipes will start to convert me... the pork patties from a few weeks ago were mighty fine...

These chicken ones were very tasty, but not as good as the pork patties - I think we like our chilli too much! Not being able to find minced chicken anywhere, and preferring to use slightly better quality chicken anyway, I used the breast meat from the chicken I jointed on Friday and minced it up in the chopper pot of my Braun Multiquick. Love my Multiquick - had it for years, and got the metal one instead of the plastic one for about £20 when Boots clearly made a mistake and mispriced it, it was selling for about £70 at the time. It's perfect for when you need to chop/blend/mix slightly smaller amounts than if cooking for more than 2-4 people, or just dealing with one ingredient. I make breadcrumbs, blend soups, whisk egg whites, mince meat, chop herbs/onions etc (if doing more than a few).

The raw mixture was quite crumbly and wasn't holding together very well (bits of onion falling out everywhere) so I was worried they wouldn't keep their shape, but after making little patties and leaving them to one side for 30mins as in the recipe, they did actually firm up fine and could be popped in the pan easily. I quite liked the method of browning them quickly on the hob and then braising them in the oven, in some of the chicken stock made the other day, which gave a thin gravy to serve.

Served with the roast pumpkin (actually butternut squash - the half leftover from the pumpkin soup last week), roasted in the oven with tomatoes, garlic and chilli. I left the tomatoes pretty much as they came out of the oven, very slightly mashed, rather than chopping them too much as they were so hot and we were hungry!! Very yummy indeed, but T's squash aversion continues. He did have a little though and ate the tomatoes (doesn't like cooked tomatoes, unless in a tomatoey sauce), but he left most of the little heap of squash I gave him. Luckily I think there's only one more squash/pumpkin-based recipe left...

21: Chicken stew and mash, p80, and 22: Hot chocolate puddings, p52

Oh my... the pudding, the pudding!! But before that... the main...

I was going to make this yesterday, thinking it would be a nice warming tummy-pleaser to pop in the oven before going to the gym, but when I went to put the chicken in the marinade early afternoon, I realised the recipe said to leave it for 4-5 hours minimum, preferably overnight, before browning the meat and softening the leeks etc etc, and then two hours in the oven. Not really enought time, oops. So I popped the meat in the marinade and then left it in the fridge until this evening - and boy, did the orange infuse into the meat!!

I didn't use a whole jointed chicken in this, as per the recipe, since it's only the two of us and I'm rather enjoying cooking more recipes rather than having lots of leftovers... this may change once my new job starts on the 1st February :)

I always buy a whole chicken instead of chicken pieces/fillets and joint it - saves a lot of money, can buy better quality chicken in the first place instead of nasty water-filled pieces, and get the carcass at the end to make stock with. Yum! It's a bit of a faff but when I'm at work all week, it makes me feel productive on a Sunday afternoon, to joint a chicken, pop some in the fridge to use in the next couple of days and the rest in the freezer, and brew up a litre or two of good stock and then make soup for lunches during the week...

This recipe made a very tasty stew indeed, with the meat falling off the bone, with soft leeks and melting garlic, and cannellini beans breaking up the richness. It's always a good sign when T eats the pulses/lentils in a dish! There's a good amount of gubbins* left in the pot, which I will probably eat as a soup, I think, but not as much as in the lamb shanks dish the other night.

And then on to the pud... Which was a bit of an afterthought actually. I decided T needed a treat after a busy week, along with the bottle of Cab Sav to go with dindins. I've had some upsetting failures with whipping egg whites in the past - teeniest bit of grease/yolk in the bowl with the whites and they won't whip up... so didn't tell T that I was making a pud until it was definitely looking like it might work... But it did, and a lot of top notch dark chocolate, butter, and a blob of chocolate spread later, mmmmmm!!! Perfect gooey melty chocolate fondants out of the oven for afters! They were incredibly rich though, so maybe a dollop of fruit on the side, raspberries or something, perhaps gently stewed up, would be rather nice...

Update: The next day, the chocolate fondants are actually even better cold! They've sunk in the middle, but have taken on the consistency of dense chocolate fudge cake... mmmmm!!!! 

* gubbins - another family technical term, referring to the bits and bobs, veggies, oniony pieces, sauce, and juices, left in the dish after a casserole/pot roast.

20: Chicken with mushrooms and lemon grass, p107

OOOOOOOOOOOOhhh, this was good. The name of the recipe is somewhat uninspiring and does this little stirfry a great disservice - it's a scrummy, zingy, fresh-tasting mixture, with lots of garlic and ginger, plus a little red chilli and a good kick of lemongrass, and that delicious but-don't-inhale-too-deeply salty-meatiness given by a good glug of nam pla. Served on steamed basmati rice, and many contented 'mmmm's all round...

 

10: Sauteed chicken with spice, fennel and cream, p367

I bought a fennel bulb last weekend, hoping to make 'a salad of fennel, winter leaves and Parmesan', the second recipe in the book. I've scoured the shops and searched online and it looks like I'm going to have to buy some online which will take weeks what with the lack of post at the moment (serious ice here, and no post for 4-5 days now)... unless I make some! I have tarragon, I have cider vinegar/red wine vinegar/white wine vinegar. many many recipes for tarragon vinegar online, but they all take a couple 2-3 weeks minimum so the salad recipe will have to wait for a while (and another bulb of fennel). Trekking around West London seems like a lot of effort for 1 tbsp of tarragon vinegar, but it's used in the 'Chicken with vermouth, tarragon and cream' recipe later in the book, and I'm not going to substitute! So I've got a bottle of tarragon vinegar brewing gently in the wine cupboard... ready in a couple of weeks :)

So, what to do with a spare fennel bulb, Nigel? He clearly likes the stuff - there are 5 recipes using it in the Diaries. Unfortunately I don't like fennel - toooooo aniseedy - so it's going to be fun. Maybe I'll start to like it during the course of this year!

Tonight's dinner therefore, a mild spicy/mustardy creamy chicken dish. Very easy - well seasoned chicken legs/thighs panfried in a little oil until scrummyly crispy and golden, sauteed fennel, lightly cooked spice paste, and a good dollop of cream. Lovely jubbly. And the fennel added a nice texture and it's very distinctive flavour was definitely there but wasn't too overpowering. Success!

I didn't have any chilli powder (I have a huge range of spices and herbs, but only dried chillis, chilli flakes, cayenne pepper etc) - so I ground up some tiny dried chillis in the pestle and mortar, along wit the other spices. Probably made it a bit hotter than chilli powder would have done, oops!  

I also took the opportunity to try out my new toy from Lakeland. I love Lakeland :) It's a microwave rice steamer - woohoo! Okay, I know rice isn't exactly difficult to cook, but I find is a bit stressful trying to make it really nice and fluffy (ie. weighing and using the right volume of water, yadda yadda) as I'm often in the middle of something else and get distracted so it gets stuck to the pan... or if I do the loads of water and drain it at the end option, it just ends up a bit soggy and disappointing... All this is is a big clear pot with a removable pot inside, slightly raised up and with holes in it, and a lid. Rinse the rice in the inner pot, pop it in the larger pot, add boiling water from the kettle to just cover the rice, pop lid on, stick it in the microwave for 10mins, stirring halfway though. Ta-daaaaa! And it works perfectly! Nice light, fluffy rice, perfectly cooked, no mess, eaaasy peasy :) Am I lazy, or am I lazy?

7: Chicken salad with watercress, almonds and orange, p85, and 8: Bulghur wheat with aubergines and mint, p19

Dinner tonight is going to finish off the roast chicken in a meaty, wintery salad, with one of the veggie recipes as an accompaniment, as T's going to be home from work late, with lots of snow still around and bulghur wheat and aubergine alone wouldn't exactly be likely to enthrall :) I'm off to pilates beforehand so looking forward to something a bit lighter and refreshing for dinner.

Why is Nigel Slater not fat??? Leaving aside the number of cake recipes in the book, the quantities, the quantities!!! Both recipes today are down as serving two (albeit with seconds for the bulghur wheat with aubergines...) - you'd have to eat huge portions to eat either of these in one sitting, but hey! They went together well, as T said, although the almonds in the salad seemed a bit pointless (and enormous) what with pumpkin seeds in there already adding crunch.

The bulghur wheat recipe will make a good lunchbox meal in the future, and the salad will definitely be one to make again in the summer with leftover roast chicken...

5: Chicken broth with noodles, lemon and mint, p22

Using up the rest of the chicken broth and some of the roast chicken from Sunday - really zingy, quick soup, which was really rather nice - will definitely make this again, and will have to because I forgot to take a piccie of this one. Apparently the recipe is 'enough for 2 as a main dish' but I made half the volume and it was plenty for both of us for lunch - and more meat than I'd normally put in a soup, so a happy carnivorous hubby, even with though it included coriander, which he hates.

Clear soups like this remind me of 'UFO soups' from a family holiday to Austria many many years ago. We stayed in a little family run guest house in Soll, Tirol, where every night they served a different (?) very salty consomme/broth with what we termed 'Unidentified Floating Objects' which became a family game each evening trying to work out what they were (tiny mushrooms, spring onions, croutons, minestrone...).  If not extremely salty, the UFO soups unfortunately had a tendency to taste rather like one imagines dishwater with lemony washing up liquid might, so unfortunately this recipe triggered this memory-association slightly... although I thought it was best not to mention this as we were eating in case T refused to eat any more...

3: Roast chicken with cheese mash and garlic gravy, p342

An easy peasy one now, although the difficulty is stopping myself roasting the chicken with the little bits and bobs I'd normally do - like rub the butter under the skin instead of on top, mixed with a little orange or lemon zest and juice and some chilli flakes, and popping the remains of the zested fruit up the bird's whatnots... I like Nigel's idea of popping the chicken upside down for the first 45mins, and the garlic halves tucked in the roasting tin are smelling gorgeous.

Because the recipe includes cheesy mash, I've skipped roasting potatoes around the chicken as well, fearing potato overload. Although I'd prefer roasties,  the 'with cheese mash' does seem to be an integral part of the recipe, so I'm sticking to that.

I've halved the quantities since it's only me and T eating. Ooooh, lots of lovely leftover chicken!! Very pleased about that - I usually only roast a bird when we've got guests so there's only usually enough left to do a chicken risotto and the carcass to make a great vat of stock. I may have to start doing roast chicken for two more often...

I love roast chicken. It can't possibly go wrong :)

...and it didn't, as predicted. Super crispy skin, meat cooked to perfection, and scrummy mash. Halfway through I realised I'd made a bit of a booboo, supermarket chickens (even the better quality ones) don't come with giblets so couldn't make the gravy with them, damn damn damn. So I snipped the wingtips off the chicken quickly, and brewed them up as per the recipe before adding them to the roasting tin (when the chicken was ready, and removed). Good save, I think.

Served up with a good serving of our family's classic 'Mozzie's Acid Leeks'. Nice bit of vitamin C to cut through those cheesy tatties. And a glass or two of a chardonnay-chenin blanc-viognier blend. Note my utterly in-expert carving...