Cherry's English Kitchen

In the Bag November - Chestnut & Chicken Supper

So, once again we have reached the point in the year when there is very little natural light and every picture that I take of food has an orange glow to it. Forgive this, it will be better next April!

My entry for this month's In the Bag food event is this Chestnut & Chicken supper. My parents have a sweet chestnut tree in their garden that is around 500 years old, it produces many, many chestnuts each year which I should have had the forethought to grab and use in this dish as I did last year.

However this year I was in my back garden and not theirs so I had to make do with buying some ready shelled chestnuts form my local Waitrose.

Cherry's Chestnut & Chicken Supper

Serves two

Break up several pieces of day old french stick or chunky white bread and dry fry for two mins on a medium heat. Then place the bite sized pieces in to a large mixing bowl. Drizzle the bread pieces in EV olive oil, mince one clove of garlic on to the pieces and add a few grinds of the pepper mill. Stir well, coating the bread in the oil, garlic and pepper and set to one side.

Gently fry 100g of chestnuts, broken up in to much smaller pieces but not crumbs, 1 red pepper, chopped in to smallish pieces,  50g of sliced chorizo, half a de-seeded red chili (finely chopped ) in olive oil for about 7 mins on a medium heat. Add 50g of pre-cooked chicken that you have shredded with your fingers in to finer pieces. This meal is perfect for a Monday night after you have had a roast chicken for Sunday lunch.

When the oil form the chorizo is covering the other ingredients, the peppers have softened a little and the chicken is cooked through (again) tip the whole lot into the bowl with the previously garlicked pieces of bread. Add 100g of cooked cous-cous  and a small bunch of fresh coriander, chopped with kitchen scissors finely and  mix everything together well.

Place a bed of baby spinach onto a plate, serve the ous-cous dish on top of the spinach and drizzle the lot with my homemade dressing.

A little bit about the dressing.

I use this dressing almost every day and always have a drizzler full of the stuff on the go in my fridge. I simply top it up from time to time depending on what ingredients it needs. Here is a very, sorry, SUPER rough guide to making a dressing that goes with pretty much everything.

Pour three inches of EV Olive Oil in to a receptacle that is good for pouring with ( told it was a rough guide), add two teaspoons of Dijon mustard, one and a half inches of balsamic vinegar, one sugar cube, one clove of garlic (minced) and one inch of lemon juice. Shake well, pour some onto the back of your hand, lick it off and decide whether to add more of something or leave it just the way it is.

Enjoy.

Cherry

After The Fat.....Fennel!

Now don't get me wrong here! I made those Vanilla Squishy Kisses in order to eat them, and eat them I did. In fact, I ate so many that LBH came in from work one night and said "but you've been baking all week. Where are the cakes??"

However after all that fat and sugar I needed a little injection of freshness and a few vitamins to top up my supplies. I know that Fennel is not supposed to be available right now so I can only assume that I was able to get hold of two organic, British bulbs of the stuff due to the very mild Winter we have recently lived through.

It has also been a week of fish. Lots of fish in fact. Salmon, among other fish, is in season at the moment, and this is a new recipe of mine that I tried out earlier this week.

Topped Salmon with Baked Fennel

Serves Two

Take a generous handful of pine nuts, 12 black olives, half a red chili (de-seeded) and a large handful of flat leaf parsley and throw them in a blender. Drizzle a small amount of olive oil into the blender and whiz until it looks like the picture above and share two thirds of the mixture with the tops of two Salmon fillets. If you whiz the mixture for too short a time then the mixture will be too chunky to stay on top of the Salmon and if you whiz it too much it will be too much like liquid to stay on the Salmon. So, you can see the importance of getting this just right.

Slice one bulb of fennel into slices and place in a baking tray with the topped Salmon for approximately 20-25 mins at 160 degrees. As you can see in the picture I have placed some of the salmon topping onto the fennel also. This is important and will give the fennel a wonderful, additional taste as well as cutting down on the amount of olive oil you have to use due to the oil in the pine nuts seeping out during baking. If however it looks like the fennel is turning a little dry in the oven then drizzle with a small amount of olive oil.

Serve with brown rice or lentils.