Hi Kay!
I know you're a busy woman, you've got a lot on your plate. You can't always take hours and hours preparing a meal. So this time I'm giving you a simple recipe - one of the "chop it all up and throw it in the oven" variety.
You will need, per person:
2-3 potatoes
a handful of cherry tomatoes
1 small onion (or half of a big one)
A clove of garlic, minced (we buy garlic pre-minced so I'm not sure how much it is exactly XD)
1 chicken breast (one large field mushroom, peeled & stalked, for vegetarian friends :D)
About 3 tablespoons of green pesto (try and get the kind with parmazan cheese in it)
A handful of salted cashew nuts.
You could add things like sweet corn, cream cheese, to this recipe, but I don't reccomend it - the combinations of flavours as it is are in perfect synch and adding to it would make some flavours stand out less.
Step One: Preparing your dish
Assuming you'll be making this dish for multiple people, it's easiest just to use one big casserole dish. Take the (oven-proof!) dish, add the garlic, and swipe it around the bare dish. This will make for an even distribution of garlic. If you don't have minced garlic, rub the peeled clove around the dish and dice it up finely later.
Step Two: In with the potatoes!
For this you can use just about any kind of potato - even left-over ones! Cut them into small chunks, spice with salt (and pepper if you like, I'm not big on the spicy stuff), and cover in oil. Then you will need to bake the potatoes prior to adding the rest of the ingredients, because the potatoes just take so much longer.
Step Three: Try not to cry
As you peel and slice the onions. I find that slicing them in half and then in slices (like halved onion rings) works better for this dish. Just about everything in this rustic dish is chunky, but that's the way it is best!
Step Four: Prepare your chicken!
This is the bit where things get a little mucky. If you're using a field mushroom for a vegetarian, make sure it's peeled, stalked and washed before starting this process, which is the same for both the chicken and the mushroom. Take a good amount of pesto on a spoon, and put it on one side of the raw chicken breast. Now, with your fingertips (it's icky, I know,) massage the pesto into the chicken on both sides to make sure the flavours combine. You need to use enough pesto to make the chicken oily - if you don't use enough pesto, the chicken will be really dry when it's done, so be careful! You can do the same with the mushroom.
Step Five: When it all comes together...
When the potatoes are just starting to cook a little in the oven, throw in the onions and the cherry tomatoes - whole, mind, the tomatoes are small so you can keep them whole. Then gently place the chicken breasts/mushroom on top of the potato/onion/tomato mass, and let it bake as a whole. Some pesto will come off the chicken and get on to the potatoes and such - don't worry! This just makes it even better :3
Step Six: Enjoy!
Cooking in the oven is dicey for us. Our oven CAN and WILL burn anything you put into it over 180 degrees celcius. So I can't really give you a number here. I can say we generally cook this dish at 170 degrees celcius for a total of 40 minutes (that's including the pre-cooking of the potatoes) and that it is totally worth it. It's good with some fresh salad, but I'm sure you can figure that out for yourself if you want to.
Good luck! x
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A Pinch of Poison
No FicciónHey hey! Join Debs and I as we journey into the scary world of cooking (not that we weren't already there). But now we get to try each other's recipes, learn to cook many wierd and wonderful things and quite possibly poison ourselves in the process...
