a busy domestic blog of knitting, sewing and all kinds of needlecrafts, cooking my garden produce and preserving it

Friday 5 March 2021

Hunter's Chicken from Pinch of Nom

 Among the frozen ready-meals from my usual supermarket I have a favourite - Hunter's Chicken. It's spicy without being over-powering, and feels like something I could eat forever, but there's a stigma to eating ready meals everyday, and, let's face it, there's not much filling up my time these days, so I want to make some effort and find a home-made version.

 

The recipes I've found among my books and magazine clippings vary widely - Nigella's Pollo Alla Cacciatore is lovely but nothing like my shop-bought Hunter's Chicken - so I'm going to work my way through them, find a recipe that's close, and if necessary from there I'll tweak the ingredients - a little more of this, less of that - till it's just the way I like it. 

I'm starting with the version from Pinch of Nom by Kate Allinson and Kay FeatherstoneNow essentially this is a book of weight-watching recipes, but use your regular full-fat cheese instead of the low-fat option, and add an extra dollop of potatoes plus cauliflower and french beans if you're not bothered about losing weight. I did :)

What I'd actually hoped for was a recipe that took things back to basics - tomatoes, peppers, onions, sugar etc - but as I've found before the Pinch of Nom recipes tend to call for 'prepared' ingredients, in this case BBQ seasoning and hot sauce, which all too easily vary between manufacturer, so I'm not sure I actually got the flavour they were aiming for
. Also, there's a LONG list of ingredients - balsamic vinegar, white wine vinegar, Worcester sauce, mustard powder, etc etc. Not a lot of each is needed and it's fine if you've got them in the cupboard but to buy them specially would make this far more expensive than my beloved ready meal. Get through that fussy list if ingredients, and the recipe is clear to follow. 

The final stages of cooking suddenly required a lot of plates and pans but I don't have a dishwasher and I hate the proliferation of extra pots just for the sake of styling and presentation, so I skipped a lot of fussing about at the end, just added the cheese to the casserole dish and melted it there. It probably could have benefited from an extra minute or two under the grill but the potatoes and veg were ready, so I served it as it was.

It wasn't quite what my taste buds wanted though; a little too acidic (perhaps all those various vinegars), and the base flavour of tomato was too overwhelming. It's definitely on the lines of what I'm trying to reproduce so I have a good workable starting point from which I'll tweak the ingredients.


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