Balsamic Chicken Salad

This is an ever-so-simple meal for a quick and easy weekday supper.  If you can be faffed then you should get the chicken in the marinade before you go to work, knowing that it will be ready and waiting for you when you get home – ready, even, to go straight on the grill. 

 

The proportions will feed two as a main meal or four as a starter – but it's terribly easy to increase.

 

Ingredients:

 

2 chicken breasts

50ml olive oil (plus a drizzle for the sweet tatties)
50ml balsamic vinegar (doesn’t need to be uber expensive)
2 medium sweet potatoes
½ tsp cayenne pepper
50g pumpkin seeds
½ tsp smoked paprika
1 lime
100g rocket leaves

 

(In the pictures below I have used pine nuts.  Ignore this – Sainsbury's were out of pumpkin seeds.  So sub in pumpkin seeds wherever you see pine nuts.)

1. Lay the chicken breasts flat and slice them in half horizontally, so that you're left with two pieces of chicken of the same proportions but half the thickness.  Place these in a large, flat bowl, pour the oil and vinegar over them and stir it up so that the chicken is properly coated.  Leave them to marinade for at least an hour.

2. Peel sweet potatoes and cut them up into fat chips.  Drizzle the oil and sprinkle the cayenne pepper over them then stir to ensure they're coated.  Stick them in an oven at 175ºC for 45 minutes or until cooked (ie. soft inside and slightly crispy / blackened on the outside).  They'll need turning a few times during the cooking process. 

3. About 15 minutes before the potatoes are done you'll want to cook the chicken, so you probably want it to come out of the fridge about 15 minutes before that to come up to room temperature.  Get a griddle pan on the heat (mine is properly screwed so I've used a frying pan instead) and get it hot, but not screaming hot like you would for steak (otherwise the chicken will stick to it like superglue – hence why mine's so screwed).  Get the Chicken on the griddle and cook for about five minutes aside, or again until done and a little crispy on the outside.  When it's done the meat will need to rest of a few minutes.

5. Whilst the chicken rests you can cook the lime.  Slice it through the equator and stick it on the griddle.  At the same time, lay the pumpkin seeds out on a baking tray and toast them in the oven.  Be careful here – they need only a couple of minutes.  Overdo them and they'll be minging – crusty and burny and not at all nice.  So keep an eye on them.  When they're toasted pop them in a freezer bag with the paprika and the tiniest drop of olive oil and give them a big shake.  You'll find that the paprika sticks pretty good.

 6. All of your elements ought to be done by now, so it's just a matter of assembly.  Slice the chicken into strips, being careful not to lose any juices that run out.  Put the rocket in a big bowl and heap the chicken and any escaping juices on top.  Add in the warm sweet potatoes and the pumpkin seeds.  Squeeze the lime over the whole lot and toss the salad.  You may want to add a drizzle of oil if you don’t feel it's dressed enough, but I never really think it's worth it.

Serve the salad whilst it's still warm.  It's good for all seasons – summer and winter alike.

- GrubsterBoy -

Basil Sorbet and Balsamic Strawberries

This is another one of those recipes that I am going to keep up my sleeve for a dinner party because, again (much like whisky cured salmon or making your own home made oatcakes) it makes you sound like a phenomenal, nay, award winning, chef without actually being even remotely difficult.  Please don't allow the length of the post to confuse you - this is a lot easier than it looks.

The one thing I do recommend, however, is that you do it with an ice cream maker.  I have one that goes in the freezer for 48 hours before hand, which is a bit of a faff but frankly does the job just fine – they start from about £30 these days, whereas the worktop machines (that have an in-built freezer unit) start from about £300.  You can do it through the freeze, whisk, repeat method (freeze for a few hours, whisk the partially frozen crystals, freeze again, etc...) but I advise against it.  Before I had my machine I had a (thoroughly underserved) reputation for being crap at ice cream based on an incident during a weekend in the country when I made sorbet, the boys turned up on the Friday night as I was meant to be doing the waiting-and-whisking bit, we got lashed and I forgot to whisk, and we ended up with a block of frozen syrup for pudding the next night.  So save yourself the bother. 

You will also need a stick blender or (if you're lucky and have one) and actual smoothie blender. 

Ingredients:

Sorbet –

300g caster sugar
125g basil leaves
Juice of one lemon

Strawberries –

600g ripe strawberries
30g caster sugar
3 tbsps balsamic vinegar

Before you begin, ask yourself this: Are my guests coming tonight?  If the answer is yes, then find another recipe.  This recipe takes two days – one to make, and the other to freeze.  At a pinch you could do steps 1-4 the night before, and then get up super early on the day of the party and do the rest as quickly as possible.  It feeds 4 to 6.

1. Pick your basil over, removing any grim-looking bits, and breaking the stalks up into sections no longer than an inch – shorter even if you can be faffed.  Omit this step at your peril – you will spend days (literally) trying to unravel long fibrous stalks from the blades of your blender.

2. Place the basil and the sugar, along with 300ml of water, in a large(ish) saucepan over a high heat.  Bring it to the boil until the sugar has completely dissolved and the basil wilted a little, so that it looks a bit like steamed spinach.  Take it off the heat and allow it to cool.

3. Whilst the sorbet syrup cools you can get started on the balsamic glaze.  Mix the sugar, just two of the tablespoons of vinegar and two tablespoons of water together in the smallest pan you have.  This should go over a medium heat, stirring regularly.  Dissolve the sugar and bring it to the boil, cooking off most of the liquid.  Turn the heat off, cover and leave it to cool right down to room temperature. 

4. By now your sorbet syrup will be cool enough to play with (but careful, it will still be hot).  Basically, you need to blend it smooth.  This really requires a blender, but I don’t have one of those, so I improvised with a kilner jar and a stick blender.  Do NOT put it in a food processor.  Turns out those puppies aren't waterproof.  Basically it came out like an erupting volcano. 

Once you've liquidised it will look like one of those hateful smoothies that hippies / healthfreaks drink in the morning and wax lyrical about.  Fortunately, this is pretty bad for you (it's basically almost entirely just sugar) and tastes wonderful, so no harm of it actually being one of those. 

Put it through a sieve, using the back of a wooden spoon to force out as much moisture as possible.  If you're being super diligent you can put it through a muslin immediately afterwards, but I could not be faffed.  Once that's done it'll look even more like one of those hateful smoothies, but relax – it still isn't.

Add the lemon juice now, then stick a lid on in and let it cool right down to room temperature.  If you can, you could even stick it in the fridge overnight to cool it down ready for the churn (this is not essential, but it helps if you're using a frozen bowl churner). 

5. Right, both mixtures should be cold now – or at least not hot.  If you're using an ice cream maker that's ben in the freezer you need to work pretty quickly.  The way this system works is that the frozen core of the mixing bowl will cool the syrup and freeze it, whilst churning the ice crystals.  The second law of thermodynamics, as immortalised by Messrs Flanders & Swann, dictates that that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems always evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy.  Or, put more simply, "heat can't move from the cooler to the hotter"  This means that the flow is not cold moving from the bowl to the syrup, but heat moving from the syrup to the bowl.  This only really has one practical application here: the syrup will never, ever get as cold as the bowl.  Your freezer will have dropped the bowl's temperature below 0°C (probably to something around -18°C if you've given it enough time) but it's now only getting hotter – both from the ambient temperature and from the syrup.  So the longer the bowl is out of the freezer, the less effect it will have on the syrup.  Similarly, the hotter the syrup at this stage, the less effect the frozen bowl will have.

So get moving.  Have everything prepped and ready to go – syrup in a jug, ice cream maker set up, everything it its place, before getting that bowl out the freezer.  Then, once it's out, go go go. 

6. It's really very simple from hereon in, in terms of the sorbet at least.  The machine's makers should have given you some instructions, so just follow them.  Only thing I would say is this: it's a lot like making jelly from scratch: you follow all the instructions and then you get to this stage and nothing happens for AGES – and you're convinced nothing will – until suddenly you look down and it's basically a slush of ice crystals.  Mine took about 30 minutes to turn into slushie, a bit like this:

Ideally, I'd have it slushier, more like melting snow, but by this stage the bowl had lost most of its coolth (that's a word, OK?) and there's a risk that you end up reversing the process.  I think it was a combination of my bowl not cold being enough (it had only had 24 hours in the freezer) and the syrup not being cold enough.  Neither made a dramatic difference, but there's no reason to let that happen to you.

But anyway, once you get to this stage, you just scoop it all out with a spatula and get it into a tub in the freezer.  It'll need at least a couple of hours there. 

7. Returning to the balsamic strawbs... Your vinegar syrup should be cold by now.  Stir in the third and final tablespoon of vinegar.  Hull and quarter the strawberries and place them into deep dish.  Pour all of the vinegar syrup over them, turning them very carefully with a spoon to dress them like a salad.  Put them in the fridge for at least a couple of hours, turning them at least once during the process. 

8. That's pretty much it.  When you're ready to serve scoop a spoonful of strawberries into the bottom of a bowl and add a wee bit of the vinegar syrup.  Then put a ball of sorbet on top and serve to some pretty impressed guests.

- GrubsterBoy -