Chicken, olives and lemon - Dish of the Month for April 2013

It would be a bad job if I couldn't come up with a dish for my own blog challenge!  However, it's not too much of a hardship to make one of Nigel Slater's recipes for Dish of the Month.  The April chapter of the Kitchen Diaries II is full of lovely recipes including quite a lot of prose from Nigel too.
He waxes lyrical about olives and states that it is rare to find an olive he does not like, only those tossed in garlic, stuffed with anchovy or red pepper or marinated with chilli get spat out!  Well, I have to say, my favourite olives are the ones stuffed with anchovies but I wouldn't put them in this dish.

This is a very simple dish to make, starting by making a paste of spices, salt, oil and garlic.  I realised as I started that I still didn't have any turmeric, so that got left out.

Nigel uses chicken thighs for this recipe (are you listening Dom?) but I find it more economical to buy a whole free range chicken and joint it myself, then cover it with the paste and leave to marinade.

After a couple of hours, or overnight if you are well organised, fry off the chicken in olive oil and add to the casserole with lemons and onions and water.

The dish is finished with a handful of olives and a bunch of torn coriander.  I served it with couscous to soak up the delicious juices.

If you would like to join us for Dish of the Month, here is what you need to do:

• Make a Dish of the Month from ANY recipe by Nigel Slater
• Link to Farmersgirl Kitchen or A Little Bit of Heaven on a Plate
•  Use the Dish of the Month logo in your post
• If you use twitter, tweet your post with @serialcrafter or @Heavenona_plate and #DishoftheMonth and we will re-tweet it to our followers. 

Rules:

• If you own The kitchen diaries II please do not publish the recipes on your blog without permission, they are copyright.
• If you are using recipes from the BBC Food website, please link to the recipe on BBC Food rather than publishing the recipe.  Likewise recipes on the Guardian Lifestyle website.
• One entry per blog.
• Recipes must be added to the linky by the 28th of each month.

Labels: Chicken, Dish of the Month, lemons, Nigel Slater, olives

posted by Janice @ 21:45