I had included on the menu for last night (Sunday) a pan-roasted chicken dish, gleaned from "A Glug of Oil" (see original blog post here).
Now before I go any further, I have to say that the failure of our dinner has nothing to do with Jan's excellent recipe. Rather more, it has everything to do with the pathetic nature of Asda's frozen chicken portions - which was all I could get when shopping.
I set out to buy three chicken breasts, which I can't help but think would have been brilliant for the job. Unfortunately, you needed to have mortgaged your house - or at the very least sold your car - in order to have been able to afford the fresh chicken breasts. So my eyes turned to the frozen. What a pathetic no-choice we had there! It was either a monster bag of cheap-as-chips-full-of-salty-water-and-no-chicken pieces or a small bag of "chicken chunks" which were, at least, breast meat - even if they had a significant amount of the salty water injected into them. *sigh*
I should have thrown the idea to the wind and gone for an entire chicken and just done a roast, but I had my heart set on the pan-roasted chicken thing.
I had a half a pack of streaky bacon, left over from an earlier dish, still in the fridge, so decided to wrap two chunks of chicken breast in each piece of bacon and pan-fry them as the recipe said.
Which was all very well, until I looked at the quantity I wound up with. Let's say, it's just as well we had an enormous plum pie for dessert.
Oh, and I won't be bothering with adding shallots to my green beans again. Can't see the point of that at all, as although the idea sounded good in practice it turned out to be tasteless and disappointing.
However, the real result of the whole meal was the Honey Roasted Butternut Squash (and a Parsnip, who crept in as an afterthought when it looked like we weren't going to get much for dinner). Gosh, but that squash was good. I'll definitely be doing that again! :)
