Roast chicken thighs (and more)
Ok, last birthday-related post. I swear.
Last Saturday I had a few people over for dinner as a pseudo-birthday party. This post is part recipe and part thank you to my friends. Dinner was nothing fancy, mainly just a overgrown kids sitting around eating too much and watching youtube (for some reason this is one my favourite youtube videos and my life will never be the same after watching this clip from Jerry Springer – the good stuff starts at the 3:50 mark, fair warning though, it is really disturbing and may leave you unable to eat creamed corn ever again).
Ok, here comes the run down of dinner and the thanks to everyone for contributing portion of today’s post. Colin Hill was covering entrees and made a terrine with caramelised onion. I was very impressed, I’d have no idea how to even start thinking about making a terrine. That’s a lie, my thinking would probably start with a ‘G’ and end with an ‘oogle’.
The Prominent Eurasian doesn’t generally cook for us so surprised me when he appeared with a stellar duck noodle salad featuring some expertly sliced vegetables and homemade sauce.
Gerard who doesn’t really cook also impressed me putting together a salad of rocket and cos with sliced pear, feta, pomegranate seeds and candied walnuts.
I candied the walnuts which involved putting them in a single layer on a baking tray in the oven for about 10 minutes while I melted some sugar. The walnuts then went into the saucepan of sugar, with a little salt added in, to be coated before being laid out on a paper lined baking tray to cool down. They cooled all stuck together because I couldn’t mange to separate them while they were hot, if you can separate them while hot it’ll be a lot easier than doing it when they’re set like I had to.
For mains I roasted chicken thighs with potato and tomatoes using a Jamie Oliver recipe I found here and random quantities of things (amended recipe below).
My best friend brought a cake for dessert which (I think) was a sponge with cream and pineapple between layers and passionfruit icing.
Jamie Oliver chicken thighs (serves 12)
Around 3kg of chicken thighs
5 punnets of cherry tomatoes
2kg of baby potatoes
A bunch of corriander
Olive oil
Red wine vinegar
Salt & Pepper
1. Boil a large saucepan of water and add salt and potatoes. Keep on heat until the potatoes are cooked.
2. Prick each of the cherry tomatoes with a knife. Cover the tomatoes with boiling water and leave for around 5 minutes then drain and peel the skins off so that the flavour when roasted is a whole lot sweeter and stronger. The recipe says to leave the tomatoes under water for about a minute, if you leave them for a minute peeling them will be almost impossible, I would recommend at least 5 minutes. Peeling 5 punnets of cherry tomatoes is right up there with the most tedious things I’ve done, and I’ve done some tedious things in my time. Once at work I spent 18 hours straight locked in a room with a friend reading one copy of a 300 page document aloud to him to make sure that it was identical (spelling, spacing, formatting etc) to another copy. The next day there was a new version and we did it all over again. And still, I struggled with these tomatoes.
3. Rub each piece of chicken in olive oil, salt and pepper. Cook each piece in a frypan and set aside.
4. Crush coriander, add about 6 tablespoons of olive oil, 3 tablespoons or so of vinegar and salt and pepper.
5. Place the chicken, potatoes and tomatoes in a roasting pan, add the coriander mix from above and combine.
6. Cook at 200 degrees for approx 45 mins.
