Serve with rice

There's something enticing about a recipe with a name like 'easy chicken' (p140). I've had my eye on this one for a while, but was unable to try it until I'd located one particular ingredient - redcurrant jelly. After doing the rounds of my usual supermarkets, I finally found some at Fresh Choice Merivale. Being in an upmarket part of town, Fresh Choice Merivale has a larger range of specialty goods, so you can often find things there that are unavailable elsewhere.

Anyway, I got the jelly, and yesterday I finally got a chance to make easy chicken. You start by browning chicken pieces in oil. I had a little trouble getting my chicken pieces go go nice and golden - there seemed to be too much oil. It was also spitting everywhere which was a nuisance. In the end I put a lid on it and left it spitting away while I prepared the sauce.


To make the sauce, you mix mustard, soy sauce, grated ginger, Worcestershire sauce and orange juice with the red currant jelly. The jelly didn't want to mix in, staying in little red lumps even when I got the whisk into it. Still, I was going to heat it, so I decided the lumps would melt down in the pan.

When the chicken resembled something approximating the "golden on both sides" described in the recipe, I drained off the oil, added the sauce mixture and put the pan back on the heat. Once it had come to the boil, I put the lid on and left it to simmer for 20 minutes before stirring through some vinegar and serving it up with some potatoes and salad.

My easy chicken didn't taste too bad. The sauce had a nice tangy flavour - almost like a sweet and sour sauce. It was quite runny though - more the sort of thing you'd have with rice, so salad and spuds weren't the best accompaniment.

With this in mind, I decided to have some rice with the leftovers this evening. And since I felt cooked veges would go better than a salad, I made courgettes provençal (p159) as well.  Consisting of courgettes and onion cooked with chopped blanched tomato, courgettes provençal probably wasn't the best match for the flavours in my easy chicken, but I happened to have courgettes on hand. I didn't do a particularly good job of it either, so the courgettes came out a bit overcooked and soggy.

I was far more pleased with my plate of chicken tonight. All that runny sauce got sucked up by the rice and made it so yummy. And, while the courgettes provençal didn't really work with the chicken, it's still quite a nice side dish.


By all means have a go at this dish (if you can find some redcurrant jelly). It's definitely easy, but the recipe is missing one instruction - "serve with rice"!