Good food, good company and good conversation...
Two days off from work and all I could think about was cooking. So I thought why not invite my friends round and have a chilled night in, catching up and eating some food. Also this was a perfect excuse to test out some of my latest recipes!
It was a great evening of fun and great to catch up with all after a long summer.
So I decided to start off with my new food strategy that I am taking, a few simple ingredients, beautifully crafted. Here I wanted to take just a few delicious flavours and combine them in different ways to excentuate and make the most of the complexity of each one. For example, first of all my main course was tahini and honey chicken with a green bean salad and beetroot. I wanted the main flavours here to be honey and tahini thus kept it simple.
The honey and tahini on the chicken make it so scrummy, the tahini not being overpowering and the honey a subtle floral tone in the background. For the bean salad I went for fresh so simple dressed it in lemon, honey and olive oil. This combined with the chicken made that sweet honey sing around the dish even more. For the beetroot I simply combined tahini, olive oil and lemon juice again to make a dressing to bring out the nuttiness and almost peanut flavour of tahini in the overall dish - delicious.
Tahini and honey chicken with salads:
Serves 4
Ingredients:
Chicken
8 chicken thighs/legs (on the bone or off the bone)
150g tahini
50g honey
Sides
3 handfuls frozen broad beans
1 handful radishes thinly sliced into rounds
4 cooked beetroot slices into 3 mm-ish rounds
2 tablespoons tahini
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons lemon juice
4 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper
Balsamic vinegar (optional)
Method:
Set the oven to 190oC/170 (fan) and put all the chicken in a bag with the tahini and honey. Ideally this should be marinaded to make the chicken super tender for as long as possible (up to 8 hours or overnight) but if you haven't got time no worries.
Place the chicken in a baking tray and cook for 25 minutes, then check to see if the chicken is cooked through. Leave to rest for 5 minutes.
Place the braod bean in boiling, salted water for 2 minutes until just hot, but still al dente. Then run under cold water until cold. Add the radishes, 2 tablespoons of honey, the lemon juice, 2 tablespoons of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste.
Place the beetroot in a dish. Mis the remaining tahini, olive oil, salt and pepper in a pot before pouring over to coat.
Serve the chicken with the salads, pouring over the chicken juices and yummy crusty bits from the pan. If you have some crusty bread lying around to mop up juices this is ideal! An optional drizzle of balsamic vinegar and you're done!