I had one small Sainsbury's chicken, about 1.35 kg and it was my plan to make a variety of dishes and have a fun day in my kitchen.
I had also planned to make a potato salad and it had been my intention to make sourdough bread, with the starter I began about ten days earlier. Unfortunately, my starter had gone over by a couple of days and, apparently, the only way to save the situation is to discard half of the starter, and begin feeding it again. So that's what I'll do ....!
The chicken had gone into the oven, for forty-five minutes at 70 C. and it cooked perfectly in this time. I had browned the skin a little, to begin with, in a medium-sized fry pan with one small chopped onion, and then cooked it in my covered casserole, on a bed of vegetables left over from cooking a leg of turkey earlier, knowing they would provide a good flavour for the cooked bird; I also added two well-chopped sticks of celery.
I skinned the cooled bird and jointed it, giving me two breast meat portions, two large thigh joints and the small meat pieces picked off the bones, and those collopy bits on the underside of the carcase.
I decided to cover one piece of breast meat with a tarragon and mayo white sauce and serve it on a bed of my brown vegetable rice, also made today -
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| My Tarragon-mayo sauce on chicken breast with my brown vegetable rice |
and to cover, with a Sharwood's Butter Chicken cooking sauce, prior to grilling, the second piece. This is something my family cook in Australia and it sounded rather nice. A decoration of flaked almonds was added to the grilled dish.
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| Sharwood's Butter Chicken Cooking Sauce smothered chicken breast with almond flakes |
I shredded the thigh meat to make up three separate items. The first was a creamed mushroom and chicken mix with celery and spring onions, sautéed together, then blended to a fairly chunky texture with mushroom ketchup, and this is for eating with jacket potatoes, with hot pasta or on crackers or hot buttered toast, possibly without the extra butter, as the mixture is quite rich from the cooking olive oil and butter!
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| My creamed chicken and mushroom mixture for filling and spreading! |
With the second amount of shredded butter, I mixed together a hot mushroom, onion and celery mix, also adding more of the Sharwood's Butter Sauce with the chicken -
Mushroom onion celery and curry sauce with shredded chicken
and used this with some of my brown vegetable rice, to make a filling for my proposed gluten-free pancake stack -
Brown vegetable rice
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| My gluten-free pancake stack with chicken, mushroom, brown rice vegetable and almond flake filling |
The third amount of chicken went into my risotto of Morrisons Arborio Rice, chopped red onion, peas, home-made chicken stock, all finished off with a small amount of coconut cream, black peppercorns and a little sea salt.
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| My chicken risotto! |
That was quite a day of cooking, with the potato salad and a batch of American Fluffy Pancakes made to a BBC recipe, found on the internet, which I altered a little by using buttermilk. For the buttermilk, I made up dried milk powder and water, using a new product found in a local health food store, Flour Bin Buttermilk Powder - www.flourbin.com I see this as a useful product to keep against an occasion when I need buttermilk in a hurry and find myself unable to dash to Sainsbury's or Tesco, to buy fresh buttermilk. Here are my pancakes, perfectly delicious and voted top cooked item of the day by the dear SO!
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| Our top-favourite bake of the day!!! |
I wonder how you cook chicken in your kitchen?
Daisy