Recipe: chicken with apricot sauce
April 13th, 2010 by IonaI wasn’t going to write up this recipe, but today I changed my mind, as you will see!
You need:
-four chicken breasts, boneless and skinless;
-an onion;
-three garlic cloves;
-three tablespoons of honey;
-half a lime;
-two handfuls of dried apricots;
-some ground cinnamon;
-black pepper;
-two chicken stock cubes
-some type of cooking oil.
Chop the chicken into bite-sized pieces and fry in your oil on a high heat, so it cooks through quickly. Once it’s done or nearly done, set it aside in a wee bowl. Chop your onion into half-slices, crush the garlic cloves and fry them up in the same pan until the onion pieces are translucent.
Slice the apricots finely and throw them in the pan, add a few shakes of ground cinnamon, a few shakes of brown pepper, and turn the heat down so the apricots start to get properly squishy.
Then make up the stock. You want it to be thick, so put two stock cubes into one mug of boiling water. Stir this, throw it into the pan and then put the chicken back in.
Stir this well, put your three tablespoons of honey in to thicken it all, and squeeze the juice of the lime in as well. Stir, stir, stir, stir, and turn the heat up so the liquid starts bubbling off. Once most of it’s gone, turn it right down and let it all jellify nicely until there’s no liquid left, just nice squishy apricot-y sauce.
Serve with rice.
This is much more complicated than my usual recipes, which is why I wasn’t going to post it originally – this series is meant to be based on a theme of delicious food you can make fast and simply – but it’s truly, truly tasty and not that difficult to make. It feeds two, if you have plenty of rice, and leaves a bit. The bit that’s left, you let cool and then put in a plastic lunchbox with two handfuls of chopped lettuce, half a chopped cucumber and the rice that’s left, plus another squeeze of lime. Eat after a long morning of classes and make happy, happy noises. So good, especially after the flavours have soaked in.
My next project: slow-roasted tomatoes. These look wonderful, but I haven’t tried them yet because I haven’t been home for seven hours together since I saw the recipe! But I will be soon, and in the meantime have done two dry runs: chopped tomatoes with black pepper roasted for an hour at 140 degrees. The first lot I put in pasta with feta cheese and olive oil (delicious!) and the second lot went in a sandwich with mozarella and honey-roast ham (also delicious).
Really, this eating-lunch lark is a dream.
