Friday 8 November 2013

Grilled chicken with guacamole - a Random Recipe


This month it's a real back-to-basics Random Recipe challenge at Belleau Kitchen - pick a random recipe book and open it at a random page, then cook the recipe you find there. I used Random Number Generator to choose from my shelves (and yes, I did count the piles on the floor too) and then again to tell me how far along the shelf to go, and the lucky book was John Torode's "Chicken and other birds" - a good choice from Mark's point of view as it wasn't likely to contain any fish recipes. And a good choice for me too as I've had it for a few years and never yet cooked anything from it.


Another random number took me to page 48 - Grilled Chicken with Guacamole. I actually had all the ingredients in the kitchen, apart from fresh coriander which I was going to have to leave out anyway because Mark is severely allergic to it. Oh, and apart from chicken breasts, so I popped to the nearby supermarket for some. They had none. Well, they did have a chicken crown but it was two days past its use by date. I asked at the butcher's counter and just got a grunted "no", so I bought a whole chicken, jointed it and made some stock with the carcass. And reminded myself how easy it is to joint a chicken - in this case, apparently easier than buying it ready jointed. Cheaper too.

So I assembled the ingredients

 
then took a closer look at the recipe......

 
200 tomatoes for a batch of guacamole to serve 6? Wouldn't they swamp the two avocados that also go into the recipe? I don't  know whether the recipe was meant to say 200 grams of tomatoes, or 2 tomatoes, but I went for 200 grams.

The guacamole is a slightly different one from what I'm used to making (even without the massive amounts of tomatoes!) - I've never seen basil used in it before, and there was a good handful of parsley too, so the lack of coriander didn't mean a lack of greenness in the finished sauce.

John's way of grilling chicken is a great way of turning a healthy piece of meat into a butter-and-oil soaked, unctuously unhealthy  and deliciously moist and juicy treat, which means that what could have been an everyday dish becomes an occasional treat - but it's well worth it!




Now I'm just left scratching my head over those 200 tomatoes. I really don't think it needed the other 195.......


3 comments:

Unknown said...

oooh, i've never seen this book but this is one of my all time favourite foods... LOVE LOVE guacamole!... an excellent random recipes, thanks for the entry xx

Bintu @ Recipes From A Pantry said...

If you do have tons of tomatoes left then check out th tomato jam recipe from the homesick texan. That stuff rocks.

Anonymous said...

I hope you found out what to do with those tomatoes!