Baked chicken with tomatoes and olives for Nigel Slater Dish of the Month

As my contribution to "Recipe of the month" challenge hosted by Janice who blogs over at Farmersgirl and Sue who blog over at a little bit of heaven on a plate, I have chosen a recipe from Nigel Slaters kitchen diaries II.

The recipe is on page 322 and is recipe from August in the book, I fortunately managed to get hold of some English tomatoes to make the recipe with and I always have chicken thighs in the freezer I thought I'd give it a try. I pretty much followed the recipe to the letter except I didn't have any green tomatoes as you can see from the photographs the recipe turned out well enough but was a little too moist for my taste, so if I made it again I would roast longer to burn off some of the meat juices.

Nigel recommends you serve the dish with bread, rice or couscous to soak up the juices.

As stated above I'm taking part in "Dish of the month" hosted this month by Sue who blogs at "A little bit of heaven on a plate"

                                                 

Chocolate Damson Cake for Nigel Slater Dish of the month

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by an old work colleague with the kind offer of plundering her damson tree's in her garden. So initially my thoughts were to store my plunder and make jam, which I have done even having enough to squirrel away for our WI winter sale later in the year, but I wanted to do something different with the small quantity I had leftover.

Well lucky me, as I spotted a tweet by same lady to Nigel Slater, mentioning his chocolate damson cake, so off I went hoping that I had the Nigel Slater recipe in my collection of  his cookery books. Fortunately I did, the recipe is in Kitchen Diaries II, his most recent publication to date.

Damsons are one of Nigel's favourite fruits and many of his book's feature recipes using this most English of stone fruits.

The resultant bake is very moist and gooey but also very delicious, ideal served as a dessert either plain or simply with cream. The damsons provide a fruity ripple to the brownie like cake and the cake went down very well with the staff at BBC Radio Lancashire as this was the bake I took into the studio. The slightly sharp damsons contrast beautifully with the rich chocolate flavours.

I am using this bake as my contribution towards Dish of the Month hosted by Farmers Girl kitchen this month.