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.

                                                 

Goosnargh loaf cake with orange buttercream filling and icing

Given that the theme for the latest clandestine cake club was "Lancashire afternoon Tea", I decided to have a go at re inventing the Goosnargh cake as a real cake.

Goosnargh cakes are a traditional Lancashire delicacy which are more like a biscuit than a cake, however there is traditional English cake "The Seed Cake" that shares some similarities. 

The Seed Cake features caraway seeds in much the same way as a Goosnargh cake does so that  was the inspiration for the cake, given that this was cake club I needed to enhance the cake so I decided on a fresh orange buttercream, caraway and orange being a traditional pairing.

I used Nigel Slater's Seed Cake recipe which can be found here, please pay heed to Nigel's advice re the quantity of caraway you use as otherwise your cake will be horrid, I have ignored his advice however when it comes to gilding the lily and plumped for fresh orange buttercream which seem to go down well at cake club.

To make the orange buttercream filling and icing , I used softened butter, icing sugar, juice of 1 fresh squeezed orange and the zest of the said orange, whipped until not grainy in my trusty mixer. A lovely fresh contrast to the caraway in the cake.


I am entering this post into Farmers Girl  Nigel Slater Dish of the Month linky that she runs with Sue over at A Little bit of heaven on a plate.

                                              

Cream of mushroom, mustard and tarragon soup

                                        

Two of my fellow food bloggers, Sue over at Heaven on a Plate and Janice at Farmersgirl Kitchen have launched a monthly cook along for any Nigel Slater recipe, I have quite a few of his books in my extensive cookery book collection, Nigel Slater is my style of cook, cooking seasonally and using what he grows and purchases locally, he is the only TV cook my husband will watch, that says a lot.

When I saw this challenge I knew I had to take part, so a quick rummage in the bookshelves and I came up with this hybrid combination inspired by mushroom soup from Real Fast Food ( a very early Nigel) pg 164 and Roasted mushroom with mustard and tarragon in Kitchen Diaries 1 Pg 279.

A delicious easy creamy mushroom soup with the great inspired additions of a touch of dijon mustard and the herb tarragon,  I didn't have any fresh tarragon as perscribed so I used dried and it worked fine.Nigel's recipes are of simple but always inspired and the mustard and aniseed back note of the tarragon combined well with the earthy mushrooms.