Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #1: Mustard Chicken
As promised a few weeks ago, the Snook and I have decided to cook and blog our way through Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals in its entirety. We got the book this week (thank you Booko!) and picked out a hopefully-easy recipe to start with: Mustard Chicken with Quick Dauphinoise, Greens, and Black Forest Affogato.

Quick Verdict: We experimented a bit with the dessert but the other three components were prepared exactly as specified. Both of us rated this one 8/10. With a few small tweaks, it could’ve been even higher. Our elapsed time was 50 minutes, but that was mostly due to capacity of our frying pan. Read on for a photo essay of the entire preparation.Pre-start prep: I got out all the necessary ingredients, tools, and cooking vessels. The kitchen was clean (well, as clean as it gets) and everything wiped down and ready go to. The oven was turned on to 220C and the kettle was boiled.

First up are the ingredients for the Quick Dauphinoise. I should mention that I have never been able to cook a very good gratin, so I was interested to see if Jamie’s version would work. It used baking potatoes, a red onion, cream, thyme, parmesan, anchovies, bay leaves, and nutmeg.

Next the ingredients for the Mustard Chicken. We got four skin-on chicken breast fillets, but they’re actually a fair bit larger than the size he specifies. This may have affected the final dish a bit. (More on that later.) We also have leek, garlic, mustard powder, wholegrain mustard, cream, and rosemary (not in the picture because I had to run out and pick it).

The Greens were pretty simple: a bunch of silverbeet, a package of baby spinach, and a lemon.

The cooking pots, ready to go. The roasting pan was for the potatoes; the frying pan for the chicken; and the sauce pan for the greens. This is where I’d do things differently next time. The frying pan wasn’t actually large enough for all four of our chicken breasts, so we had to do some juggling to cook them in stages. Make sure your meat fits! And my silverbeet only just fit in the saucepan.

Assembling the Dauphinoise. Most of the ingredients are in the roasting pan here and the Snook is mixing it up with his hands. Jamie has you cheat a bit by cooking the mix in the roasting pan on the stove for a bit. It was a bit tricky for us, as our cooktop is induction and our square roasting pan doesn’t fit nicely on the round induction zone. So it probably took a few minutes longer than necessary to start bubbling away.

Check out those monster chicken breasts. They’ve been “massaged” with chopped rosemary, mustard powder, salt, pepper, and olive oil. That’s when we realised we had a size issue happening with the pan. We decided it was best to cook them two at a time.

The Dauphinoise is bubbling away now so it was time to add in more parmesan and thyme. Then it goes into the oven! (That freed up a burner so we could get the other chicken going in a separate pan.)

I didn’t document much of the Greens preparation since it was so simple. I chopped the ribs of the silverbeet first and tossed them in the pot of boiling water. After a few minutes, I added the roughly chopped leaves. When they were cooked, I drained it by pouring it over the baby spinach in a colander in the sink. Then the whole lot went back in the pan with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Simple but delicious!

The Dauphinoise bubbling away in the oven and getting nicely brown…

Here the Snook has turned the chicken over and added leek, garlic, and white wine to the pan.

Meanwhile, I started some prep on the dessert. Instead of “Black Forest” Affogato, we decided to go with Raspberry since we had some homemade raspberry gelato in the freezer. I’ve crumbled a couple shortbread biscuits into each glass and then topped them with frozen raspberries and bits of 85% Lindt chocolate.

The Dauphinoise as it came out of the oven. It was still a little liquidy, so we think it probably could have cooked a big longer. But we were hungry and everything else was done. (While we ate, it continued to suck up liquid and I think the leftovers are going to be pretty nice!)

Here’s the completed meal! After finishing the sauce with cream and wholegrain mustard, the Snook spooned it over the chicken breast pieces. (Note: We have plenty of potato and greens left over, along with the other two chicken breasts.)

And now for dessert! The Snook brewed up a couple espressos while I scooped some gelato into the glasses. Here he’s pouring the coffee over the ice cream.

And now the finished dessert, garnished with more raspberries and grated chocolate.

Tasting notes: The Snook thought the chicken itself was a bit ordinary (though the sauce was great). I argued that chicken breast is pretty much always tasteless protein anyway, and the fact that our breasts were larger and thicker may have diluted the flavour a bit. The Dauphinoise was the highlight of the meal, and we think 5-10 minutes more cooking would have made it divine. The Greens were a nice, simple complement to the richness of the potatoes and the strong flavour of the mustard. The Affogato ended up being a little bitter, but that may have been due to our coffee maker or to the fact that we changed up the recipe. It was still yummy.

Stay tuned next week for another recipe from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals!