Categories
Mains Recipes

Jerk Chicken with Roast Peppers

Here’s a really tasty and spicy way to jazz up some chicken and peppers. It’s based on a recipe I obtained from Simon and Tim on TV’s Sunday Brunch programme, which I’ve developed in my usual manner. Once the pieces are cooked, you can enjoy them in various ways: hot with rice, cold with salad or – my favourite – as a filling in a tortilla wrap.

I reported a few posts back that I had opened a new channel for A Different Kitchen on Instagram. I decided to teach myself some reel making skills with this dish, which was enormous fun. I’ll say more about that shortly. First of all, let’s focus on the food!

Servings

This depends on how you intend to serve it, but you will get 4 chicken breasts worth of spicy, meaty goodness to eat as you please.

Timings

15 mins to make the marinade, 12 hours to rest in the fridge, then 25 mins to cook.

You Will Need

  • 4 chicken breasts, cut into chunks
  • 1 red and 1 yellow pepper, also cut into pieces
  • olive oil

For the Marinade:

  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 3 scallions, chopped
  • 1 chilli, chopped
  • 1 garlic clove, crushed
  • 1 tbsp 5 Spice powder
  • 1 tbsp allspice berries
  • 1 tsp ground nutmeg
  • 1 tsp dried thyme
  • 100ml dark soy sauce
  • 50ml veg oil
  • a few twists of sea salt and black pepper

Method

  1. Combine all the marinade ingredients in a bowl. Tip in the chicken chunks and coat all over. Leave in the fridge for 12 hours, then take out.
  2. Place the chopped peppers in a dish. Drizzle the oil over and roast in the oven at 180C for 25 mins.
  3. While the peppers are roasting, tip the chicken pieces and all the marinade into a large frying pan and place on a high heat. Turn the pieces until they are cooked through and the marinade has become a sticky, saucy coating.
  4. When the peppers are done, tip them into the pan and stir in with the chicken so that they are also coated in the spicy sauce. Serve hot or cold.

Customise It!

There are various ways you can cook and serve this. Come the summertime, I fancy threading the marinaded chicken and pepper pieces on skewers for roasting on the BBQ.

On this occasion, I opted to roll some of the cooked chicken and peppers up in a soft, warmed tortilla wrap along with a mango salsa (that I will show you how to make in my next post!)

As I say, I made this the subject of a reel over on my new Instagram channel – you can find it on @differentkitch. I had great fun, and learned a lot in the process – probably the main lesson being to shoot in portrait mode on my camera phone for Instagram, rather than the landscape that I am more accustomed to using over here. I’ve since corrected this in my subsequent reels.

Although jerk chicken is Caribbean-inspired, I felt wrapping it in a flour tortilla gave it a Tex Mex kind of feel. So, when it came to choosing an audio track for my reel, I opted for ZZ Top and Gimme All Your Lovin’. Someone commented that the guys in the band would be pleased the chicken, peppers and other bits were wrapped up in the tortilla, as it meant no stray pieces of food would get tangled up in their trademark long beards. I hadn’t really thought of that, tbh, but you have to say – fair point.

Here’s ZZ Top with Gimme All Your Lovin’.

Categories
Bakes Blog

New Year’s Day

My New Year’s Day this year was notable for 3 things.

Firstly, I used up the last of the puff pastry and mincemeat from the festive supplies, baking the final batch of mince pies of the season (see my photo above). When this point in the season is reached, you really do know that Christmas is officially over.

Secondly, my wife and I joined a beautifully scenic group walk along our local section of the English Coastal Path. The walk leader explained that it has now been renamed the King Charles III Coastal Path, reflecting our new monarch’s aim of promoting access to the realm’s green and pleasant land. Well done, sir! I did wonder whether he and Camilla might surprise us somewhere along the route, popping up with some mince pies of their own, to wish us all a happy new year. It was not to be, however.

Thirdly, I fulfilled a New Year aim by launching a channel for A Different Kitchen on Instagram. Mission Control for the blog remains firmly here on WordPress, and there are no plans to change that. The tools on here for online writers are excellent, and I love the support, talent and inspiration within the WordPress community (yes, that’s you!).

However, people engage in different ways, and just as ADK also has an accessible Playlist on Spotify and a channel on X/Twitter, I thought it was time to open another on Instagram. I think of it like a restaurant chain, opening an outlet in a new town or community to meet another set of people. The concept remains the same – a personal view of the world through a lens of Good Food, Great Music. Whichever platform people choose to engage with, they will encounter the same style, attitude and values (oh yes, and the same jokes – thank you there at the back).

One week on, and so far it seems to have been well-received. I’ve had lots and lots of likes, comments and follows, and a few invitations to join groups and networks. It’s helped take my total follower count across all my platforms past 2,500.

If you are on Instagram, do please pop over to @differentkitch and say hello, so I can follow back.

All in all, a busy 24 hours to start 2024. Naturally, today’s musical choice is U2 with New Year’s Day. I saw them perform this live when it was still a relatively new track. I’d seen them in their even earlier days, and the main development of their sound by this point was the introduction of an electric piano. On stage, the Edge managed to play it with one hand, at the same time as playing the lead guitar slung around his neck. Oh, and he was also providing the backing vocals to Bono. What an all-round talented chap he is. I suppose these days you would call it multi-tasking.

Enjoy U2 with New Year’s Day.