a big jar of red peppers, and some half price chicken

I bought a *huge* jar of roasted red peppers for something – not sure what, either our big party last year, or our camping break in Wales. Whatever it was for, they didn’t get used, and have languished in The Cupboard Under The Stairs for many months, next to the big jar of sun dried tomatoes; no, don’t know what they got bought for either.

One day last week, I popped into the local CoOp minimart – sadly, it is not nearly as local as the local Sainsburys minimart. and I much prefer it, but I happened to be nearby and popped in for some bits. They had packs of four chicken breasts at half price, so I snapped up a couple of packs. And left my beautiful bunch of irises on the counter, but never mind.

I made a chicken and chickpea tagine with five of the breasts, having put the chickpeas in to soak a couple of days before, and then cooked them in the slow cooker on Saturday while we were Morris dancing in Malton. The tagine is dead easy – brown the chicken and put it in a pot (slow cooker for me), add sliced onions and garlic, and Ras el Hanout spice mix fried off a bit, some dried apricots, about 1/3 of the jar of roast peppers sliced up, a lemon or two halved and squeezed and hurled in the pot. Bit of water and left alone for a few hours. Was lovely.

The other three chicken breasts were roasted off in the Remoska with seasoning and olive oil, and stowed in the freezer for … well, whatever. Pasta or stirfy or something, but all eight would have made far too much tagine.

As for the rest of the peppers – that’s for the next post!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

red pepper sauce

So – 2/3rds of a huge jar of roasted red peppers. Opened. What to do?

Finely chopped an onion and about three cloves of garlic, and fried them off in olive oil, then added a slug of red wine and deglazed the pan. Sliced up the peppers and threw them in till they were warmed through thoroughly. Liquidised it in batches, then “cleaned” the goblet with about a glass of water and added it to the sauce; it made enough for at least two meals for us, and possibly three.

I cut up a thin leek into thin rings (we have just started a veg box again, so there might be interesting (or not :) posts re that soon). It went into a pan with some olive oil, and was fried until just caramelised. There were some chickpeas left over from the tagine, so I added them, some seasoning, and some torn basil leaves from the pot on the windowsill at the end. I could have taken some chilli, I think, but was really delicious eaten with fusilli pasta, and I shall freeze the rest of the sauce today. So nice we shall have it again, and possibly again after that.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.