Rethinking what we eat – Spicy chicken revisited

There can be a real joy in revisiting recipes – and this one is a case in point.  It is a few years since we first cooked this dish but it really is worth coming back to!  You can find the original cook here – or you can jump straight to the recipe below.

Coming back to this particular cook made us realise that our relationship with food has subtly changed over the last few years.  I noticed as I went back to the original recipe that previously we had made this dish with 2 large chicken breasts.  One each!  Now we have one (large) breast between us!  Our appetite is certainly no less than it was a few years ago, but the ratio of our meat and vegetables has certainly changed.  Are we becoming vegetarian? – certainly not!  Are we enjoying meat less – oh no! We are however, eating a larger proportion of vegetables, and we are trying more interesting things with them.  The affect of this is that somehow we are enjoying our meat more.  This may be because we are buying better meat (even if our overall meat bill remains the same or slightly less) or simply that we are valuing the meat we are eating so much more!

As we get older we have the luxury of time to reflect more on what we eat, its affect on us and also the impact on the planet.  For each of these things I think there is a really strong argument for reducing/stopping the highly intensive meat farming methods used round the world.  Intensive production leaves us with more meat than we really need, and a lot of food waste.  In turn, this leaves us with too many calories to consume and too many greenhouse gasses adding to an already precarious climate problem.  Should we stop eating meat all together? I really think not, and it feels too easy to swing that pendulum too far!  As part of a sustainable regenerative farming practice animals have a real place.  Should we reduce/stop battery farming? – for all sorts of reasons I think that should be our goal!  Should we move from raising cattle indoors, dependent on concentrated foods and antibiotics and move back to field grazing?  The sooner the better I am sure!

It does mean that meat will be more expensive.  Done properly, it also means that our meat will be better quality.  To maintain the same budget (if that is our goal) we will need to eat less meat. Reflecting on that, we have not found it difficult to make these changes – and if anything, we are really appreciating the meat more now. Putting this into context, the chicken supreme in this cook came from a high welfare, free range bird (more than twice the cost of an economy battery chicken).  We bought the whole bird as that works out much less expensive (see here) and with everything else on the plate, the dish above worked out at less than £2.00 per head.  Better still it was just a great dish!

A perfect point to get me off my soap box and just leave those thoughts there – but please do follow this up with your own thoughts in the comments section below.

So after these reflections how did we cook this?  This was identical to the first time  other than the single chicken breast (actually a supreme) and that the potatoes were partially precooked on our last BGE cook using the residual heat as it cooled.  The chicken was sliced into 6 chunky pieces and served with the chorizo potatoes and a mixture of cannellini beans and a few French beans from the garden.

A really fulfilling meal and …………….

…………………………a great way to really appreciate chicken!!