Chicken with Leek and Asparagus

Snakes alive! This is rapidly becoming the year of the snake. Remember, a couple of posts ago, I told you about finding a snakeskin in our roof space? Well, since then we have been finding the real thing. This one was in our shed, yikes!



We have been reliably informed that he is not poisonous, and we should leave him alone as he will kill any mice in there, although I'm sure the cats won’t be too pleased about the competition. We have named him Hissing Sid. Needless to say, I give the shed a very wide berth and let Mick deal with him.

This chap had to be evacuated from our garage, fortunately, he left with good grace.



Anyway, snakes aside, on with the recipe. This is another one from the BBC, but I made quite a few changes to it. In the first place it called for the chicken to be flambéed in brandy. Now, I don’t know about you, but if there’s any brandy lying around the kitchen it does not go in the food! And, I didn’t like the idea of flambéing, as I would probably burn the house down, so I just bunged in some white wine.

Also the original recipe said to use asparagus and shallots, but having enjoyed the leek and asparagus combo in the tart, I decided to use leeks. Anyway, if you’re interested in burning your house down and want to have a go at flambéing, be my guest, you’ll find the original recipe here:
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/10599/flambed-chicken-with-asparagus

This is my version, and the end result was really rather nice, Mick declared it a keeper.

Chicken and Asparagus




Ingredients:

2 skinless, boneless chicken breasts
A few tablespoons of all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
Black pepper, to taste
2 leeks, white and pale green parts only, sliced
¼ cup white wine
1 cup chicken stock
10-12 asparagus spears, halved
¼ cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon chopped basil

Directions:

• Coat chicken with flour
• Heat oil and butter in a large skillet over a medium heat, add chicken and a generous grind of black pepper and cook until browned on both sides. Remove chicken from pan and set aside.
• In same pan, sauté leeks for a couple of minutes until softened.
• Return chicken to pan, add the white wine and cook until wine has reduced a bit.
• Stir in the stock and bring to boil, reduce heat and cook chicken for about 15 minutes.
• Add the asparagus and cook for a further 5 minutes.
• Stir in the cream and chopped basil and cook for a couple more minutes until cream has warmed but don’t let it boil.

Serve with some steamed basmati rice.