Chicken With Olives

This Mediterranean-style way of cooking chicken crops up most frequently in cookbooks written by people who, I suspect, were heavily influenced by Elizabeth David. Since I, too, am one of them it appears here.

If memory serves me right, I got the original recipe from an English magazine called Vogue and the initials next to it in my notebook are A.B. This would have to be Arabella Boxer.

Her version calls for a whole chicken, which is all very well but makes life a little difficult in the final stages. So I have opted for chicken Marylands instead which, for those of you who don’t use my butcher, are the whole leg, trimmed of fat but with the skin still on.

For the weight conscious, you can remove the skin after cooking. In fact I nearly always do.

Okay. Prepare:

· 4 chicken legs (or breasts)
· 30mls olive oil
· 25g butter
· 1 sliced onion
· 1 sliced head of fennel
· 2 green bell peppers, chunked
· 2 red bell peppers, also chunked
· Good pinch of saffron or 1level tsp turmeric
· 175mls white wine
· 175mls chicken stock
· 32 stuffed green olives

Preheat the oven to 170°C, 325°F.

Heat the oil and butter in a casserole and brown the chicken on both sides. Set aside.

Add the onion and let it melt into the juices for about 5 minutes before adding the fennel. Give that another 2 minutes and then stir in the bell peppers. Cover and allow to gently cook for a further 5 minutes, then put the chicken on top of the vegetables and add the saffron or turmeric. Season with salt and pepper.

Heat the wine and stock together in a separate pan and pour over the chicken. Cover the casserole and bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Turn the chicken pieces over, add the olives, and cook for a further 20 minutes.

To serve; put the vegetables in a shallow oval dish, cut the legs into thigh and drumstick and arrange on the vegetables, pouring some of the stock over to moisten.

If you decided to use chicken breasts, slice them thickly and on the diagonal and arrange them in the same way.

Most of the time I serve this with couscous with the sauce handed separately, but for a real treat I cook up a batch of those crisp, thin, potato fries the French call ‘frites’. Yum.

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