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Chicken devil curry

This is a recipe with a really interesting pedigree. It’s a Malaysian curry, but it’s not a Tamil Indian, Malay or Chinese recipe. This dish is unique to the Kristang, descendants of Portuguese traders who lived in the port of Malacca, and is deliciously different in flavour to the curries you usually find in Malaysia.

Chicken devil curry is a bit like a cross between the vinegar-seasoned curries of Goa and the devilled foods of Victorian Britain. It’s fiery hot, and unbelievably tasty. Serve with plenty of rice – you’ll need it to soak up the sauce, which is serious foretaste-of-the-heavenly-feast stuff, and to temper the heat of the chillies. I served this with some dal and some cooling pineapple and cucumber salad.

To serve 4, you’ll need:

6 chicken joints (your choice), with bone and skin
4 medium potatoes
1 large onion
6 cloves garlic
2 in piece of ginger, peeled
1 stalk lemongrass
10 fresh red chillies
10 dried red chillies
10 blanched almonds (or 5 candlenuts, if you can find them)
2 teaspoons powdered mustard
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 can coconut milk (use a brand like Chacao without emulsifiers)
1 teaspoon caster sugar
Salt and pepper

Rub the chicken pieces (I used six thighs) with a teaspoon of caster sugar, a teaspoon of salt and a generous amount of pepper. Set aside while you prepare the curry paste.

Put the onion, garlic, ginger, lemon grass, almonds and both kinds of chillies in the bowl of your food processor with 2 tablespoons of water, and whizz until everything is reduced to a paste.

Heat 2 tablespoons of flavourless oil in a wok, and brown the chicken all over. Remove it to a plate, and add the curry paste to the hot wok. Cook the paste over a high flame, stirring all the time, for five minutes with a spoonful of the cream from the top of the coconut milk.

Add the mustards, the sugar and vinegar to the paste and stir until the mixture starts to bubble. Lower the heat to medium and slide the browned chicken pieces into the pan to cook in the paste for ten minutes. Add the rest of the coconut milk from the can with a teaspoon of salt and the chopped potatoes. Stir well to make sure all the potato and chicken is covered with sauce, put a lid on the wok and simmer over a low flame for 20-30 minutes.

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Chicken with morels

Rummaging in my kitchen cupboards last week, I had a very pleasant surprise – I found a pot of dried morel mushrooms which I’d bought last year and forgotten about. Morels are an utterly delicious mushroom, with a honeycomb-textured cap and a subtle and delicate flavour, much less musky than some other wild mushrooms. They can be very expensive, but it’s worth shopping around: I found mine in a shop in Nice last year, where they were cheaper than they are in the UK.

The morel season is short, so you’re most likely to be able to find them dried. (If you see them fresh anywhere, snap them up; a fresh morel is a thing of wonder.) Some people out there take morels very seriously – The Great Morel is just one of a number of websites dedicated to this fabulous little fungus, and is well worth a browse.

I chose to make a chicken dish to show my morels off to their best advantage. You don’t require any complicated spicing here -with the crème fraîche and white wine in the sauce, the morels make this a velvety-rich dish with exceptional flavour. To serve two, you’ll need:

2 plump chicken breasts, with skins
8 large dried morel mushrooms
3 shallots
2 fat cloves garlic
1 glass white wine
100ml water
5 tablespoons home-made chicken stock
3 heaped tablespoons crème fraîche
Juice of half a lemon
1 handful fresh chervil
2 heaped tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and pepper

Soak the dried morels in 100ml of freshly boiled water for half an hour. If you’re lucky enough to get your hands on fresh morels, skip this step, and replace the soaking liquid later in the recipe with chicken stock. (If your morels are not as large as those in the picture above, feel free to use a few more.) Dice the shallots and chop the garlic.

Melt the butter and olive oil in a sauté pan, and heat over a medium flame until the butter starts to bubble. Slide the chicken breasts in, skin side down, and cook for about seven minutes, until the skin is golden. Turn the chicken over and add the diced shallots and the garlic to the oil in the pan. Move the shallots and garlic around in the pan with a spatula until the shallots are turning translucent, then add the morels, reserving their soaking liquid, and continue to sauté for two minutes.

Pour the mushrooms’ soaking liquid (being careful to avoid any gritty bits at the bottom of the bowl) and the wine around the chicken with five tablespoons of home-made chicken stock. The sauce in the pan should simmer – allow it to bubble down and evaporate until you have less than a third of the volume of liquid that you started with. Stir in the crème fraîche and simmer for another minute. The sauce should be glossy. Add the lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste.

Garnish with the chervil and serve with mashed potatoes, which you can use to mop up the gorgeous sauce, and a green vegetable.

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Spicy barbecue chicken wings

I’ve been barbecuing a lot in the last couple of weeks, as the UK has sunburned its way through a heat wave. Recently I’ve been experimenting with old-fashioned barbecue sauce, and I think I’ve finally come up with a pretty much world-beating home-made version. (Of course, any recipe which starts with eight tablespoons of ketchup can barely be called a recipe – but I hope you’ll let me off this time.) This is a great marinade and baste, and is thick enough to stay on the wings as they cook. If you baste well during cooking, it will caramelise into a dense, sticky-crispy layer on the skin, making wings just aching to be torn apart with fingers and popped into your mouth.

Chicken wings are one of the best things in the world on the barbecue. The flesh is succulent and sweet because of the proximity to the bone, they cook (and marinade) faster than a larger joint would, and all that lovely skin crisps up to a mahogany deliciousness. To marinade ten chicken wings, tips removed, you’ll need:

8 tablespoons tomato ketchup
2 tablespoons sweet chilli sauce (use your favourite – I like Kampong Koh or Sriracha)
4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 crushed garlic cloves
2 tablespoons muscavado sugar
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons Tabasco chipotle sauce
2 teaspoons ground chipotle peppers (use ground cayenne if you can’t find chipotle)
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons liquid smoke

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and marinade the chicken wings for about eight hours. (You can cut down on this with a vacuum container like a SealSaver, which is what I did.) Cook on the barbecue (or under the grill indoors if the weather is bad), which should not be blistering hot, for 15 minutes, turning regularly and basting each time you turn with the remaining marinade.

A note on the balsamic vinegar: don’t use the best stuff that you keep for salads. A cheaper version will do here. I like Aspall’s balsamic for cooking. Maille also do a very good balsamic vinegar, but I’ve not seen it outside France – if anyone knows of any stockists here, please leave a note in the comments!

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Jerked chicken – and brining 101


I promised you a post about brining. Brining sounds a bit counter-intuitive at first; how on earth is giving a piece of meat a bath in salty water going to make it taste better?

Back in the dark ages when I was at school, cooking lessons were called domestic science. I am unconvinced that there’s a lot in common between my constructing a pie and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, but understanding how brining works does actually require you to think back to your biology lessons. This is because what’s going on in your chicken once you’ve popped it in its salty bath involves osmosis, whereby the cell walls in the muscle let through the concentrated brine to try to balance the concentration inside and outside the cells. This results in a plumping of the muscle – the cells draw up the brine all the way into the core of the piece of meat and become very juicy, leaving you with a lovely moist piece of cooked meat. There’s also some denaturing of protein thanks to the salt; this will make your meat much more tender. All this science works at its fastest and best when your brine is as close to freezing as possible – once you’ve made yours, refrigerate it (perhaps with a couple of ice cubes bobbing around in there) until it’s very cold before using.

The brine can also push certain flavours deep inside the meat (far deeper than ordinary marinading can achieve). When choosing what flavours to add to your brine, be careful – you need to use only those aromatics which are soluble in water or vinegar, not those (like the essential oils in a lot of herbs and spices) which are only fat-soluble – these flavours won’t make it past the cell membranes. Any of those chilli sauces which have a vinegar base (Tabasco, Frank’s and so on) work brilliantly in a brine; so does lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, mustard, flavoured vinegars and any alcohol. Be careful when adding wine or cider to a brine though; because the brine works on the deep tissue of the meat, not just the surface, it can be hard to cook the brined meat little enough to keep it tender while also cooking it enough to burn off any alcohol lurking deep in the middle.

I like sugar or honey in a brine, especially with chicken, because as well as adding flavour to the meat, it makes the surface skin much nicer – brown, crisp and quick to caramelise. You can add another variable by buying some vacuum containers like the ones I reviewed here, which will make brining about four times faster. Without a handy vacuum tub, brining times for chicken are:

  • Chicken breasts, no bone – 1 hr
  • Chicken joints, with bone – 1 ½ hrs
  • Whole chicken (about 4lb) – 3 hrs

I’ve made a jerk rub to slather all over chicken once it comes out of the brine. This Jamaican seasoning is unusual in its heavy use of allspice, usually a dessert spice, and it works really well here. To make unbelievably succulent, spicy chicken for two, you’ll need:

Chicken and brine
1 chicken, jointed into six pieces (ask the butcher to do this for you or go at it yourself with a very sharp cleaver)
70 g salt
1 litre water
1 ½ tablespoons Tabasco sauce
2 tablespoons honey

Jerk seasoning
2 tablespoons ground allspice
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1 tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon dried habañero pepper
1 teaspoon black pepper

Mix the water, salt, Tabasco and honey and heat gently in a saucepan, stirring, until all the salt has dissolved. Chill in a large bowl in the fridge until very cold. Add the chicken pieces to the brine and leave for an hour and a half.

Remove the chicken from the brine and pat dry with paper towels. Drizzle with a little olive oil and rub well with the jerk seasoning. Grill the chicken on the barbecue or under the grill in your oven for about 7 minutes per side (be careful here – for some reason, brined chicken takes less time to cook than virgin chicken).

I’ll put up a recipe later this week for a plantain accompaniment for this chicken.

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Lemon-pepper crispy chicken with tomato sauce

Lemons. Tomatoes. Lots and lots of basil. Who said it was February?

I really love a good breading mixture. This one’s just great – it’s seasoned with lemon zest and freshly ground pepper, so it’s really fresh and zingy. I’m sure there are non-fried things just as crispy and delicious as this, but I’ve yet to find out what they are.

To serve four, you’ll need:

Chicken
4 chicken breasts, without skins
8 tablespoons olive oil (choose a really fruity one)
Juice of ½ a lemon
1 clove of garlic, crushed
½ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 eggs, beaten
250g breadcrumbs
Grated zest of a lemon
1 teaspoon chilli flakes

Sauce
1.5 kg fresh ripe tomatoes
3 large onions
4 cloves of garlic
1 handful fresh basil
1 handful fresh oregano
1 mild red chilli
1 ½ tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1 large knob butter, plus extra to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and pepper

Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and marinade it overnight in the olive oil, lemon juice, salt garlic and ten turns of the peppermill.

Here comes the tedious bit – peel and seed the tomatoes. (This is very easy but takes a while – use a knife to make a little cross in the skin at the bottom of the tomato, then pour over boiling water and leave for ten seconds. Fish the tomato out with a slotted spoon. You’ll find the skin will come away easily. Slice open to remove the seeds.) Chop the tomato flesh and set aside in a bowl. If you are pressed for time, use tinned tomatoes. They won’t be quite as good, but they’ll still be pretty darn tasty.

Dice the onions and chop the garlic finely, and fry in a large knob of butter until translucent and fragrant. Add the tomatoes and finely chopped chilli to the saucepan and stir to combine everything. Bring to a very low simmer, and reduce (this will take more than an hour) to half its original volume or a little less. Bring the vinegar and sugar to the boil in a small pan and stir it into the sauce. Add the oregano and season with salt and pepper. Taste to check whether you need more salt or sugar. Add another knob of butter for a more mellow flavour if you like.

Combine the breadcrumbs, lemon zest, chilli flakes and a tablespoon of freshly ground pepper in a large bowl. When the sauce is nearly reduced, bread the chicken by removing the pieces from the marinade, dipping in the beaten egg, and rolling in the breadcrumb mixture until each piece is nicely coated with the crumbs and aromatics. Heat a large knob of butter and three tablespoons of olive oil together in a non-stick frying pan, and slide the breaded chicken pieces in when the oil is very hot. Cook for about 5 minutes each side, until the chicken is golden and crisp.

Serve the chicken and its tomato sauce with buttered tagliatelle or some basmati rice mixed with a knob of butter and a small handful of parmesan.

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Sage and onion roast chicken with gravy and crispy sage leaves

I’ve been experimenting with roast chickens. You’ll notice that the method here is rather different from other roast chicken recipes on this site; this time I’m getting you to stuff a buttery mixture under the skin and then blast the chicken at a very high temperature for a much shorter cooking time than usual. I’m amazed at the difference this makes to the finished product. The skin is crisp and flavourful – absolutely the best I’ve ever achieved on a roast bird – and the flesh is incredibly juicy and moist, taking on flavour from the butter, herb and shallot mixture, but requiring no basting or turning upside-down and juggling in the oven.

I had a great email conversation over Christmas with an American gentleman in Japan who was wondering about typically English flavours to cook his Christmas goose with. Sage and onion is one of the classic English mixtures, and here it goes to make a boring old chicken really festive. I’d be very happy serving this as a Christmas dinner for people who (like me) don’t go a bundle on turkey. The gravy here is also typically English – it’s thickened with flour and makes a lovely, glossy, boozy glaze for the meat. I served a side of mashed potato with this to soak up lots of the gravy (because mashed potato and gravy is one of the best things in the world, right up there with sex and roller coasters), some easy stuffing balls to reflect the sage and onion flavours, and a really tart salad to cut through all the lovely butter.

To roast one chicken weighing about three pounds (around 1.5 kg), which should serve three or four, you’ll need:

Chicken
1 chicken
1 lemon
2 small (round) shallots or 1 large (banana) shallot
125 g (¼ lb) softened salted butter
12 fresh sage leaves
2 medium onions
Salt and pepper

Gravy
1½ dessert spoons flour
1 small glass dry white wine
100 ml chicken stock

Sage leaves
8 sage leaves
Olive oil to fry

Chicken method
Preheat the oven to a blistering 230°C (450° F). Dice the shallots as finely as possible – think micro-dice – using your sharpest knife, and combine them thoroughly in a bowl with the zest of the lemon, a teaspoon of salt and the butter. Use your fingers and the back of a teaspoon to separate the skin over the breast of the chicken from the muscle, starting at the bottom (leg) end of the bird, where the cavity opens. You should be able to make a large pocket between skin and flesh over each breast. Use fingers to stuff this pocket with all but two teaspoons of the soft butter, then slide six whole sage leaves under the skin as well, on top of the butter mixture. Push the remaining two teaspoons of butter and two more sage leaves into the space where the chicken’s legs meet the body.

Chop the zested lemon in half and slice the onions roughly. Remove any lumps of fat from inside the chicken and discard. Push half the lemon and half an onion into the chicken’s cavity with four more sage leaves and some salt and pepper. Make a pile of the onion pieces in the centre of your roasting tin and balance the chicken on top, then rain another teaspoon of salt all over the skin of the bird and roast for an hour.

When the hour is up, use a skewer to poke into the fattest part of the chicken’s thigh. If the juices run clear, remove from the oven; if there is any pinkness, return the bird to the oven for another ten minutes and repeat. Remove the chicken to a warmed platter and leave it in a warm place to rest for ten minutes while you make the gravy and the crispy sage leaves.

Gravy method
Pour any juices from the cavity of the chicken into a small frying pan over a medium flame, along with all the fat, juices and onion bits from the roasting tin. Do not discard any of the flavourful butter and fat from the roasting tin – if you feel guilty after having overdone it at Christmas, go for a run tomorrow rather than deprive yourself of flavour here.

Bring the contents of the pan up to a gentle simmer, and sprinkle over the flour. Use a wooden spoon, making tiny circles in the pan, to work the flour into the fatty mixture until no floury lumps are visible. (There will be onion pieces and bits of chicken kicking around in there – these are fine; you just don’t want any floury bits.)

The liquid in the pan will start to thicken dramatically. Pour over the glass of wine and continue to stir for a couple of minutes to burn off the alcohol. Pour in the chicken stock and continue to stir for a couple more minutes, then taste for seasoning. Tip in any juices which the chicken has released while resting, and get someone to start carving.

Sage leaves method
These are as easy as anything. Just heat the oil in a little pan and throw in the sage leaves for a few seconds. They will frizzle and crisp. Drain on kitchen paper and sprinkle over the carved chicken.

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Devilled chicken

Devilling is a Victorian technique for resurrecting drab leftovers. It involves making a spicy paste from mustard, Indian chutney and other storecupboard standards, dressing cold, roast meats with the paste, then grilling until the whole confection is hot. The Victorians were wont to devil anything they could get their hands on; breakfast kidneys were devilled, eggs, hams, mutton chops: let’s be honest here. It was really a way to disguise food which was a bit elderly and didn’t taste that great any more.

In North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell describes some devilled chicken which “tasted like saw-dust”. The cook must have been low on mustard that day. Disraeli’s curiously awful Sybill describes the requirement for a cool glass of water with spicy devilled biscuits (I am still not quite clear on how precisely you’re meant to devil a biscuit – he probably meant that the biscuits were heavy on the chillies). These days, we don’t really use this technique much any more, although I do remember a home economics class at school which culminated with a slightly boingy hard-boiled egg piped full of a gritty orange yolk, mayonnaise and raw spice mixture. Unsurprisingly, I haven’t devilled anything since.

Never say never. Having mentally consigned devilled-anything to the ‘unlikely to be delicious’ pile, I found myself browsing through some of my antique recipe books at the weekend (a very cheap obsession, should you get bitten by the collecting bug; they’re usually available for pennies in bric a brac shops and they’re fascinating; who knew that powdered millipedes were good in a sort of soup for hysteria?) and read through a devilled chicken recipe. It actually sounded pretty good. I looked up another one. It sounded fantastic. Time to swallow my prejudice and get devilling. All the same, I decided to roast the chicken specifically for the dish rather than using leftovers. It was amazingly and unreservedly good, and it’s going to become a regular on our supper table. To devil my four chicken leg and thigh joints (these are almost always the bits left over when you have a roast) I made sure that unlike Mrs Gaskell, I didn’t skimp on the mustard, and that like Disraeli, I had a cold glass of water standing by. You’ll need:

4 chicken thigh and drumstick joints, pre-roasted or raw (see below)
1 ½ generous tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 ½ tablespoons good Indian chutney. I used Patak’s brinjal (aubergine) pickle, but any good mango chutney or similar will also be excellent here.
1 tablespoon chilli sauce
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
A generous amount of pepper and salt
Flour (optional)

I realise this ingredients list sounds pretty peculiar. Persevere with it; Victorian flavours can seem oddly foreign to modern palates, but remain extremely good.

If your chicken is raw, put it in a roasting tin and roast, drizzled with plenty of salt, pepper and olive oil, at 180° C (350° F) for 40 minutes until crisp and golden, and set aside in the roasting tin to cool. If you’re using pre-cooked chicken, just place it in the cold roasting tin and start cooking the sauce.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and stir in the mustard, chutney, chilli sauce and Worcestershire sauce until you have a thick paste. Remove from the heat. Cut deep diagonal gashes into the meat of the chicken, with another set of gashes across them. Push the paste into the slits in the meat, and spread it generously all over the skin of the chicken. If there’s any paste left, put a dollop under each chicken joint.

Place the roasting tin under the grill about 4 inches from the flame, and grill for 10 minutes until the paste is starting to brown and the meat is hot. André Simon suggests dredging the chicken pieces with flour after you’ve smeared them with the paste in order to achieve a crispy finish. You might want to try this if you’re using yesterday’s chicken, but chicken you’ve just cooked should have a lovely crisp skin underneath the paste, so extra crispiness isn’t really necessary.

Serve with buttered rice or new potatoes and a sharply dressed salad.

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Honey and sesame glazed chicken wings

Glazed chicken wingsContinuing this week’s things which taste as if they ought to cost a lot more than they did theme, here’s a recipe for chicken wings. They’re a much-overlooked bit of the bird, and this is a shame (or would be if it didn’t mean that they’re amazingly cheap), because they’re wonderfully tasty. Meat from near the bone of a chicken always tastes richer and sweeter. Grilled in a sweet sauce, the skin on the wings becomes crisp and delicious. And somehow, sticky things which demand to be eaten with the fingers are about three times tastier than the ones you can just manage with a knife and fork.

To serve four as a starter or two as a main course with rice, you’ll need:

16 chicken wings
2 tablespoons dark soya sauce
2 tablespoons runny honey
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon light soya sauce
1 tablespoon chilli sauce (choose something sweet here – I used Kampong Koh chilli and garlic sauce, which is made in my grandparents’ town in Malaysia)
3 cloves of garlic, crushed or grated with a Microplane grater
Juice of half a lemon

Remove the pointy end-joint from each wing with a sharp knife. Mix all the other ingredients in a large bowl and marinade the chicken pieces for a few hours or (preferably) overnight.

Place the chicken wings on a rack over some tin foil in a grill pan and grill close to the heat source under a medium flame for about six minutes on each side (or use a barbecue). Baste the chicken with the marinade from the bowl regularly as it cooks. The sauce will caramelise and the skin will bubble. If you want a sauce, put any extra marinade in a small pan and boil vigorously for a couple of minutes, then pour over the wings. Serve with a bowl on the table for the bones and plenty of paper napkins – you’re going to get very sticky fingers!

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Chicken with cardamom and preserved lemons

Chicken with cardamom and preserved lemonsRemember those Moroccan preserved lemons from a few months back? They turned out very nicely indeed – salty, zingy skins infused with the scents of the spices in the jar. One of the spices I used in the preserved lemons was cardamom, and I’ve used more in this dish; along with the lemons and some flowery olive oil, it lifts and brightens the flavour of this chicken dish. Pure sunshine in a bowl – and that’s just what I feel like in dismal October. Be sure when choosing your ingredients that you use an olive oil with a good flavour.

I’ve used a box of the tiny fillets (sometimes called chicken tenders) you’ll find to one side of a chicken breast here. They’re a very easy piece of meat to work with if you’re in a hurry – no skinning or chopping necessary. To serve two, you’ll need:

450g chicken fillet pieces
3 shallots
3 tablespoons polenta or cornmeal
8 cardamom pods
1 preserved lemon
4 tablespoons good extra-virgin olive oil
1 handful parsley, chopped
Salt and pepper

Preserved lemonStart by scraping the pulp out of the inside of the preserved lemon (the pulp of these is too salty to eat). Dice the skin and pour over three tablespoons of the olive oil, then set aside while you prepare the rest of the meal.

Slice the shallots very finely and put them in a large bowl with the chicken. Bash the cardamom pods lightly in a mortar and pestle to crack their tough skins, then use the back of a teaspoon or a fingernail to get all the seeds out. Discard the empty pods and crush the seeds in the mortar and pestle. Mix the cardamom seeds, polenta and some salt and pepper, then sprinkle evenly over the chicken and shallots and mix well.

Heat the remaining tablespoon of olive oil in a large sauté pan over a high flame. Tip in all the chicken mixture and sauté until crisp and brown. Remove the chicken and crispy shallots to a clean bowl and pour over the lemon and oil mixture and some parsley, tossing like a salad to mix. Serve immediately.

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Tarragon cream chicken

This recipe is absurdly quick and simple – it’s good for unexpected guests because you’re likely to have most of the ingredients in the house already (and may well already find them all lurking in your fridge). It’s rich and delicious, and it only needs a salad and some crusty bread to accompany it and soak up the creamy juices.

If you can get your hands on some fresh tarragon, use that. Dried tarragon, however, is surprisingly good here. There are no similar short-cuts you can take with the parsley, though; dried parsley is useless and revolting, so you’ll have to find some fresh.

To serve three, you’ll need:

Three chicken breast fillets
3 tablespoons flour
400ml crème fraîche
3 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon (or 3 teaspoons dried)
3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
Half a lemon
2 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper

Chop the chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces and dust them with the flour and a little salt and pepper. Melt the butter in a sauté pan and heat it until it starts to bubble. Add the chicken to the pan and sauté until it is cooked through and starting to brown at the edges. Turn the heat down low.

Tip the crème fraîche, herbs and mustard into the pan and stir well. Bring up to a simmer and add the lemon juice and some salt and pepper. Taste for seasoning, adding a little more lemon juice if you like, and serve immediately.