Late summer chicken

Oooh, this was interesting. It's another chicken recipe (am breaking my own rules on chicken/fish week and doubling it for the summer), and it comes from New Kitchen Basics, which is extremely reliable. None of the ingredients are particularly unusual. The flavours are woody herbs and late-summer fruit/veg. But it turned out really intriguing, and I bet it would be different another time. 

Chicken roasted with grapes

Yet another tripartite recipe:

1. Take chicken thighs and marinade briefly with a little oil, bay leaves and seasoning. Then put in the oven on high for 20 minutes.

2. After 20 minutes, add a bunch of grapes broken down into mini bunches, and lots of dried thyme. Roast another 20 mins.

3. In theory at the end but in my case at the same time as 2, take a thinly sliced onion and 2 bulbs of fennel (or 4 celery sticks), mixed with seasoning, oil and fennel seeds. If you like your onion crunchy raw, just mix it in at the end to soften a bit. I let the whole thing roast for those 20 mins, with this mix under the chicken and grapes.

 

The interesting thing is how much the grapes affect the outcome - yet the recipe says any colour of grape is fine, and Muscat are delicious. With perfumey white grapes this would look completely different and might well taste quite different too. This one, made with smallish black seedless grapes, was flooded with midnight juice, which stained the meat and the fennel dramatically (possibly not one for skittish eaters). The topmost grapes roasted quite taut and raisiny, but I would think that'll vary with size/juiciness too. 

 

Having it with celery instead of fennel would be fascinatingly different. Basically, with some cupboard herbs and supermarket staple grapes, chicken, celery and onion, you could keep on playing with this. Plus, with 35-40 minutes in the oven you can bake spuds alongside really easily. Not quite a traybake, but just as useful.