Chicken with cider and lovage
More experiments with lovage. I had seen it written that lovage went well with chicken, so I adapted this recipe from the Waitrose website.
Ingredients:
- One Organic free-range chicken, jointed (easy to do this yourself)
- 500ml good cider
- 2 tsps ground allspice (from the wholefood co-op)
- 40g organic butter
- 2 crisp desert apples, sliced into wedges
- 250g mushrooms, sliced
- 2 good sprigs of lovage; use the leaves very finely chopped. (from the garden)
- 4 tbsp double cream
Method:
- Put the cider in a large pan and simmer until reduced by half
- Put the chicken joints in a plastic bag with the allspice and a little salt and rub the spice into the chicken. The bag stops me making a big mess
- Melt half the butter in a deep-sided frying pan, and fry the mushrooms and apples until golden. Lift out with a slotted spoon and set aside.
- Melt the rest of the butter in the same pan and add the chicken pieces until lightly browned.
- Stir in the reduced cider, and bring to the boil, then turn down to simmer for 20 minutes to cook the chicken
- Add the mushrooms and apples along with the very finely chopped lovage and the cream. Season to taste and heat for a further five minutes.
We had this with mashed potatoes and peas. It was good, but the lovage did tend to turn into clots of leafy stuff. Maybe I didn’t chop it finely enough. If you like a thicker gravy, I would suggest mashing 20g of flour into 20g of butter and adding that instead of the cream.
