The marmalade challenge

No this is not about making marmalade again. Well only incidentally. It is a bit all consuming at the moment. No this is about David being 'cute' and giving me the challenge of marmalade for his special once a week meal. At first I said, no but then I thought about it a little and thought that it might be quite an easy thing to do. I thought there was bound to be something with chicken, or maybe pork out there.

The above Roast Marmalade Chicken with Winter Salad is a Jill Dupleix recipe that I found in my recipe database of recipes found in delicious and other such places. I confess I'm not going for the winter salad - we'll just have a plain green salad, but I've filched the olives from the salad and added them to my chicken. It's supposed to be thighs with the skin on, but David doesn't like thighs, so he is getting a breast with no skin. I just can't help fiddling. I've also retained the quantities of the marmalade and mustard that she recommends even though she had eight thighs and I've only got one thigh and one breast. Though they are big ones. So maybe it will be swimming in too much juice and will not roast properly. But you can never have too much juice really.

I'm trying to tell myself that this is what makes me a good cook. Other people say I'm a good cook. Not me. I think I'm an OK cook but nothing special. Because basically I think you just need to have the right cookery books, or, these days, know where to look on the net. Anyway being a good cook I suppose, is having the confidence to fiddle with recipes.

To accompany this dish I have made a potato gratin - I have potatoes that are beginning to grow in my pantry - so I had to use them. And I am being a bit 'cute' with them because I've put a bit of marmalade in the egg and milk mix that I have poured over them. Not at all sure how that's going to work out.

The marmalade I used is from the first batch of marmalade I am making this year. It was still in the pot and not quite at setting point. Orangey though.

You had to put a bit of onion and some wedges of orange in with the chicken but I see that the picture doesn't show them. Maybe they burnt them!

When I was looking for suitable recipes it was almost astonishing that all of those that I found were very similar and very simple - mostly containing marmalade and mustard and not much else. And no pork recipes, but some duck. Well to be honest, now that I think about it I did specify chicken in my Google search, so it's not really a surprise that I didn't find pork. There was probably ham too.

So batch one done. Another three, maybe four to go I think. I got 11 jars of varying sizes out of this batch so I should eventually get enough to see David through until next year. Must take a jar to the supplier of the oranges in the market.

Going back to David's challenge I should probably have really finished it off by making a marmalade bread and butter pudding, but we've still got some baklava and my back was aching, so I didn't. Another day.