potato and chicken bake

Using up: cold roast chickie!, old potatoes, spring onions from a friend’s garden, cream bought for supper on Saturday and not eaten (due to circumstances beyond our control)

This is a real bitsa one - I’m pleased with it, because it was lovely.

Chopped some very elderly potatoes into slices about 1/4″ thick, and layered half of them into an ovenproof dish.  On top of that went the chopped spring onions, and the chickie! from the carcass I boiled up for soup a couple of days ago.  Added some cream and seasoned, grated a little gruyere cheese onto it, then layered the rest of the potatoes on. More cream (you need quite a lot, really), more seasoning, then cut more gruyere into very small dice and scattered them over the top.

I gave it 5 minutes in the microwave to get it started, then it had about 40 minutes on gas 5.  Should you try this, make sure you put the dish on a tray in the oven, because ours oozed a bit.

We had it with a bulb of fennel, sliced up, put in a little casserole dish with some of the chicken soup broth, and cooked in the oven alongside the potatoes, to save gas.  I really must think more about gas consumption when I’m cooking.

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courgette and fennel “cottage pie”

Using up: fennel, courgette, potato

Chopped a courgette into chunks, and the other half of the fennel into thin slices, and chopped an onion.  All into a frying pan with some olive oil, and left to sauté down.  I left it for 20 minutes, but I think it would have been better to either put a lid on it, or left it another ten - the end result was quite crunchy.

While this is going on, I boiled some spuds for mash,

Added a tin of tomatoes to the vegetable mix, a dash of salt and a good grinding of black pepper, and cooked for another 6-7 minutes.

The spuds were mashed with a combination of Red Leicester and gruyere cheeses (that’s odd - why did I capitalise the red leicester and not the Gruyere?), with some reserved for the topping. With hindsight, I thought it was too much cheese - either in, or on - but Pete thought it was just right.  We also added some chopped chives to the mash.

Veg/tomato mix into an ovenproof dish, top with mash, sprinkle with remaining cheese. Cook at gas 6 for about 20 minutes.

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