Food: Dinner Party

We were having two of our good friends over for dinner, Andy and Fi, over the weekend. This meant that I had to slightly relax the ultra healthy food that I've been cooking up recently. I'm sure they would have appreciated it all the same, but dinner parties are supposed to be relatively decadent. As the weather has been so lovely the last couple of days, finally, I wanted to make a more summery dish. I was initially going to make roast chicken but I decided to use the chicken instead to make Martin's favourite dish, chicken and saffron rice. I'd cooked up a large quinoa salad at lunch time, so I added some of that as a side and also a quick carrot and orange salad that I had rustled up. 

For dessert I scanned BBC Good Food for some ideas. BBC Good Food is one of the best food websites around. The number of user reviews means that you're pretty much guaranteed that the recipe will work, it's is been highly rated. I decided to make a reduced fat lemon tart. I'm usually not keen on reduced fat desserts because you can tell that they're the diet version due to lack of flavour or an unusual texture compared with the full fat version. However, because this particular recipe had 38 five star reviews, I thought I'd give it a go, and, with just over 180 calories per portion, how can you go wrong?

I had a bit of a disaster initially, as I stupidly didn't measure the size of my tin, so I didn't make enough pastry. I tried, in vain, to roll it out between two pieces of cling film to make it thinner. But no, the pastry wasn't having any of it and I ended up making a second, larger batch. This time it worked perfectly. However, on blind baking, I sampled a little excess pastry and realised I'd forgotten to add icing sugar. Doh. I was not happy! Having already made a previous attempt, I gave up at this point and just carried on with recipe. Luckily I'd made my pastry nice and thin, and the highly lemony filling more than disguised this error. The end result was a beautifully crisp pastry tart with a soft, moreish, oh so lemony, filling.


Chicken and Saffron Rice

It's hard to describe what this dish is like as it involves such an unusual combination of flavours such as paprika, golden syrup, saffron, tomato ketchup, risotto rice and chicken. But honestly, please take my word for it that it's delicious and give it a go! It's effectively a chicken and rice bake. 

chicken and saffron rice