Chili Chicken piperade and polenta wheels
This is a bit of a left over dish. The chili chicken was leftover from a pasta dish, the polenta was baked to make polenta chips to go with chili con carne and the piperade was made with a half red pepper leftover from stir fry.
The chicken are chicken breasts which have been roasted in lemon juice and chili powder (dust about a table spoonful over the breasts after drizzling with the lemon juice). Roast until golden and you're done.
To make the piperade, slice up some red pepper along with a chili and some garlic, fry all of this lightly in olive oil until the red pepper is soft. At this point pour in some passata and cook until the mixture is nice and thick (i.e. some of the liquid of the passata has cooked away and the mix looks thicker). If you have it, add a splash of balsamic vinegar to give the sharpness to counter the sweetness of the peppers and passata.
For the polenta wheels, bring about a litre of chicken stock to the boil, add in a chopped onion and 2 or 3 chopped cloves of garlic and a table spoonful of herbes de provence or oregano or thyme or any green herb you have (or not it's not michelin). Now, pour in a packet of polenta (approx 400-500g) and STIR and KEEP STIRRING otherwise the polenta will go the way of lumpy porridge. Once the mixture is nice and smooth keep stirring and cooking until it has thickened (to the point of good porridge) and then pour out onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof.
Allow the mixture to cool at room temperature before refrigerating for an hour (this helps it firm up - leaving overnight won't hurt) - then bake in the oven at 180 degrees celsius until the top goes golden brown (about 20-25 minutes).
This dish can be eaten hot or cold, for me I had the leftover polenta so just cut that into wheels whilst cold and then flaked one chicken breast into the piperade to warm through and placed a breast on top and layered the results to look as it does in the picture - although this is just a picture to look nice on a food blog and in all honesty the trimmings that were leftover from the photos made their way into my bowl and taste ever bit as good without the foodie faff.
