Saturday 31 January 2009

G is for Goujons, H is for Hotdogs

Ok so your probably wondering why I’m writing about G and H together right?
Well all will be revealed if you keep on reading!


Lets start with chicken goujons.

We used
Small chicken breasts
About 6/7 slices of bread
Paprika
Chives
Tin of chopped tomatoes
Bag of couscous
Tomatoe Puree
Garlic Powder
Onion
Cayenne pepper spice

It cost
Loads! About 10 quid. Just not pratical on a student budget!

This was a Jamie Oliver recipe. Quite complex for us considering the previous disasters. The temptation when things go so wrong is to find the easiest recipe out there and just do that. However we decided against “dumbing down” the recipes so to speak. We chose the ones which we felt would be the nicest, regardless of how complicated they were. After all, theres only so many times a person can go wrong isn’t there? And chicken Goujons are nice so we thought lets just go for it.

The most boring part of this recipe is definitely the breadcrumb bit. It literally involves sitting there, breaking bread over a bowl. At least that’s how we assumed you make breadcrumbs anyway. So many minutes and many pieces of bread later, we finally had a bowl full of bread crumbs ready to coat the chicken. Adding some chives and spices to the breadcrumbs, they actually looked and smelt quite nice. To get the breadcrumbs to stick we had to coat the chicken in egg, then dip them in the breadcrumb bowl. Well this seemed fairly simple. Ok so the coated chicken looked a bit odd and nothing like and chicken Goujon id ever eaten but I was sure this would change when we cooked them.
We also attempted to make a spicy tomato couscous to accompany the Goujons and actually we realised that this recipe was a lot of bloody work! The couscous was almost as complicated to make as the chicken and its hard to get the timings right when your cooking and frying so many things at once. It took well over 2 hours. It was a very fiddly, fussy recipe. I reckon this taught us the lesson that we should actually read the recipes before we attempt them, rather than just getting caught up in what looks nice!

Anyway, by now were well on our way to yet another disaster. When cooking the chicken it occurred to us there was bare bits where the breadcrumbs just hadn’t stuck. God knows why, I mean we did submerge them in the breadcrumbs bowl. What more could we do? Then it appeared that the breadcrumbs were burning so we hastily served up, only to be told by our flatmates that the chicken wasn’t cooked. Keen to avoid salmonella poisoning, our efforts were binned leaving us with a plate of couscous each that neither of us liked the taste of anyway. Marvellous.

H is for Hot Dogs...
Well we did what I said we were so against doing. We dumbed down. Hot Dogs are idiot proof. As long as you can fry an onion and boil a Hot Dog then your sorted. These were lovely. Cheap and easy and tasty.
Were they healthy? No.
Did we care at this point? Not really. we were really disheartened! Anyway what else begins with H, except Hot Dogs and Haggis?!
If your made enought to want to attempt the Goujon recipe, you can find it here:


3 comments:

  1. Orz!!
    They looked nice, I'd have cheated personally with the bread crumbs and brought a ready made tube of them :P

    Keep Goingg!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I bet I could have made these easily, but we all know I am a much better cook than you!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. They were so hard!! We did everything right but it just didnt work...again! lol.

    Afterwards we saw a tube of ready made breadcrumbs and were gutted, we should of done it that way and we may have had a success!

    ReplyDelete

 
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