Chicken in pastry

Here’s the pastry dish that I mentioned  in “kids and meat“. It’s good because you can buy or make the ingredients in any combination. Ours was all from bought ingredients except the home made bacon. I prefer the butter puff pastry, which is pretty easy to find in a big supermarket.

ingredients (per person)
1 chicken breast (for a mix of adults and kids, you can trim a little off an adult server to make a kid sized portion)
1 sheet puff pastry (ditto re kids)
A small slice of camembert or brie
Slice of bacon

Method:
Wrap the chicken, bacon and cheese in the pastry. Bake for 40 minutes or until cooked. Serve with hollandaise and asparagus.

An early start to curing

Last year’s bresaola was sufficiently successful that I was determined to get an early start to curing this year.

First to be finished is a pork belly. I did a half salt, half sugar cure with instacure #2, black pepper and garlic powder for two weeks in the fridge, changing the cure half way through. This was a cure-in-the-bag arrangement, so it started dry and became wet with the extracted moisture.

This was followed by two months under the house wrapped in muslin. The finished product was inedibly salty but a day in fresh water fixes that. I think the extra salt was probably what let me get away with curing while the temperatures were a bit too high.

The finished product! Now that it’s winter we’re not getting any eggs from our hens, so it’s nice to have something else home made on the plate.

Note that this is not a “how to cure”. I don’t have enough experience to help someone else do this: it’s just a record of my own experiments. If you intend to cure at home, I’d recommend getting a good book or doing a lot of googling.