Anyway, I'm teaching this class 'writing,' which I generally try to avoid because when the students are writing, I'm staring into space and waiting for them to finish. Yesterday I spent the time figuring out what to cook for dinner: I wanted to use potatoes. And if you're using potatoes, you should probably have sour cream. Oh, and roasting garlic is something I've been wanting to try. I might as well defrost some chicken as well. And I'm not entirely sure of Tom's opinion regarding baked potatoes, which seems to be the obvious place to go with potatoes and sour cream, so I was going to have to be a bit inventive there.
After a lot of crossings-out and re-working the ingredients into different places, I ended up with this:
Garlic Chicken with Sour Cream Mash
Serves 2
2 servings of potatoes (I had 9 which were of varying sizes, mostly small)
4 cloves of garlic
3 small chicken breasts
3 rashers of bacon
Garlic sauce
Cream cheese
Milk
Lemon juice
1 tablespoon butter
Seasoning
Peel the potatoes and chop into small chunks. Heat in boiling water over a low heat.
Cover the chicken in garlic sauce (alternatively, cut a pocket in the chicken and slip some garlic inside) and wrap each breast in a bacon rasher. Chop the top and bottom off each garlic clove, peel, and put both the chicken and garlic on a cooking tray, with a little oil over the garlic. Cook at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for 15 minutes.
Blend cream cheese with lemon juice and milk (I honestly just eyeballed the amounts so they would fill my small blender, and probably ended up with about 1 and 1/2 cups) to make sour cream. Pour into a cold pan.
After fifteen minutes, remove the garlic from the oven, put in the sour cream pan, and mash with a fork. The chicken goes back in the oven for another 10 minutes. Heat the sour cream and garlic on a very low heat, turning the heat off if there are any bubbles. This sauce just needs to be warmed rather than cooked, and you don't want it to split or anything.
Mash the potatoes with some butter and about half of the sour cream and garlic sauce. Serve alongside the chicken, with the extra sour cream sauce on the side.
