Oven Steamed Chicken in Foil

You know what? I like being busy. Particularly when I'm busy with things I enjoy, like writing or cooking. Not so much with teaching. I've mentioned to a few people that although I'll make it through to the end of my contract absolutely fine, if anyone ever offers me a teaching job after this I might run away screaming. I don't have the patience, you see. And, as terrible as it is to admit this, it's really boring spending the day working at a child's level.

Which means that on Friday nights, I'm generally drained. Previous Fridays have brought us some of my laziest cooking, such as last week's easy roasted pepper sauce. This week, I decided I would 'experiment' with a style of cooking I've only really seen in TV adverts for fish - by which I mean, it looked easy, and some research just confirmed that. No washing up was the clincher. Plates and cutlery only.

Many of the foil-steaming recipes have a generally 'Asian' twist to them - such as adding mirin and soy sauce to the foil packet - but I didn't feel like doing that, particularly as we only have some disgusting cheap soy sauce at the moment. To be honest, it wasn't the most flavoursome of meals, but the meat was tender, the onion was delicious, and despite the amounts of butter used, it's probably pretty healthy. Right?

Edit: Scroll to the bottom of the recipe to see what I did with the leftovers...

Oven Steamed Chicken in Foil

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

1/2 stick of butter, cut into slices

Sauce of your choosing (soy, garlic, liqour - I used plum)

1 onion

2 large or 3 small chicken breasts

6 mini peppers

1 sprig parsley

1 cup white wine

Seasoning

Plain kitchen foil

Get your foil out and make sure it's big enough to hold all the chicken you want to use (including covering) and fit in your oven.

Cut some slices of the butter and lay on the bottom of the foil in the middle - your chicken will sit on top of this.

Season the butter liberally with salt, pepper, and another flavour of your choosing. Use herbs, dried or fresh, sauce, or liquor. Go wild! I went for a drizzle of plum sauce over the top.

Slice an onion in half, then into crescents. Scatter half of the crescents on top of the butter.

Place the chicken breasts on top of the onions, with another slice of butter on top of each breast. You may have more butter left over, in which case put it back in the fridge now.

Put the rest of the onion on top. Season again.

Fold up the edges of the foil to make a bowl shape, in preparation for scrunching the top and bottom together later. Pour in the white wine and garnish with a sprig of parsley.

I then deseeded six mini peppers and chucked them into the mix as well, but forgot to take a photo of it. Here's a picture of their wrapping instead.

Loosely seal the edges of the foil by crimping them together, so that some of the steam can escape but the packet is mostly closed. Put in the middle of the oven at 230 degrees (450 Fahrenheit) for twenty five minutes, before carefully opening the packet and serving with rice.

There were lots of leftover onions and sauce, so for lunch the next day I fried them up with some torn bacon and black pepper, and piled it into small rolls bought half-price from the bakery.

So good.