Tasty Tuesdays - Chicken and Potato Mess Up (Home-cooking)

Come on in! The kitchen is open once more and this time, albeit a day late, I am bringing you some honest soul-warming home cooking. No recipe books, bloggers or BBC Good Food; I’m taking it straight from my childhood with a dish my mum rather simply called Chicken and Potato Mess Up. So long as you have the two basic ingredients – chicken and potato – you can pretty much make this out of anything. Of course there is a recipe but, as I’ve come to learn over the years of making this for my birthday or just for the nostalgia, just like the ones you pull from cookbooks, family recipes are often subject to alterations, amendments and ageing. And so I will present to you the recipe as my mum wrote it, with my additions tacked on.

You’ll want to start with the core ingredients – the chicken and the potato. The original calls for 1 ½ chopped cooked chicken breasts, but for a 4-person family I’m more inclined to recommend you use the full 2. Season them with salt/pepper and tarragon (or thyme – whichever you prefer) and cook at 180°C in a foil-covered dish for between 25 and 35 minutes depending on their size (this helps the meat retain moisture) before chopping. I also recall this dish being made with leftover chicken after a Sunday roast, making this the perfect Monday after-school meal. If you choose to do this, you’ll want roughly 250g / 8.5oz of meat.  You can even substitute with the same amount of Quorn pieces if you’re vegetarian. As for the potatoes, these will be going on top of the chicken and the rest of our ingredients. My mum’s instructions were to par-boil 5 medium potatoes (peeled and cut in half) for 15 minutes before slicing them thinly. Alternatively, you can slice them beforehand which brings the cooking time down to about 8-10 minutes, but either way you will still need to leave them to cool while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. Also, feel free to leave the skin on – it helps maintain the potato’s structural integrity as well as adding a bit more fibre.

The basic extra ingredients include:

- Tomatoes – you can use between ½ and a whole can of chopped tomatoes, 3 standard salad tomatoes, or one large beef tomato. These will create some liquid which the chicken will partially soak up, imbuing the meat with their sweet flavour.

- Carrots – one small can of sliced or baby carrots, or one large fresh carrot, sliced and boiled for 8 minutes (you can cook these in the same pan as the potatoes). We all know how difficult it is to get kids to eat vegetables, so if you want, you can dice the carrot up.

- Pasta – my family’s pantry was never without certain big brand products like Marmite, Daddies Brown Sauce, Colmans Mustard, and, for the purposes of this recipe, Batchelors Pasta ‘n’ Sauce. These dehydrated packets of pasta and sauce are deliciously nostalgic served as a side to chicken and chips, but here they play an important role in combining the ingredients. The flavour we use is Chicken & Mushroom, but there is a Cheese & Broccoli one too which could work just as well. The instructions are simple: bring a pan of milk and water to the boil, add the packet contents, and cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Of course, if you don’t have access to this product, there are most likely substitutes to be found, but if you have the time, I have provided instructions on how to make your own. Also, my mum was quite sparing with this, but I’ve found it much tastier (and easier) to use the whole packet!

- Potato Bake – Batchelors returns with a now defunct product: the genius Cheese and Bacon Potato Bake sauce. This smoky white sauce would be layered with the potato slices so that, when cooked, the covered slices would be gooey and the top slices would bear a gorgeous golden-brown crust that always made me save them until last when eating. Unfortunately, you will notice I said ‘defunct’ – I have been unable to find this product in my local supermarket so have had to improvise, as with the pasta sauce (see instructions with recipe at the end).

- Stock – another of our branded kitchen staples was the humble Oxo cube; a tiny foil-wrapped compact cube of stock granules which when crushed and sprinkled into this dish helped add saltiness and boost flavour. You can opt for low-sodium ones or just use half if you prefer.

- Peas – often said to be a child’s worst enemy at the dinner table, but I like to think, if I didn’t like peas as a kid before this dish came into my life, I certainly did afterwards. And they add a beautiful pop of colour alongside the tomatoes.

- Tomato Puree – because you can never have too much tomato.

- Seasoning – salt/pepper. You know the drill.

But from there, pretty much any additional vegetable, pulse, meat, stock or seasoning that you like is fair game. Some of my tried and tested favourites are: kale (one large handful); celery (1 diced stick); onion (1 small one, diced and fried); white wine (no more than 50ml – if you’re not cooking for children); stock from the roast chicken (again, no more than 50ml); and paprika (1 tsp). I would also recommend trying: lentils or chickpeas (25g), mushrooms (50g – diced and fried), or replacing the peas with sweetcorn. Have a mess around with whatever you have in your fridge/cupboard, whatever your kids like, and get some goodness in you!

For Potato Bake:

• 50g/2oz butter
• 50g/2oz flour
• 8fl.oz./235ml milk
• 50g/2oz cheese, grated (this needs to be a firm cheese like Cheddar or Red Leicester)
• 2 shallots, finely chopped
• 4 strips of smoky bacon, finely chopped
• ½ tbsp olive oil
• Salt/pepper

1. Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the bacon and shallots until crisp and golden.
2. Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and cook over a low heat for 1 minute.
3. Remove from the heat, add in a little milk and, using a hand whisk, mix to a paste. Continue adding the rest of the milk (saving about 30ml).
4. Return the pan to the heat and stir until the sauce thickens up (if it is too thick, add some of the reserved milk. You can even add a splash of white wine here if you’re cooking for big kids – and by that I mean us grown-ups)
5. Once thickened, add the cheese, and stir until melted before adding the fried bacon and shallots, and seasoning to taste.

For Pasta ‘n’ Sauce:

• 100g/4oz pasta (use whichever kind you prefer, though something small like shells or macaroni is perfect)
• 3.5fl.oz/100ml milk
• 9fl.oz/250ml water
• 1 chicken Oxo cube, crushed
• 2-3 mushrooms, finely diced
• ½ tbsp nut oil
• 1 tsp cornflour

1. Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the mushroom for 5 minutes.
2. Pour the milk and water into a saucepan and bring to the boil.
3. Add your pasta and Oxo cube and cook for 10-12 minutes (depending on the packet instructions of the pasta)
4. Remove a few spoonfuls of the sauce and combine with the cornflour to make a slurry. Pour this back into the pan, whisking as you do to prevent lumps, to thicken the sauce up.
5. Add in the mushrooms.

For the rest of the dish (my edits and additions are in bold):

• ½ - 1 can chopped tomatoes / 2 salad tomatoes, chopped / 1 beef tomato, chopped
• 1 small can of sliced/baby carrots / 1 large carrot, peeled and sliced
• 1 handful of frozen peas
• 1 ½ (or 2) chopped cooked chicken breasts / 250g/8.5oz chopped leftover roast
  chicken
• 5 medium potatoes (par-boiled and sliced thin)
• Salt and pepper
• 1 Oxo cube (chicken or vegetable)
• 1 tbsp tomato puree

1. Preheat oven to 180°C/350°F
2. Bring a large pan of water to the boil and add your potatoes (halved or sliced). Boil for 8-15 minutes depending on size (see note on potatoes at the start).
   
3. If using fresh carrot, add this to the potato pan for the last 8 minutes.
4. Once boiled, if using fresh carrot, scoop these out and put into a deep casserole dish before draining the potatoes and setting them aside to cool.
5. Put the rest of your ingredients in the dish – including the pasta. If not made from scratch, follow packet instructions before adding to the dish – and mix it all together.
6. If you are using any additional ingredients (listed earlier) add these in now.
7. If you didn’t pre-slice your potatoes, do this now
8. Arrange half of the potato slices on top, then pour over half of your potato bake, repeating with the rest.
9. Put into the oven for 1 hour until the top is crisp and golden and the filling is bubbling.

You can serve this with some broccoli for an added hit of colour and vitamins or eat it on its own. My favourite accompaniment is the vinegary sweet Daddies Brown Sauce.