Chicken & Peppers

A dish of beauty

Faster faster faster! When did speed become the defining criteria for dinner happening or not?. Simple I get, tasty I need, beautiful I can be seduced by - but fast? Not so much. Fast food as a term was recoginised by Websters Dictionary in the early 1950's but I'm guessing that what  would be recognised then as fast food would never be sold in the mutli national giants today.

Thought I might reclaim the term just a smidgen, and categorise food that takes less than 15 minutes to prep as fast food. Fifteen minutes is no time, I waited longer than that for a bus yesterday and still got home in time for tea.

So here, without further ado, is possibly the simplest dish this blog has ever posted. It is exactly what it says in the title, just chicken and peppers. What gets served up an hour later with rice is a vibrantly beautiful plate of food that tastes rich and complex. Magic.

Chicken & Peppers

The peppers cook down and mix with the juice released by the chicken to make a lovely sauce that needs some rice or perhaps just lots of crusty bread to soak it all up

For 2

4-5  chicken thighs and/or drumsticks, on the bone, skin on
6-8 bell peppers, a mix of red and yellow (but not green as you are looking for sweet), chopped into large dice
2 tablespoons olive oil

In a large lidded saute pan warm the olive oil and cook the chicken pieces skin side down for a couple of minutes till the skin is crisply golden. Take the chicken out of the pan onto a plate and leave to one side for a couple of minutes while you fry the peppers, stirring occasionally until they start to soften. Return the chicken to the pan, skin side up, and season generously. Once the peppers start to give up their juice, turn the heat right down, cover the pan and leave to cook for 45 - 50 minutes.

Serve over plain boiled rice.

Seriously, that is all  you do.