Chicken en Papilotte with Orange Veg

Chicken breasts are a great stand-by for dinners during the week; both my fiancé and I like them, they are quick to cook, pretty healthy and you can do a lot of different things with them. I found this recipe for spiced baked chicken parcels – chicken en papilotte – on Serious Eats, and decided to make my own variation on it.

 

I already had za’atar, a Middle Eastern spice, I’d bought when we had the letter Z for Alphabakes, but I don’t like to eat peppers or tomatoes so instead decided to use a little bit of pepper and a portion of spiralized butternut squash. A squash is really easy to spiralize if you have a robust enough machine (mine is the Lurch one from Lakeland that you can buy on Amazon here:

 

 

I tossed the chicken breast, which I had butterflied out, with the spices, oil and herbs and then placed it on a square of foil with the peppers, onion, spring onion and butternut squash on top. I wrapped up the parcel and baked it in the oven; it only took 20 minutes as I had sliced the chicken relatively thin. When you unwrap the parcel you have a very tasty meal, which can be served with extra veg or perhaps with new or mashed potatoes for a more substantial dinner.

 

Za'atar Bread Rolls

 I bookmarked this recipe for za'atar bread rolls- spellings also include zaa'tar and zatar- as I thought it would be a good entry for Alphabakes when z came up, which it finally did this month. Za'atar is a Middle Eastern spice blend made of oregano, thyme and sumac - sumac is something I've never been able to get hold of in the supermarket so I didn't hold out much hope of finding za'atar, so I ordered some over the internet.

The recipe comes from a blog called Cutchi Kitchen; I halved the quantities and rolled them up rather than twisted them, and left out the milk powder as I didn't have any, but other than that followed the recipe exactly.

Mixing the ingredients in a bowl:

 

Here's the spice blend

Sprinkling over half the dough

After placing the other piece of dough on top, I cut strips using a pizza wheel and rolled them up.

After baking in the oven:

I ate the bread rolls with some homemade soup. The spice blend didn't have a particularly strong flavour but it was distinctive and went well with the soup.

I'm sending these to Alphabakes, the blog challenge that I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker; I am hosting this month and you have until the 25th to send in your z recipes to alphabakes@gmail.com!

I'm also sending this to Bookmarked Recipes, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes.