I feel like I've mentioned my spreadsheet quite a lot recently in this blog. It's basically a list of all the meals I've cooked so far, cross referenced with the chapter in which the meal is found and the score Lolz gave it. It means I can work out the average score per chapter and other wildly exciting statistics. I have also written some formulas which mean that every time I add a meal to the list, it works out what percentage of that chapter I have made. Prior to today, my spreadsheet was telling me that the chicken chapter was lagging behind with only 69% completed.
Even so, there were only 5 left. Of those, I've been saving the spicy Cajun chicken as it looks like a nice easy one for a weekday evening and the Mexican chicken seems more of a winter thing. The chicken liver salad seems more of a lunch thing, and the Thai chicken laksa looks really good so I'm saving it. Therefore, I was left with this one. I already had some polenta left over from the chicken Caesar salad I made way back in April (we don't eat a lot of polenta) so decided to make it from scratch rather than buy the ready made stuff. It's not exactly a sexy ingredient - it's kind of a sloppy/gooey mess, but I cooked it and put it in a loaf tin to cool so that I could slice it. With that done I could get on with the other elements of the meal.
There were a few issues - I coated the cooled, sliced polenta with oil but it still stuck to my griddle pan. The asparagus meanwhile, didn't cook properly just sitting on top of the polenta so I had to finish it off in the frying pan later on. There were mushrooms - a big problem for me, and fennel seeds - a big problem for Lolz.
Plated up, it looks a bit of a greasy mess but taste wise it's mostly good. The sauce is nice - better than the passata based sauces I have made for the pasta dishes - and the spinach, asparagus and chicken (unless you dislike fennel seeds) are pretty inoffensive, but we weren't too keen on the polenta and thought it was lacking a bit in the carb department.
Lolz gave the dish 7/10. Difficulty rating 5/10.
I had a lot of the same issues you did with this one, but I thought the flavours worked really well together. Your polenta looks more charred and less sticky than mine!
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