Readers and friends often ask for help with chicken. How can they make it different, what can they do that isn’t the same old, same old? Even though my job is to think about food, I often have the same problem myself when I start to wonder about the evening meal. So I gathered up all the dishes I could – old favourites and new ones, mostly nothing too difficult – to put in this book. There are also short pieces of writing on braising and roasting that you should read, but I’ve tried to keep instructions on method to a minimum. Cooking chicken is basically easy and there’s no reason to complicate it. I just wanted to give you as many recipes and new ideas as possible.
Many of the obvious classics are missing; other people have given recipes for Thai green chicken curry, so you hardly need that again. Instead, I’ve tried to offer the less well-known and riffs on the familiar. The book could have been three times the size, but sometimes less is more and I thought it was better to have a useful book in the kitchen than a thick, comprehensive tome. All the recipes in here are now part of my repertoire. I hope they become part of yours, too, and that the evenings when you look at the packet of chicken thighs in your fridge and think, ‘What the hell am I going to do with those?’ are a thing of the past. If you have chicken in the fridge, a good meal is never far away.
