Hot and Spicy Chicken with Ackee Ratatouille

Hot and Spicy Chicken with Ackee Ratatouille is a dish with plenty of Caribbean flavour. It is great for a mid-week meal.

This week I have been experimenting with Caribbean food to mark Caribbean food week. Grace Foods kindly sent me some ingredients to experiment with and I have managed to make a couple of different recipes.

First I made a one pot chicken curry that used up a number of different herbs and spices as well as including sweet potato and butternut squash. It was delicious. I then made a coconut rice pudding using up a tin of coconut milk.

I had been rather intrigued by a tin of ackee and I had to make a recipe using them, just to see what it was. It is a fruit that is used in the traditional Jamaican dish, ackee and saltfish. I decided to try making a fusion dish, ackee ratatouille. To accompany this I fried up some chicken in a hot and spicy seasoning. The resulting hot and spicy chicken with ackee ratatouille was delicious.

The hot and spicy chicken was really easy to make. I cut some chicken breast into pieces and then dipped them into a bowl containing beaten egg. I then covered them in the hot and spicy chicken spice and then fried them gently until the chicken was cooked though. They could also be placed on a baking tray and cooked in the oven. The spice flavouring was delicious, a slightly hot taste but not too hot to eat and a lovely flavour. A can of ginger beer was the perfect accompaniment.

For the ackee ratatouille I used the tin of ackee and added cherry tomatoes, garlic, a spring onion, a red onion, and some chopped mangetout. To add some extra spice I used a teaspoon of garlic, ginger and pimento seasoning and a teaspoon of green peppercorns in brine. These were left over from when I made steak with peppercorn sauce. The ackee is bright yellow in colour which surprised me. It looks a bit like scrambled eggs and has an almost cheesy nutty flavour that works really well with the other ingredients. The ackee ratatouille was a lovely side dish to the hot and spicy chicken.

The whole family enjoyed the meal and the hot and spicy chicken was a big hit. I will definitely be making it again. I really enjoyed experimenting with Caribbean food and it has been fun to try some new foods in the process.

Have you tried Caribbean food? I would love to find some more recipe to try. Do let me know.

Joining in with the kitchen clearout linky on Madhouse Family Reviews as I used up the green peppercorns lurking in my cupboard.