Spanish Chicken With Peppers, Olives and Capers

Recently I have been wondering about cooking up a Spanish Style feast and creating a selection of tapas to snack on. I love the thought of having lots of different dishes to nibble on with a range of flavours to tantalise the palette. I am currently planning the best combination of dishes to create and will give this a try in a couple of weeks. In the meantime I decided to get myself into the Spanish mood by creating an evening dinner of Spanish Chicken with peppers, olives and capers.

I cooked the chicken in a tomato based sauce which I flavoured with rosemary as this is plentiful in my garden. I made use of a number of different products that I had been sent by Fragata. These included peppers, capers and olives which were perfect for the recipe. I have never tried capers before so sampled a few straight from the jar. They are nice, a little spicy maybe. I never realised capers are used in tartar sauce so I may experiment with a fish dish using them.

I have to say that the Spanish Chicken dish worked perfectly. It was delicious. My son remarked that it was one of the nicest things he had tried recently and ate it all. I didn’t give him any olives as he does not like them. Olives are one of those things you either love or loath, and are something I have only learned to like in recent months. I remember as a child going to a posh banquet with my mum and dad. There were what looked like little fondant fancies on the table and I bit into one to find an olive lurking inside. It was rather unexpected and put me off olives for a long time. I do like them now and managed to eat quite a few of these before adding them to the dish.

If you would like to try this recipe, these are the steps I followed:

Spanish Chicken Recipe

Ingredients

• 3 chicken breasts
• 2 teaspoons rosemary
• 1 onion
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1 red pepper
• 1 can tomatoes
• 45g pancetta or bacon
• 1 tablespoons capers
• 1 tablespoon olives
• ¼ pint chicken stock
• 2 tablespoons white wine

Method

1. Warm some olive oil in a pan. Chop the chicken into pieces and add to the pan.
2. While it is browning chop the rosemary, onions, bacon and garlic. Add to the pan and cook for a few minutes until the onions are soft.
3. Chop the pepper into small chunks and add this to the pan with the olives and capers.
4. Add the tomatoes, wine, chicken stock, olives, peppers and capers. Simmer slowly until the sauce thickens and the meat is tender.

I served the dish with plain rice. A side salad would also go nicely with this dish.

Disclosure: I was sent some Fragata products in order to create a recipe.