Chicken and Orange Risotto
Deliciousness! My favourite yet. This photo is from the first time I cooked it (last week sometime) but I cooked it again last night and I've leftovers for lunch. So yummy!
The recipe:
Dice 2 chicken breasts and add them to a large bowl with ¼ cup of extra virgin olive oil, 1 finely chopped clove of garlic, a liberal sprinkle of coarsely ground black pepper and the leaves stripped from 3 sprigs of lemon thyme. Mix well.
Peel the skin from 3 oranges using a peeler, chop finely and add to the chicken with 3 bay leaves. Mix well, then cover with gladwrap and refrigerate for roughly an hour.
Juice the oranges and put the juice aside for later.
30 minutes before you want to serve, soften 3 diced brown onions in 40g of butter over a low heat. Put 1.75 litres of chicken stock on to simmer in a saucepan (or at least a litre and add the rest as you use it).
Once the onions turn translucent, add 425g of arborio rice and mix well so it's combined with the buttery mixture. Add the orange juice and stir, turning the heat to high. Once the orange juice is absorbed, reduce the heat to low and add a generous ladleful of the chicken stock.
Add the stock and stir as necessary, making sure the risotto stays creamy and soft, but not too wet. This goes on until you run out of stock.
Lightly toast a handful of pine nuts on a dry frying pan and put aside. Roughly chop a handful of pitted green olives and add to the nuts. (My olives weren't pitted, so I just sliced chunks of olive off around the pit.) Separate the chicken from its marinade, season with salt and fry up in small amounts (so as to avoid broiling action).
Once the chicken is deliciously brown and all the stock has been added to the rice, remove the rice from the heat and add the chicken, nuts and olives. Stir through well and serve.