For food, we just have to eat what we have in ... and that can sometimes mean invention or even a quantum leap into some interesting combinations.
Tonight, I have some chicken.
I also have an aubergine (eggplant), courgette (zucchini), a couple of golden carrots and a red pepper (capsicum?).
That's the ingredients - my method, or madness, you decide, is to griddle the chicken and the aubergine, ribbon the courgette, boil the carrot and chop the red pepper, serving raw.
Seems legit ...
So, courgette sliced with a vegetable peeler into ribbons and placed in a steamer to sit over the boiling carrots towards the end of the cooking time. The aubergine was sliced into centimetre slices across the bias and then cut in half.
My griddle is quite small, so I pre-griddled the aubergine and then the chicken, pushing all the chicken together to make space for re-heating the aubergine at the end while the courgette just steamed through.
The plate was put together with the aubergine as the base, courgette ribbons dotted in and amongst the chicken which was placed over. Carrots on top and red pepper all over.
Garnish with herbs, parsley in my case, cayenne pepper, black pepper, Icelandic ash salt (sea salt is fine) and some dried mushrooms chopped up fine for a little umami pack in and amongst the other flavours.
We also had a bowl of cauliflower stalk soup for starters and cheesecake for dessert.
