Recipe: Chicken, lemon & pea traybake

Courtesy of the two Nigel(la)s

I’ve wrestled before with the question of ‘originality’ in my recipe writing. Was my family’s favourite sausage ragu really mine to write about, given we cribbed the recipe from a newspaper decades ago? Could I really claim there’s anything unique about my version of spaghetti carbonara, or that the constituent parts of my meatball recipe weren’t just borrowed from the many others I tested along the way?

I take some comfort in knowing that Felicity Cloake has made the best part of a career doing exactly this sort of thing in her ‘How to cook the perfect…’ series, in which she test drives the most acclaimed recipes of a given dish before assembling her own Frankenstinian creation.

And so we reach today’s recipe, for a simple chicken traybake that really came about from me mashing together two recipes, from Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson, after realising I was rather fond of them both.

The first comes from Nigel Slater’s truly excellent A Cook’s Book, in which he recommends roasting chicken thighs before quickly heating lemon juice and basil leaves in the same pan while the chicken rests. It’s punchy and sticky and unctuous, but so simple that it requires supplementing to make a full meal.

Nigella’s recipe comes from her book At My Table, though it’s since been re-published online, which is where I found it. She bakes a few thighs on top of a bed of frozen peas and leeks, flavoured with a good pour of vermouth, which I love for its ease, but I find her cooking times leave the chicken tough and the vegetables a little wet and gloopy.

Here, I present what I hope is the best of both worlds: a single-pan traybake that produces a full dinner for four in less than an hour, with Nigella’s veg and Nigel’s flavours. The steam from the peas keeps the chicken moist, but the skin still crisps beautifully, while the lemon and basil produce a sticky sweetness that I find hard to resist.