Week 18: Mozzarella & Parma Ham Wrapped Chicken with Roasted Tomatoes

The book: My patterned recipe folder

The recipe: no. 8, "Mozzarella & Parma Ham Wrapped Chicken with Roasted Tomatoes" (Bitchbuzz)

These are my trusty recipe folders.

They are home to the multitude of recipes I've printed out from the internet, been given by other people, snipped out of magazines and newspapers, and so on.

Specifically, the green one contains recipes from friends (because green is a friendly colour!), the red one contains curry recipes (because red is a hot colour!), and the patterned one contains everything else (because that was the other folder in the set of three from WHSmith!).

Despite not being actual cookbooks, I thought they deserved to be part of the Random Kitchen project all the same. While they do house quite a lot of things I've cooked before (I wouldn't keep a recipe without being fundamentally interested in it, after all), there are still plenty of recipes that remain thoroughly unexplored - "this looks interesting, let's print it out then forget about it for seven years!" - and plenty of old favourites that I haven't dug out for a while.

The latter category is where we end up today. I've made this one before (even for visitors). It's hardly reinventing the wheel - anyone can wrap a bit of meat in some other meat and stick it in the oven - but it's a really nice simple dinner and one that, frankly, we could use after last week's Spiced Cucumber debacle, so...

The prep: There's very little I actually have in stock for this one, so a supermarket sweep is required for some chicken, mozzarella, basil, prosciutto and cherry tomatoes.

I'm even out of olive oil, so actually pretty much the only thing I don't have to buy for this recipe is the seasoning. Totes worth the outlay though.

The making: This is the point where I normally talk in vague terms without referencing specific quantities or quoting the ingredients and method directly, because copyright and stuff. But the beauty of recipes from the internet is... they're from the internet. Which means I can share the full joy with you here. Let's celebrate!

"This is supposed to be some kind of prize...?"

This week's recipe, then, can be found right here. Yes, it really is from a website called Bitchbuzz (now defunct, apparently).

As you can see, two chicken breasts are essentially used as the meaty bread of a mozzarella sandwich. (Mmmm, meaty bread.) The mozzarella-stuffed chicken is then wrapped in basil-stuffed slices of Parma ham (or proscuitto, or whatever you can get really) and perched atop a bed of sliced courgette and not-sliced cherry tomatoes.

Lashings of olive oil plus some garlic, salt and pepper are added to proceedings, et voilà:

It really is that straightforward. Recipe ain't lying when it talks about "minimal effort". Into the oven it goes, and 35 minutes later we have an easy evening meal on our hands. Hurrah! But what about the end result?

The eating: Well, obviously it's ace. It's chicken, mozzarella, basil, Parma ham, oil and lovely fresh-tasting veg - what's not to like? The roasting process really brings out the best in the courgettes and tomatoes, and the wrapper o' meat means the chicken is lovely and succulent too.

As you can see, the recipe recommends serving this with buttered new potatoes. This would very much be an error. Oil, chicken and the veg mean there's lots of lovely juices swimming around the bottom of the roasting tin, so mashed potato is clearly the only way to go.

Oh, and a slice or two of Hovis to mop up the leftover juices once we're done, because we're northern.

So there you have it. On the one hand, this week's Random Kitchen choice has confirmed something I'd long suspected from my years of Eurovision blogging, namely that it's a lot harder to write interestingly about positive experiences than proper actual hilarious disasters. On the other hand, it's nice to actually get to eat some proper food for a change.

One-word verdict: Smashing.