You can buy it in the supermarkets all year round, usually in weeny portions wrapped up in plastic, but I find them really unsatisfying and very expensive. It's best to wait until they're in season and buy them whole.
I hadn't been intending to make this tonight, but I popped into town yesterday and when I saw that the greengrocer had a stack of whole corn-on-the-cobs on display out front for 50p each, I couldn't bring myself to walk past. Walking home with my prize I just had to decide what to do with them.
Corn-on-the-cob just with butter, salt and pepper is a cheap and delicious lunch of course, but I knew I had some chicken thighs in the freezer so I thought I'd have a go at peri-peri chicken. I love Nandos, and always order corn on the side when I eat there. Nandos sell their own marinades in bottles which I think are pretty good, but I couldn't be bothered to go back into town to the supermarket so I decided to make my own.
Googling for recipes brings up loads of different results, so I think that peri-peri is more of a catch-all term for spicy marinades than a specific recipe. What they do all have in common is garlic, olive oil, something acidic (either lemon/lime juice or wine vinegar) and chilli, along with other herbs and spices. Cumin and paprika seem to be popular, and so is oregano.
I settled on olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, a fresh chilli pepper, cumin, crushed chilli flakes for colour and a bit more kick, and salt and pepper. A heaped teaspoonful of each of the spices, a pinch of salt and a twist of pepper, peel the garlic (I used three cloves), chop the pepper and throw it all into a food processor with a glug of olive oil and a splash of vinegar. It's supposed to make a paste, but mine was more of a liquid - I'd put a bit too much vinegar in. Doesn't really matter though.
I always have a little look at the clear-out section of the fridges in the supermarket - where they put food that's approaching the sell-by date and discount it - and recently got four free-range, organic chicken thighs for £4. They went straight in the freezer, where they store quite happily.
Having defrosted the chicken overnight, make some slashes in the skin with a sharp knife to allow the marinade to penetrate through and into the flesh.
Pour the mixture all over the chicken, then put it back in the fridge to marinade for at least a couple of hours. Lots of the recipes I found today specified the receptacle that the chicken should marinade in, most commonly a ziploc bag, and one insisting on a glass bowl. It matters not. I used a tupperware today, because it was sitting on the draining board next to where I was working and saved me a walk over to the cupboard.
When cooking chicken with the skin on, you want crispy skin but you don't want the flesh to dry out which is a problem because one requires high temperatures, but the other needs you to cook low-and-slow. Heston Blumenthal came up with some quite extreme solutions to this in his In Search of Perfection programme, in the episodes on roast chicken and Peking duck, including peeling the skin off and cooking it separately. There are simpler methods for the home cook though! The most common method is to fry the chicken in a mixture of oil and butter, just long enough to crisp the skin without cooking the chicken, before transferring to the oven. I didn't want to do that today though, because I wanted to keep the marinade on the chicken.
Some time before you want to start cooking, pre-heat the oven as high as it will go. Mine takes a fair a old time to get there, so plan ahead. Put the chicken in and immediately turn the oven down to 180C. The theory is that the initial high temperature crisps up the skin, then as it drops the chicken will cook without drying out.
The chicken will take about 20-30 minutes, so you've got plenty of time to prepare the corn while that's going on. There are a hundred ways of preparing corn, but I've settled on this one. Peel the leaves off, and chop off the end where the leaves join the fruit. Get rid of the silk - all those annoying little threads running up the length of it. This can be a bit fiddly and messy - I find that blasting the cobs under the cold tap then rubbing with kitchen roll does the trick.
Having said all that, this one came apart really easily - the leaves and silk just came away in one go and the end snapped off in my hand without needing to be cut.
Bring a (necessarily large) pan of salted water to the boil and boil the cobs for about 7 minutes. If you like the corn harder cook it less, and if you like it soft cook it for longer - some people like it raw, even.
Serve the chicken, then fish the corn out of the boiling water using tongs and fry it for a minute or so in the pan that the chicken cooked in. This isn't strictly necessary, but it gives it a bit more flavour. To my mind, you can't have corn without a knob of butter and some salt-and-pepper too!
Oh - if the British summer hadn't finished already, I'd probably have done this on the barbecue. Just make sure the chicken's cooked through before serving!
Taste verdict
Before we even sat down, this smelled fantastic - the marinade smelled nice, and it smelled nice while it was cooking. Always a good start! The chicken was delicious and it packed a good chilli punch too. It doesn't look much on the plate, and you can serve chips with it if you want to, but it was quite enough for us. I'll definitely be doing this again, messing about with the herbs and spices each time. I must be honest about the bum note though - the skin didn't crisp up as I'd hoped. Maybe if I fry it in a pan to start off, then spoon the leftover marinade over the top when it goes into the oven? That could work.
Financial verdict
2 chicken thighs - £2
2 corn-on-the-cobs - £1
1 chilli pepper - 25p
Olive oil, wine vinegar, garlic, herbs and spices - pennies, from store.
£1.63 per person.
The skinny
Make marinade by whizzing up the following ingredients in a food processor, or by hand in a pestle-and-mortar: glug of olive oil, splash of wine vinegar, one chilli pepper, a couple of cloves of garlic and a heaped teaspoonful each of cumin, oregano and dried chilli flakes. Or whatever herbs and spices you like really. Or lemon/lime juice instead of the vinegar. It's flexible!
Take one chicken thigh per person. Make some slashes in the skin with a sharp knife.
Cover the chicken with the marinade and leave in the fridge for at least a couple of hours, or overnight.
Pre-heat the oven as high as it will go. Put the chicken in the oven and immediately turn it down to 180C. The chicken will take 20-30 minutes, depending on size.
Prepare the corn by peeling the leaves off and getting rid of the silk.
Put into boiling water for about 7 minutes (you might prefer it more or less cooked). It needs to be ready at about the same time as the chicken.
Serve the chicken, then finish off the corn in the pan that the chicken was cooked in, to give it a bit more flavour.
WeightWatchers ProPoints
8
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