Tonight we made our own tapenade and used it to stuff chicken breasts. We added some plump, juicy sundried tomatoes to counteract the strong flavours of the tapenade and then baked the chicken in the oven. Served with some new potatoes and our usual vegetables for this time of year – runner beans and purple sprouting brocolli.
My timing was a bit out when cooking and we had to put the potatoes back on because I’d taken them off too early. They still turned out strangely; they were a lot waxier than we’d thought they would be. Also, the chicken breasts were touching each other in the dish and so were underdone where they touched and had to be put back in for a while longer. Looking at the picture though, it all looks slightly pink still… hopefully that’s just a trick of the light or we might be feeling ill soon!
All that aside, they tasted really good and we started thinking of other things to cook with tapenade soon as we only used half of it.
How did you make your own tapenade? I had a similar problem with some new potatoes we got from the garden. They took ages to soften, then once we added the oil to crunch them up the soaked up the oil and tasted really greasy.
My mum has had the same problem with her potatoes lately too, I’m wondering if it’s the weather.
The tapenade was Rick Stein’s recipe, from the BBC website. Really easy.
Hi Jules, we vaguely followed a Rick Stein recipe but did it with a mortar and pestle instead of a food processor. It went something like this:
1 1/2 gloves of garlic
40g black olives, finely chopped (about 12 or so)
2 anchovy fillets, finely chopped
15g capers, rinsed
olive oil
I started by crushing the garlic in the mortar and pestle with a little salt until it was a paste. Then added the olives, anchovies and capers and squashed them together a bit. It came out as quite a coarse tapenade because I wasn’t trying to make it completely into a paste, just make sure that I squashed the capers and anchovies mostly and combined them with the olives without making the olives into a paste. Then stirred in some oil.
Rick Stein’s recipe said to put the solid ingredients into a food processor and pulse a few times, then put it on slow and slowly add the olive oil to combine it. Some recipes also specify lemon juice.
home made tpenade is so much better than the shop stuff, isn’t it. I quite like using it to crust tuna steaks before grilling them.