A week of winter dishes from The Vintage Chef

Chicken forestière

Unlike loads of my other favoured stews, this one doesn’t take hours on the stove or in the oven. I can’t pretend it’s a ten minute start-to-finish dish, but it is one you can start after work and comfortably finish in time for dinner – and after the initial time investment, you can leave it to do its thing.

Recipes differ as to the cut of chicken you use: I’ve used fillets here which are not normally my favourite cut, but here it helps the quick cooking process, and means that you don’t have to faff around with bones when eating. The ‘forestière’ in the dish title means ‘of the forest’ and is really a reference to the mushrooms in the sauce. I’ve gone for a double mushroom hit here: sliced mushrooms, fried off so that they retain their shape and flavour when added to the sauce, and dried porcini mushrooms rehydrated, which give a fantastic depth and a dark, bosky aroma.