Briggs Poulet L'Orange

      Key Ingredients: chicken breasts, butter, spices (mixed spice, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg), flour, orange juice.

  Before she died, "Earthshock" actress Beryl Reid left behind a legacy, in this strange sounding recipe for Orange Chicken. It seemed at first glance to be perfectly reasonable, until you get to the line that goes "add the orange gravy to the chicken". Mmmm...

We begin by mixing up all the spices and the flour to make a sort of a paste, the basis for the gravy. We idly wondered what was wrong with simply buying a packet sauce at this point, rather than spending £8 on various fancy spices.



We heated the butter on the hob (along with some water for accompanying rice). Not extra virgin olive oil, oh no, BUTTER. Extra fatty butter! This is the Doctor Who Cookbook after all.



A generous amount of chicken breasts are fried in the pan. Don't they look nice?



Once browned they are transferred to a baking dish, so the frying pan can be used to make the delicious "orange sauce". How Beryl must have been laughing at us from beyond the grave.



Before long the spices, flour and (mmmmm!) orange juice had congealed into a sort of paste, not unlike runny poo.

The brown mixture is poured over the chicken and the whole thing shoved in the oven for an hour and a half. It takes 20 minutes to make a chicken stir fry you know...



And here it is cooked! Finally, we served the dish up with rice and peas. Lynda Baron and Pippin watch on...

The Verdict!

Unspectacular! Mr Rayner gave it the thumbs up, Mr Hunt wondered why the vaguely suspicious tasting concoction had taken so long when you could rustle up something tasty in far less time than it takes to watch the entire "Devil of Winterbourne" video collection. And I don't mean Gary Russell. Lady P meanwhile simply ate his up, threw his head back and cried "Zaaaaaarbbbbiiiii!" until we threw some cold water over him.