And I am not just chilling wine or popping corks!  I am cooking after a year’s sabbatical.  After a year of assembling different packets of salads, cutting up rotisserie chickens and arranging pre-cooked vegetables I am back behind the le creuset and I am good!  My olive chicken was ready in half an hour and the brown rice took a little longer.  All worth the wait till the last lick. 

Recipe for Frieda’s Pollo d’olive

• 4 skinless chicken breasts
• Teaspoons of cumin, ginger, black grinded pepper
• Pinches of salt & small pinch of chopped chili or teaspoon tip of masala
• Oversize handful of coriander
• 1 chopped onion
• 1 lemon’s juice & some flesh
• 3 cloves of garlic chopped fine
• Half a cup of mixed green and black pitted and stoned olives

Massage chicken breasts with rest of ingredients and let it be for an hour if you have time.

Heat a generous lug or 2 of Hemel-en-Aarde olive oil and simmer ingredients for 15 minutes, turn heat down and cook for further 10 minutes – never letting chicken dry out. Put lid on, turn heat off and wait 5 minutes before serving lemon chicken with olives on brown rice.

Pour some Hemel-en-Aarde Pinot noir – one of the most food friendliest wine varietals or a glass of chilled Chardonnay. Pick one wine with your first portion and the other for the second round as this chicken is very more-ish and you might have to double up the recipe even if you are only 2 people.

The question remains…will I be back in the kitchen tomorrow night?