Jamie's jerk chicken

Sorry for the appalling picture. I simply don't understand my camera and it occasionally has a kind of spontaneous fit and if it agrees to take a picture at all, it's a bad one, despite the machine costing several hundred pounds (of someone else's money).

So last night I made this out of Jamie's 30-Minute Meals because I LOVE JAMIE OLIVER in the way only a trembling, slightly tearful frightened pregnant lady can. Every time I turn to my recordings on the V+ box there is just a long list of Jamie Oliver programmes. It's quite embarrassing when my husband's in the room because it's like he can see into my head and it's going: "Jamie Oliver Jamie Oliver Jamie Oliver Jamie Oliver." But I think my husband's got a weeny little crush on JO as well so that's okay.

This jerk chicken is very exciting, but I think there might be a small mistake in the sauce quantities. I only think, though, I'm probably wrong. But it specifies 6 tablespoons EACH of vinegar and rum, which makes the sauce quite wet, and it gets wetter on cooking, which I'm not sure can be right.

Feel free to make this as it stands, or to do what I would do if I were making this again, which would be to add only three tablespoons each of the vinegar and rum to make six tablespoons of wet stuff in total.

A little bird, okay it's my friend AC... who actually is quite little and a bird so very apt description... says that she thought this sauce was a bit wet, too - and something else Jamie did with plums was also wet. So, it's still a mystery, but at least IT'S NOT JUST ME.

[N.B - I made this again the other day with half-quantities of the wet stuff and it turned out much, much better - so do that, I'd say.]

The ingredients list below is exactly as it is in the book. The method is a bit different.

Jamie's jerk chicken

4 chicken breasts
4 spring onions
small bunch fresh thyme
3 fresh bay leaves
ground cloves
ground nutmeg
ground allspice
6 tbs rum (!) - I say use only 3
6 tbs cider/red wine vinegar (!) - ditto
1 tbs runny honey
1 Scotch bonnet chilli (I used 2 red chillies from Waitrose, one seeds in, one seeds out - worked v well)
4 cloves garlic

1 Turn your oven to 220C. Oil a griddle pan, or a normal pan if you haven't got a griddle, and get it roasting hot. Cut the chicken in two at the fattest part so it's still in one piece at the thinnest part but then divides like a sort of cloven hoof (does that make sense?). This helps it cook quicker.

Put the chicken skin-side down in the hot pan and then leave it alone for about 5-6 minutes. Don't poke it about because you want the skin to go crispy and a bit charred and you've got a better chance of that happening (this goes for steak, too) if you just let it get on with it.

2 Chop up the spring onions a bit and put in a whizzer with all the other sauce ingredients. If you haven't got the spices ground, as I didn't, smash about half a teaspoon of each in a pestle and mortar and grate in a big pinch of nutmeg. If using ground, take a big pinch of each spice.

3 Pour your whizzed jerk sauce into an oven dish. Then remove the chicken from the pan and place skin-side up in the pool of sauce. Drizzle over, if you like, an extra tablespoon of honey, more salt and pepper and sprigs of thyme and rosemary if you want it to look nice. Jamie's advice, which I always now follow (because it's love, after all) is that you should smush oil over herbs before scattering them on top of a dish like this so that they cook rather than frazz.

4 Cook on a high shelf for 15 minutes.