Creamy honey mustard chicken with herby mash

Apologies for not posting this last night as per schedule: I cooked a meal from scratch – albeit with a few shortcuts, which I’ll talk about more below – and it left me so exhausted I barely had the energy to eat the meal I’d made, let alone write about it. I have been clear since the start of my condition (and I really will get around to writing about that one of these days, I promise!) that if I had the choice I would choose to be a wheelchair user and be able to use my hands to cook over being able to walk but having reduced use of my hands that stopped me cooking, so a little thing like chronic fatigue isn’t going to keep me out of the kitchen. That means I’m going to have to find ways to minimise the tiredness and maximise my cooking time, which I think I am only going to work out through trial and error.

For today, one of those ways of minimising tiredness is my beloved coffee, although that is mostly because mum woke me up early¹ this morning to ask what time she needed to be awake for church. After a few very good days, I could see last night that things were slipping when she asked me again what time her friend was picking her up this morning then, when I told her, admitted she didn’t know what “ten past ten” meant. If you’ve never had to explain the concept of telling the time to a grown adult, I would strongly recommend against it. ☹

Right, coffee acquired. Where was I?

Ah yes, dinner last night, which was one from my stockpile of Simply Cook boxes. If you’ve never come across Simply Cook (SC from here on, to save typing effort), they make spice / herb mixes which are sent out in packs of three which combine to make meals that would usually require lots of additional ingredients and time. I really like them as a time saver, although I will admit that the amount of packaging concerns me, and, as someone with reduced dexterity, the little pots are a pain in the backside to open.

Seated on my perching stool, I started to cook: first a pack of exceedingly tiny button mushrooms, which mostly didn’t need chopping but did need cleaning, which involved damp kitchen paper and far too many bits of mushroom slipping through my semi-numb fingertips and ending up on the floor. That done, the chicken went into a pan, where it stayed until I got fed up with watching it, as the burner which is easiest to reach from my stool is the smallest one, which doesn’t generate enough heat to fry things satisfactorily.²

Chicken removed and chopped into small pieces (OK, torn rather than chopped, as mum’s knives are mostly too blunt to cut anything – I need to spend some time with them and a knife sharpener), frozen chopped onion went into the pan. Ready-chopped veg is one of the shortcuts I mentioned: it feels silly paying for something like this rather than just buying a bag of onions, but the effort saved is worth it to me atm. (Cooking with a chronic illness is a constant balancing of effort saved with quality reduced, I’m finding. Ready-chopped veg is on the right side of that scale for me; ready-cooked jacket potatoes are not, although they did finally find a good home as the mash for this dish – just defrost in the microwave, squash them, add butter and the potato seasoning, then reheat when needed.)

Twenty minutes of stirring, adding SC pot contents, stirring, adding a couple of store cupboard ingredients, and more stirring, all under mum’s watchful eye – “once it’s dark there’s nothing outside for me to watch” – and dinner was ready.

The end result was a creamy, slightly sweet, slightly mustardy dish which I really liked but mum thought was bland, in a very unusual reversal of our standard responses to food. The mash tasted of buttery potatoes and not at all of the garlic and parsley seasoning that was stirred through it: buttery mashed ‘tatoes are never a bad thing, though. Overall I would score this 4/5, and did so on the SC website: I would happily eat it again – and, as there is enough left for me to have for lunch in a little while, I will do – but as mum wasn’t keen we won’t have it again.

There are a number of other SC boxes sitting waiting to be used – I didn’t remember to suspend my subscription until after I had been in hospital for a few days, and mum wasn’t going to use them – so there will be more of their recipes in future posts. (There’s a chicken makhani one I’m particularly looking forward to trying: curries, which generally require lots of different spices, are where SC really come into their own.)

For now, I’m going to enjoy the peace of mum being at church, so the house is empty except for me and mum’s remaining cat, who sadly is approaching the end of her life and occasionally decides a human is needed and yells until I go and make a fuss of her. At least I get kitty pets for my trouble, so it could be worse. 🤷‍♂️

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If, after reading this, you’re curious and would like to try Simply Cook, use this link and you can try a box for free: smply.in/CP5637. (NB: anyone who signs up using this link gets their first box for free, and I get a free box too. I think it’s UK only, with apologies to my friends in other countries. When choosing the contents of your first box, I highly recommend including the Thai prawn curry – it’s my favourite by some margin!)

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1. Early by my current standards, anyway. In hospital I would have considered it a very generous lie-in. ↩︎
2. Someone posted on one of my Facebook groups that “everyone has a favourite burner and no-one talks about it”. I’m talking about it, and my favourite is definitely not the smallest one I end up using! ↩︎