Coronation Street Blog: Cooking with Coronation Street

Greetings! Here we go with the fifth of our Cooking with Coronation Street blog posts in which we take recipes from this little gem of a book from 1992 and see what they turn out like when cooked at home by Corrie fans.

This week we chose to make Curly's chicken in red wine. There seems to be a theme going of cooking with alcohol from these recipes we're choosing, what with Alec's whiskey chicken last week and Bet and Alec's Guinness casserole too.

The recipe was as straighforward as you could want a recipe to be. Brown some chicken in a pan. In another pan cook some garlic and onions and throw in some red wine and plenty of it it. Bring it to the boil and don't set the kitchen on fire like we almost did last week with Alec's whisky chicken! The recipe called for mushrooms to be added but we, er, forgot to buy some and so we made it without. We decided at the end that not having mushrooms in the dish didn't detract from it at all but if we made it again, we'd add them to see what it was like. The recipe also said to use raisins, but we balked at this and didn't.

Once the onions and red wine had cooked down, add some chicken stock along with double cream (we used creme fraiche), add the chicken back to the pan, cover and cook for 45 minutes. The chicken turned red from the red wine and the sauce reduced a great deal. Here it is in the pan before we served it to our plates with mashed potato.

So, here's the truth or dare question... what was it like? Absolutely delicious. Both of us were surprised at how gorgeous it was and we would definitely cook it again. After last week's whisky chicken disaster - which not only almost burned down our kitchen but left a strange taste in our mouths, we were a little hesitant at trying another of the recipes, if I'm being honest. And so it was a lovely surprise at how nice this one turned out.