One-pan Chicken & Broccoli Rice

I love mid-week meals that don’t require much washing up, and it doesn’t get much better than a one-pan recipe. This one has a couple of steps, as there’s a fair bit of peeling and chopping involved BUT if you wanted to make this quicker to make e.g. after work you could do the prep the night before and stick the chopped ingredients in fridge ready to pull out when you get home. When I do this, I put the veg in one tupper box and the chicken in another which does mean two extra tupper boxes to wash up but I can do that while the dinner is cooking. Anyway, enough of the preamble, this is a firm family favourite because most dishes taste great if you throw cheese and garlic at them!

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
• one large shallot
• 3 medium sized carrots
• 2 chicken breasts
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 300g basmati rice
• 1 litre vegetable stock (or water + stock powder)
• salt & pepper
• one small tin of sweetcorn, drained
• one large head of broccoli
• 100g grated cheddar
• 50g grated Parmesan
• 50ml single cream

Direction

First, prep your ingredients: peel and finely chop the shallot; peel and thinly slice the carrots (save the peel for vegetable scraps soup); cut the chicken breasts in to small bite-sized pieces; peel and grate or mince the cloves of garlic.

Heat the oil in a large, deep lidded saucepan over a medium heat. Add the chopped shallot and cook for 2-3 minutes until it starts to soften, then add the carrot slices and cooke for another 4-5 minutes until the carrots start to soften.

Add the chicken pieces and cook, stirring continuously, until the chicken is sealed (this means when the outside of the chicken has cooked/ gone white but the inside is still uncooked). Add the grated/ minced garlic and cook for another minute to let the flavour unfold but before the garlic starts to burn.

Now add the herbs, rice, vegetable stock, a pinch of salt and either a pinch of ground black pepper or, if you have a pepper mill, a couple of cracks of black pepper. Stir everything to combine and bring to a boil.

Reduce the heat to a summer, cover the pan with the lid and leave to cook for 15 minutes, checking every 5 minutes or so to give it a stir. Careful! If the heat is too high, then the rice can stick to the bottom of the pan. If this starts to happen, again just give it a stir and add a couple more tablespoons of water.

While everything is cooking, cut the florets of the broccoli into to small, bite-sized pieces (peel and chop the broccoli stem and save for vegetable scraps soup). Take the rest of the time waiting to grate the cheese, if you have not already done so.

After 15 minutes, add the sweetcorn and the broccoli florets and cook for another 6-7 minutes or until the broccoli is done. If the rice is still a bit hard, then add a couple more tablespoons of water and keep cooking until the rice is done.

Once the rice and all the vegetables are cooked through, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cream and the grated cheeses so that it’s all melted and lovely a gooey. Give it a taste, and add more salt and pepper if needed. Done!