Packet Meals - Marinades part 1

Introduction

For Christmas part of my present from my brother and his wife was a set of 4 marinades from "The Fabulous Food Company", which appears to be a Target (Australia) label for a collection of Australian food products that they sell as though they're their own.

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^{The present, with it's plastic wrapping removed}

First Marinade

I chose to use the spicy garlic marinade first up, as I had some chicken tenderloins that needed using and figured that it would go nicely with them. I put the 4 tenderloins into a take away container and poured in about half of the 45ml bottle, which was enough to coat them and have them sitting in the liquid.

First impression was that it was quite a liquid marinade, and I'm used to working with much thicker ones, or larger volumes, so I wasn't sure how well the flavour was going to penetrate the meat. I rolled the meat around in the liquid before leaving it overnight in the fridge. I repeated the mixing in the morning and left them for the morning before cooking them up for a late lunch.

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^{When you have take away containers, you don't need a special marinading dish}

Cooking

After enough marinading time (otherwise known as when I started to get hungry), I heated my fry pan and placed the tenderloins into the pan. I drizzled about half the marinade from the container over them and let them cook for a few minutes.

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^{partially cooked chicken is rarely very appealing}

After turning them, I drizzled the rest of the container contents over them. After a few minutes cooking I turned them back over and removed the pan from the heat. I left the meat in the pan until the chips were pretty much finished before plating up.

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^{mostly cooked chicken is much more appealing}

My meal

I paired the tenderloins with a chip butty, and extra chips, and a couple of mini brioche buns. I used the buns to have spicy pulled chicken rolls.

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^{For the chip butty, just fold in half and enjoy}

The verdict

I was surprised from the first bite. The amount of heat in the marinade was certainly impressive and more than I'd anticipated from the product. It had also gotten into the chicken well, though the garlic was seemingly absent, or just obliterated by the spicy, which didn't seem to be that balanced with any other flavours it was supposed to convey.

The chicken was cooked pretty perfectly, and was quite easy to pull apart with just a fork to make my pulled chicken sliders. They were a nice idea and while could have done with a slaw, it was a good simple addition.

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^{while you can see a knife, it wasn't used to shred the chicken for the roll}

The chip butty is something I enjoy, but I never put enough butter (or margarine) onto my bread to make it drip. I've been known to add sriracha to mine recently, but traditionally it's just white bread, butter, and hot chips. Always tasty and a requirement when I have hot chips is at least 1 slice of buttered bread.