Dinner for two - Coq au Vin

These ingredients can be tweaked if you're not keen, but I'd strongly recommend that you give the whole recipe a go before you go changing things.

This recipe takes about 20-25 mins to prepare - depending upon how many you're cooking for and forty-five minutes to cook.

What you'll need:

• Chicken breasts - about 150 grammes per person is usually enough
• Shallots or baby onions - about 6 small per person
• Bacon, chopped into reasonably small pieces (about 1cm) - if you're dieting, best to use smoked lean back at one rasher per person otherwise smoked streaky at two per person
• Clove of garlic finely chopped
• 25 grammes butter
• olive oil
• 25 grammes cornflour or plain flour if you haven't got cornflour to hand
• 300 ml good quality red wine. Cheap plonk will taste bitter
• 2 tsp dried Thyme
• 1 tsp smoked paprika. Ordinary paprika will do--just.
• Salt & freshly ground black pepper
• Chicken stock cube or 300 ml chicken stock
• 50 ml tomato puree

Step one

• Take a freezer bag beg enough to put the chicken plus extra space. It doesn't have to be huge.
• Add the cornflour, some salt and pepper to season and the paprika. Shake the bag to ensure it's well mixed.
• Cut the chicken into 25mm (1 inch) cubes and put in the bag with the flour and seasoning.
• Close the top of the bag, making sure you trap some air in as you're going to shake the chicken in the mixture to ensure complete coverage.

Step 2

• Take a fairly large deep frying pan that has a lid that fits well--ours has a heavy glass lid, which is idea--and put on a high heat.
• Add a glug of olive oil--not too much and the butter.
• Add the chicken--carefully so as not to splash yourself and fry until golden brown on all sides.
• Remove from the pan and put to one side, but keep the residue in the pan.
• Put the pan back on the heat and add the bacon stirring for about thirty seconds before you add the shallots or baby onions
• Fry for about ten minutes or until the bacon is starting to crisp. Don't just leave this sizzling away otherwise the onions burn and makes the flavour somewhat bitter--again, like the wine, that won't be nice.
• Add the wine and bring to a simmer, then turn the heat as low as it will go.

Step 3

• Add the garlic,stock cube--which should be crumbled over the mixture and thyme.
• Finally add the tomato purée and cover with the lid, simmering for 30 mins.
• Now don't think you can just walk away and leave this as often although the lid will prevent a lot of evaporation, it does happen and you don't want to caramelise everything to the bottom of the pan or it turns out like treacle-- not pleasant. So you['ll need to check and give it a stir every now and again, topping up to its original level with water as the level drops.

Step 4

Serve on a plate with boiled rice.

I added peas to mine, but you could serve yours plain. The dish is very rich and doesn't want anything like fragrantly cooked rice with all sorts of stuff in as I don't think you'd be able to taste it.

An alternative would be to serve with a side salad of lettuce, cucumber, spring onions (scallions) and dressing with a chunk of baguette.

For Weightwatchers dieters, with rice, this works out at about 8 1/2 points, but with the salad, reduces to just 5