I watch a lot of cooking tv. I’m not a huge fan of the ‘reality’ programs but pretty much anything else I’ll watch – no matter how old school the production values (the really quite awful Four Burners and a Grill) or how much the chef irritates me (er, no names, because that would be just mean).

The other morning we were watching Good Chef Bad Chef. This is one show that irritates me because it kind of ‘works’ under the assumption that the chef using the meat, cream, butter and salt is the ‘bad’ chef, while the nutritionist, whose food is predominantly vegetarian (she uses a lot of seafood) and who uses dairy alternatives, is the ‘good’ chef. Andy always grumpily points out that Adrian usually looks a lot healthier than Janella …

Philosophical issues aside, lots of the food that Adrian Richardson cooks on this show looks really good. On Saturday morning he cooked quesadillas with a prawn filling. Show over, Andy says “we should have quesadillas for dinner”. Wow, I thought, that is going to be one serious pain in the butt to put together.

As we have prawns coming for Christmas, we didn’t want to do seafood so we opted for chicken. I found a recipe on taste which we used as a rough guide.

We began with one onion, finely chopped and sautéed in the wok. We added just one clove of garlic and then half a red capsicum finely chopped.

I finely (super super finely) sliced one chicken breast and the meat was tossed with some ground cumin and ground coriander. The meat was added to the wok and quickly fried.

While the meat was cooking I made a variation on the avocado cream in the taste recipe: half an avocado mashed, mixed with a couple of tablespoons of natural yoghurt and then seasoned.

I also made a quick salsa: one tomato, quartered, deseeded and finely diced (deseeding, while wasteful, does make it a LOT easier to dice the flesh), a quarter of a red onion finely chopped, some chopped coriander, and a good squeeze of lime juice. The following evening I made some more salsa, which I jazzed up with some finely sliced jalapeño peppers and some finely chopped red capsicum. If you use the juice from the peppers you don’t need the lime juice.

To wrap up the quesadillas, we heated a non stick pan, gave it a very light spray with some oil and popped in a wrap. Andy topped half the wrap with some of the chicken mix and a good handful of grated cheddar. Fold the wrap in half and you can add a second wrap to the pan. When the wraps start to become golden, flip them over (not as hard as it sounds if you’re careful). Just pay attention to the heat of the pan as you want the cheese to melt but not at the expense of burning the wrap.

Serve piping hot with the avocado cream and salsa.

With two of us on the case, this meal took less than 30 minutes to put together. With just the one chicken breast used it’s very economical and it’s also pretty healthy (look at all those vegetables!). Without a doubt it’s something we’ll be making again … especially as we reckon we could manage it on the BBQ during summer!