Cabbage Slaw with Crispy Chicken and Mango Dressing

Start with the frying, because that's where a domestic hob shows its limits. "Medium heat" on your hob could be anything depending on the pan and the ring, so forget the dial and watch the oil — it should shimmer and move like water just starting to get restless, not smoke. Six minutes a side is a lower bound, not a stopwatch instruction: the real test is pressing the thickest part of the fillet with a finger or the back of a spatula. Raw gives easily and feels slack; cooked through pushes back with a slight firmness, like the pad of your thumb when you make a loose fist. If you're nervous, cut one open — better a slightly butchered fillet than forty people with a text from you about salmonella.

Chicken breast specifically because it shreds and slices cleanly once crumbed and fried — thigh would work flavour-wise but it's fattier and cooks unevenly under a crust, so the crumb can catch before the meat's done. If you've only got thigh, flatten it a bit first so it cooks at roughly the same rate as the breast would.

The flour-egg-panko sequence (steps 3 to 5) isn't fussy for its own sake — each layer exists to fix a specific failure of the one before. Flour first because egg won't stick to wet, slippery chicken skin-side meat on its own; egg next because panko won't stick to flour alone, it just falls off in the pan. Skip the flour and you get patchy crumb with bald spots where the crust's torn away by the first turn of the spatula.

Any neutral oil with no smell of its own works for frying — sunflower, groundnut, light olive oil if that's what's in the cupboard, just not a dark extra virgin, which burns bitter at frying heat and tastes of itself in a dish that doesn't need it. Olive oil here at 3 tablespoons in a pan is really just enough to shallow-fry, not deep-fry — don't crowd the pan, do the fillets one or two at a time, or the oil temperature drops and you steam the crumb soggy instead of crisping it.

Crème fraîche at 18% rather than double cream or soured cream is about the fat carrying flavour without curdling against the acid from the lime and mango — lower-fat soured cream can split slightly when it hits that much citrus, so if that's all you've got, stir it in off any heat and don't worry too much, it'll still taste right even if it looks a touch grainy.

Three cabbages — pointed, red, kale — isn't a shopping-list flex, it's about texture and colour holding up under dressing and time. Pointed cabbage is soft and sweet and wilts fastest, which is why it goes in the massage with the kale; red cabbage is tougher and holds its crunch and colour, so it's folded in afterwards, raw and defiant, to keep some bite in the finished bowl. If you've only got white cabbage, use it, just shred it a little finer, since it's denser than pointed and needs more help breaking down.

Cashews and parsley at the end aren't garnish in the empty, Instagram sense — cashews are the only crunch left once the crumb on the chicken's gone soft from sitting under warm dressing for five minutes, and parsley cuts the richness of two creams and fried crumb with something green and a bit sharp. If you're out of cashews, any unsalted roasted nut with a bit of fat and bite does the same job — peanuts, almonds, even sunflower seeds in a pinch, though that's more a Tuesday compromise than a swap I'd defend.

This feeds four as a proper lunch, less as a starter before something bigger — say a Sunday roast's worth of appetite, it won't be. Have the dressing made and the cabbage massaged before the chicken goes anywhere near the pan, because crumbed chicken waits for no one — give it ten minutes under foil while you fuss with a salad and the crust goes soft, which rather defeats the whole point of frying it in the first place.