A chicken roast dinner of sorts

Now, I had a large free range chicken and I here is what I did: this ensures wonderful succulent meat.

Roast chicken with a hot stuffing.

Take the chicken out of the fridge and allow it to come to room temperature while the oven heats up to about 230c. While this is happening, take about six slices of bread -- I happened to have half a wholemeal loaf and a slightly elderly white baguette. I dried this in the oven for five minutes and then broke it up in a bowl. Then, I added two chopped red apples, four peeled and chopped cloves of garlic, two chopped satsumas, a very large pinch of nutmeg (or grate it fresh) and a little salt and freshly ground black pepper..

Now, put your chicken into the oven (in a dish, obviously), breast down. This procedure keeps it moist. If you've been following my writing for a while, you will surely know that I harp on about this and also, I suppose, about chicken. Cook the chicken for around 45 minutes. Around this time, put some water on to boil in the kettle, pour it into the stuffing to bind it only when the water has boiled, take the chicken out, turn it right side up asnd stuff the cavity. Now put the chicken back into the oven for about another hour --depending on the size of the bird. So, two points: the chicken cooks upside down first to allow the juices to percolate through the breast, which is the dryest part. Then, the stuffing goes in hot, which serves to moisten the meat further and also makes it easier to predict when the bird is done. You will probably have leftover stuffing: just cook it separately: it will take only about 20 minutes top cook and crisp.

Roast potatoes, broccoli, bread sauce, not gravy today..

What to serve with this? I roasted some potatoes, which I had par-boiled and roughened up. First of all, they were roasted in hot oil and then lubricated further with some of the fine roasting juices from the chicken. I made a little bread sauce. This was made from half a white baguette, plenty of salt and pepper, a generous pinch of nutmeg, a small onion which I had studded with a few cloves (just like my mother might have done) and around 3/4 of a pint of milk. You may well need to add more milk as you go. Heat the mixture up very slowly, until it barely shudders, otherwise it will stick. Cook for ten minutes, keeping a close eye on it.

Elsewhere on the table, some broccoli and a few whole steamed carrots. I made no gravy, but we just poured over the juices from the roasting dish. Cranberry sauce to one side. Some sprouts with chestnuts would have been good instead of the broccoli, perhaps. You know, when your chicken is well cooked, you won't need to drench it with gravy. Nigel Slater has been telling us this for many a moon. And another thought: this was a cheerful and festive meal. It was the nutmeg, orange and apple that did it. We ate at the table with our boys and we ate in candelight, which is to say at a table lit by tea lights in tin cans through which they had punched lots of little holes. I hope they'll remember this stuff when they are grown, just as I do. Even if they are kicking each other under the table at the time.

Chicken photo courtesy of Annie Mole at www.flickr.com Thank you

Christmas dinner

Gentle snow (still) and ice on the ground, I got snow-bound (well, ice-bound) in Wales, there is a merry fire in the grate and the boys do not want the day to end. Here, with a Merry Christmas to you, is what I made for dinner. Just a small affair this year, to please two grown ups and two young children. As we had had turkey for Thanksgiving, this year I allowed it to be ousted by a a dinner of a slightly different kind -- but festive withal. Also practical, as you will see from the leftovers.

Above is Virginia, last Christmas. That's what I call ice. Below that would be the comedy mouse snowman, to cheer you up if you are apprehensive about the new year.

A brace of pheasants, stuffed with pork sausagemeat, garlic and apples, with roasted apples to one side and wrapped all in back bacon. Just find some local pheasants if you can and get someone else to prepare them if you are squeamish. I'm not, but it should be fairly easy for you to find ready-prepared pheasant. £6.95 for a brace. Not bad.Take the pheasants out of the fridge a good half an hour before you start to prepare them for the oven: you want them to be at room temperature befeore they go in. Now, stuff them with some decent sausagemeat (or undress some decent sausages), fill the cavity with this plus some large chunks of apple and four or five unpeeled garlic cloves. Wrap the birds well in good back bacon. Cook until the breast is burnished and --really this is the only kind of occasion where I use a meat thermometer-- the sausagemeat is done. I'd allow two hours at 200c, remembering to baste frequently and your pheasant shoulld not be dry. Well, it  will be dry -er than some other birds.

Lots of chicken drumsticks, wrapped in bacon and cosied in with lots of unpeeled garlic cloves. Just as it sounds. I had got my hands on a large consignment of Halal chicken (no, nothing dodgy: this was, rather marvellously, in Asda in Hicksville Wiltshire). Halal meat has, appropriately I thought, a slightly gamier flavour which seemed apposite here. Just make sure the chicken is at room temp, as with the pheasant, before it goe to the oven and wrap it --not Halal: please note!-- with some well-flavoured back bacon ajnd sprinkle lots of unpeeled garlic cloves all around. Takes about an hour at 2oo.

Why the two? Because, this time of year, pheasant is reasonably priced (I am speaking of £6.95 for two, locally shot pheasants) and I was not sure how well the children would take this game, so cooked an alternative. They ate both and scraped at the dishes afterwards.

Sage and onion stuffing with apple, cooked to one side. Dressing, then, as they would say in Georgia. Just grate, finley chop or process --I'm not giving specifics here-- plenty of brown and white breadcrumbs, add sea salt, lots of freshly-ground black pepper, three fresh sage leaves, finely minced and some chopped red apple. Experiment until you have the mixture you like. Moisten it with water, a little olive oil and a generous dot of butter and bake for about half an hour.I cook it all of a piece in a tin, but you could form it into little stuffing balls, I suppose. If you want, a few chopped dried apricots are good here. A good grating of nutmeg would also work. And a note on sage: I don't use dried because there is always plenty of fresh in the garden. I find that dried commercially available sage seems to acquire a rather overpowering musty smell and taste. If you wanted, you could substitute rosemary for the sage.

Roast parsnips and this year, in another departure, I cooked whole carrots in with the parsnips. Just a little sunflower oil and lots of freshly ground black pepper. Peel the carrots, top and tail. Done. Same for the parsnips and then cut them in half lengthways. Cook them in blisteringly hot oil for about 45 minutes, by which time they will be sweet and irresistible and have caught the heat in places so that you get little stucky burnished bits.

Sprouts. I love them; always have.I like them quite well done here.

Roast potatoes. This year, I parboiled the potatoes --make sure you choose good floury ones-- the night before and roughened them up well against the side of the pan and then chucked them into hot sunflower oil. Goose fat, as you may well know, gives them a sublime flavour, but I'll be writing more about roast potatoes in a separate entry. Stay tuned. Cook them until they are crisp and then blitz them under a higher heat when the meat is out of the oven. Should take 45 minutes to an hour. I also added a couple of tablespoons of the sublime juices from the pheasant as they were about half way through cooking.


Mashed swede, with lots of butter and black pepper. Cook it well, in large chunks. And stunt ye not on the butter and black pepper. Salt to taste. Bashed neeps. For Kathleen from Dumfries, if she is readiing this. Also great with Haggis on Burns' Night!

Gravy. I had a little vegetable stock to one side. I had made this with half an onion, some sticks of celery and about a third if a red pepper plus four or five whole peppercorns. For additional liquid I used the water from cooking the swede and the whole thing was started off with a roux made from the juices and a little of the fat from the pheasant roasting dish. That wasn't hard, was it?

AND -- now this is peculiar-- I made unseasonal Yorkshire pudding because that had been requested by the children.

Pudding: didn't have it, really, Just the odd Clementine, hazlenuts and pistachios a little later.And then, obviously, we picked at hazlenuts, walnuts, cashews, mince pies and the Christmas cake made by an excellent aunt. This year we had no Christmas pudding, because no-one likes it apart from me. I'm not entirely happy with this state of play.

And what of dinner? I mean Christmas tea or supper. Still, confusion reigns in our Anglo-Cymric-American household.

A bubble of squeak of sorts. So, all the leftover vegetables --plenty of potatoes and sprouts-- mashed just roughly and then fried until they developed a rich, crisp crust. We had these with two pickles made in the first place by an inspirational neighbour --pumpkin chutney-- and in the second place by an inspirational parent of a child I teach: this was a tart apple and blackberry chutney. Both were received with uncommon joy and both were made from home-grown produce. We also had a piece of Somerset Brie and a slice of Dolcellate with this. A telly-side supper, while I grieved the soon not-to-be- regenerated Doctor Who. Oooh! David Tennant. There's something about his shift from tragic to comic on the turn of a dime.... Oh and we had the leftover pheasants and chicken in sandwiches with mango chutney the next day.

The happiness associated with roast vegetables

Now, we had the full roast chicken dinner tonight, but I won't bore you with the chicken part of this because, I realise, I'm forever giving you recipes for roast chicken. So...I'll focus on the roast potatoes and parsnips and say that I'd be happy to have them all on their own, or with all kinds of other dishes. I'm speaking of potatoes roasted with whole garlic cloves and parsnips --roasted in a separate dish.

You could serve your parsnips and potatoes with a simple omelette, or with a pie of some sort --cold or hot - to cheer up some cold meat or to eat with some cheese. Sometime, I'll even cook a big dish of roast potatoes to have with salad and cheese. I favour them with Wensleydale or Cheshire cheese, perhaps.

Anyway, to make excellent roast potatoes, you should really peel and parboil. Take them to the point when their edges are roughened up, but their centre is still firm, then drain and give them a good shake. Then into hot fat and cook in a hot oven for forty to forty five minutes, perhaps shaking them once. Your fat of choice might be sunflower oil or another bland oil or perhaps some dripping if you have roasted a joint. Or, best of all, goose fat. Tonight --as with the parsnips that follow-- I cooked them in the fat and juices from the chicken when it was about three quarters cooked.

You could be really lazy about it and just give the spuds a good clean, don't bother to peel and then do the same. They would still be delicious but not, I think, ever quite so sublime. When I add garlic, it may be peeled but more often than not I just throw in whole unpeeled cloves. You can squeeze out that golden paste when all is done or just pick them up and eat them, skin and all. They will be sticky and sweet.

Now those parsnips. Here, you cannot get away without peeling. Another thing is that you need to try and avoid the really huge ones because they may be inclined to get a bit woody. Some people core them; I never bother, unless they are really ancient and I have forgotten about them. So, top and tail, cut them in half and just slide them straight into hot fat. Some recipes add honey. I feel that parsnips are so naturally sweet (there was a reason why they were substituted for bananas in recipes of wartime Britain and its subseqent period of austerity), that any sweetening is guilding the lily.

So, cook the parsnips, turning once, for about half an hour and then out they come. They will be burnished and quite sticky and caramelised at the edges and I will always eat one before the dish gets to the table!

By the way, for the best evocation of the joys of the roast potato, you might want to look at Nigel Slater's writing. I also just read his description in Easy Living Magazine of happiness being that last roast potato. I concur.

http://www.nigelslater.com/home.asp 

http://www.easylivingmagazine.com/

The rest of our dinner happened to be a roast chicken, which tonight I had stuffed with a sage and onion stuffing, carrots, broccoli and no gravy. We just poured the remainder of the chicken's juices over our potatoes. As I've said before, if you roast your chicken properly --I always say breast down for at least the first half hour-- you don't need anything to moisten it.

BUT I would have been happy with the potatoes and their friendly cloves of garlic plus the parsnips, salt and pepper and a little English mustard.

Thanks to Alexbrn over at Flickr for the photo. Wish I had time to photograph everything I cooked!

A speedy dinner with a nip in the air.

By late summer, I am always glad for the cold breath of air in the morning followed by a warm day. Autumn food is some of my favourite and I love the smell in the air at this time of year. I get excited about this season in a way I just don't about summer. But enough: I expect you are hungry, so here is what we had for dinner last night.

EGG AND CHIPS TO THE POWER OF TEN

First, take some potatoes -- however they come. Don't bother to peel them, but cut them into fork-sized chunks. Put them into an oven dish with plenty of cloves of unpeeled garlic, a teaspoon or so of crushed red chilli flakes, some freshly ground black pepper and a good pinch of sea salt. Add a splash of sunflower oil and put them into a hot oven to cook until they are crisp and possibly even stuck to the dish. You could, I suppose, give them a good shake after about twenty five minutes.

Now, when you your potatoes are done, just fry as many eggs as you think you will eat. Try not to break the yolk. Now, eat your hot, crisp potatoes with the fried eggs, the yolk running through the crisp bits, the floury exploded bits and the little crunchy pieces of chilli mixed together with the salt and pepper. Squeeze out the cloves of garlic as you go -- or just much them whole, as I do.

Really, it's almost egg and chips. Well, egg and chips to the power of ten. I think you'll like it.