Archive for the ‘poultry’ Category

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Dinner Guests: Kathryn & Lucy’s roast chook

June 11, 2013

roast chook 2Like many bloggers, I often receive offers from companies or people wanting to contribute a guest post here. I almost always decline, because it’s usually someone trying to flog some crappy product or other, with boring writing to boot. But when the excellent and generous Kathryn Elliott of Limes & Lycopene got in touch about the beautiful quarterly magazine she produces with photographer Lucinda Dodds of Nourish Me – An Honest Kitchen – I jumped at the chance. Kathryn is a nutritionist who manages to write about food with generosity and heart. She understands that cooking and eating should be pleasurable, not punitive, and her recipes and advice are always fantastic. She has also been personally generous to me in all kinds of ways so I’m chuffed to have Kathryn & Lucy’s post here – specially as anyone who knows me will recognise that a good roast chook is one of the great joys of my cooking life. Here’s a way to make it just as good but a little better for fitting into one’s jeans. 

Roast dinners: a makeover

Roast dinners are one of those classic, hearty family meals. However we feel many people now hesitate to make this old favourite. Roasting a joint of meat leads to a lot of leftovers and if there’s only a few of you at home, then making good use of those leftovers can become tedious. No matter how good the original roast, nobody wants to still be eating leftovers four days later.

Plus there’s the health factor. The traditional roast, centred on a big joint of meat, with sides of potatoes, gravy and all the trimmings is a heavy, stodgy meal, one which can leave you feeling stuffed and lethargic at the end. If you’re trying to have healthy meals then avoiding the family roast may seem like a good idea.

However, in our latest issue of An Honest Kitchen we’ve taken on the challenge of making over a number of meals, including the traditional roast, because we think a roast dinner can be a good thing – simple to cook, manageable even if there’s only one or two of you at home and healthy. Our Makeover has fewer kilojoules, lots more vegetables and more fibre. It’s a better balanced meal with more nutrient complexity and variety than the traditional roast

roast chook 1How to makeover a roast dinner

In the course of our makeovers we developed a few guidelines which you could use to revamp your own favourite roast dinner:

  1. Use less meat: Rather than cooking a whole big joint of meat, choose a smaller cut with a bone in it. This will cook in a fraction of the normal time, but you’ll still end up with a juicy and flavour filled dinner. In our recipe below we’ve used chicken thighs on the bone.
  2. Don’t avoid potatoes: Roast potatoes are an integral part of the traditional roast and while the anti-carb movement has left them with a poor image, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of potato. It’s all about the size of the portion you eat and what else you put on your plate. Try to make the potato no more than a quarter of the space on your plate.
  3. Make sure you add LOTS of vegetables: Roasting is one of the best ways to cook vegetables. They are simply delicious and you can easily pack a variety of vegetables into the meal. We also avoid peeling and chop the veg into large chunks so there’s no fussy prep work required.
  4. Be careful with the fat: Traditionally a roast chicken is smeared with butter or another type of fat, which gives a crispy skin but is hell for the waistline. Instead we’ve actually skinned the chicken thighs and then added minimal fat in the cooking.
  5. Add flavour: Don’t be afraid to add unusual and strong flavours to your roast, the results can be spectacular. In our recipe below we’ve used Chinese five-spice powder, soy sauce and Chinese cooking wine to produce a roast with a difference. It’s still a roast and still delicious. This was a huge hit with our recipe testers and we’d love to share it with you.

Five Spice Roast Chicken

A twist on the normal roast chook. The whole meal is cooked on a baking tray, so you’ll either need one large tray, to fit all the ingredients, or spread them out over two smaller ones. Serves 2

  • 2 chicken thighs on the bone (about 400g)
  • 2 teaspoons Chinese five-spice powder
  • 2 teaspoons soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon Chinese cooking wine or dry sherry
  • ½ lemon
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 400 – 450g potatoes
  • 2 red onions
  • 3 carrots
  • 200g green beans

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Remove the skin from the chicken: If your chicken thighs have skin on them, then it’s easy to remove. Take hold of the skin at one end and gently, but firmly, pull it away from the flesh. You may need to use a knife to help it along. Cut the chicken skin off, using a sharp knife.

Flavour the chicken: Slash the chicken pieces all over, with a knife.You can do this quite enthusiastically, as you want each piece to have several deep cuts on both sides. Place these on a large baking tray. In a small bowl, whisk together the five-spice powder, soy sauce and Chinese cooking wine. Pour the marinade over the chicken pieces and, using your hands, rub the mixture into the chicken pieces. Make sure you push the marinade into the cuts in the chicken and all around the bone. Squeeze the juice from the lemon over the chicken. Roughly chop up the leftover lemon shell and add to the baking tray.

Add the potatoes: Cut each potato into chunks, about 4cm in size. Add these to the baking tray. Drizzle over the olive oil. Place the chicken and potatoes in the oven for 20 minutes.

Prep the vegetables: While the chicken is cooking, peel the red onion and cut each into 6 wedges. Scrub the carrots and cut into 2cm-ish chunks. Trim the beans.

Add the vegetables: After the chicken has been cooking for 20 minutes remove the baking tray from the oven. Turn each piece of chicken and potato over. Add the onion, carrots and green beans. Move them briefly and gently around in the five spice flavouring. Place the baking tray back in the oven and cook for a further 20 minutes.

Let the chicken rest: Take the baking tray out of the oven. Gently remove the chicken to a plate, cover with tin foil and leave to rest for 10 minutes. Give the baking tray with the vegetables a quick wiggle, to spread the vegetables out and then place the baking tray back in the oven, while the meat is resting. After 10 minutes serve the chicken, together with the vegetables

Cooking Notes:

Chinese cooking wine is made from rice and is often called Chinese rice wine or Shaoxing Wine. Taste-wise it’s a similar to sherry, although it has a more bitter, stronger flavour. Some supermarkets stock Chinese cooking wine and it’s also available from Chinese grocers. You can buy Chinese rice wine in many grades and a brand at the cheaper end of the scale is fine for this meal.

Chinese five spice powder is a staple in Chinese cooking. It’s a mixture of five spices, star anise, cloves, cinnamon, sichuan pepper and fennel seeds and has a wonderful aromatic smell and manages to be sweet, sour, bitter and pungent, all at the same time. Five spice powder is available from the spice section of many supermarkets. It can also be purchased from Chinese grocers.

– Kathryn & Lucy

FrontCoverFor more ideas on making over the meals you love take a look at Kathryn & Lucy’s publication An Honest Kitchen: Makeovers. An Honest Kitchen is a regular publication all about real food that’s good for you. It costs $9.95 for 31 pages of beautifully photographed and punchy, nutritionally balanced recipes – in the very friendly PDF format. 

Each issue is full of simple recipes, practical cooking information and healthy eating advice. The latest edition, Makeovers, in which we revamp popular meals is available in e-format from 11 June.

http://anhonestkitchen.com.au/

Posted in health, meat, poultry, Uncategorized, vegetable, winter food | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

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Leftover largesse: from bland to bling

September 13, 2012

Roast chicken lawar

Whenever I’ve invited people over for dinner and then find I have ended up with almost no time to cook, I tend to fall back on an old favourite in this house – roast chook.

This happened on Tuesday evening. I’d invited six pals around, having forgotten that the plasterer was coming to fix the many cracks in our 120-year-old house. Which meant spending Monday getting allll the furniture and paintings and whatnot out of allll the rooms (except the kitchen, thankfully) while they did their thing – and then on Tuesday ridding the entire house (including kitchen!) of its fresh coating of plaster dust, and hauling all the stuff back into place. All while noticing along the way that my generally sluttish housewifery meant all our belongings were in fact covered with their own rich patina of dust and grime, so all that had to be cleaned as well. Lordy.

Despite the house looking like the above at 10am, we managed to get everything back to order by six o’clock and dinner was had and all was lovely (especially including Senor’s chocolate pots au creme from Neil Perry via our friend F! Divine).

Anyhoo,  as I erred on the side of too much food and roasted two chooks for eight people, this meant two roasted chook breasts waiting to be used in the fridge the next day.

What to do with leftover roast chook? Normally I just pick at it for lunches and whatnot, but this time wanted to try something different.

My brainwave was to revisit my lawar love affair of this time last year, following our beautiful holiday in Bali. And now I reckon this must be one of the most delicious and easy ways to use leftover chicken – because you can make a whole meal from it even if you only have a tiny bit of chook. We had lots, but if you didn’t all you would need to do is just increase the beans or other veg quantities and away you’d go. We’re thinking it might be very nice with beans and cashews or tofu cubes, actually …

Once again I used this SBS Food recipe as the starting point, but this time I doubled the paste quantity so I could keep some of that fab stuff in the freezer. I also added a whole bunch of coriander to the paste, and used one small red birdseye chilli instead of two big ones. As before, I dry-fried half a cupful of shredded coconut till brown.

Rather than going the trad mortar-and-pestle route, I whizzed the paste up in the food processor because I prefer pastes with lemongrass in them to be very smooth. Also I am bone idle as you know and can’t be bothered with all that pounding.

So, into the whizzer went the paste ingredients:

  • 1 birdseye chilli
  • 12 cloves garlic
  • a sizable knob of ginger (about 5cm lump)
  • ditto of fresh peeled galangal
  • a little finger of fresh turmeric
  • roots & leaves of 1 bunch coriander
  • 6 candlenuts
  • 4 roughly chopped lime leaves
  • 12 eschallots
  • 1 chopped stalk lemongrass
  • a couple of teaspoons of shrimp paste
  • 2 tablespoons black peppercorns (ground)
  • 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
  • juice 1 lime
  • juice ½ lemon
  • 2 teaspoons brown sugar
  • salt to taste
  • a few lugs of olive oil (vegetable oil if you wish to be more authentic)

After whizzing for a few minutes, it ended up as a very aromatic yellowish paste.

Next step was to fry off about four tablespoons of this – use as much or as little as you like, but it’s so delicious I say don’t skimp on the amount. I fried it for about six minutes, stirring now and then to stop it sticking, over a medium heat.

While that was going on I shredded the chicken breast meat and set it aside. The real recipe uses poached chicken mince, and you then use the chicken water to cook the beans in. But I just blanched the beans – about 2 cups of green beans, cut into 3cm lengths – in boiling salted water for a little over a minute.

Once the beans were just crisp and refreshed in cold water, I added them to the chicken with about ½ a cupful of thinly sliced red capsicum and the previously browned coconut.

Then I added the lawar paste and combined very thoroughly until all the chicken, beans and capsicum were well coated in the mix. At the end I added the roughly chopped coriander leaves and about a tablespoon of chopped mint, and served this with a wedge of lime on each plate for squeezing. You could serve it with rice, but the paste is so deliciously rich and thick we just ate it in a bowl on its own.

All in all, it was a damn fine dinner.  And it might have been extra good because of the satisfaction quotient involved in transforming quite ordinary leftovers into something much more special, which always feels a bit magical to me.

What about you – any good kitchen transubstantiation going on at your place lately?

Posted in herbs & spices, poultry, reducing waste, salad, zing things | Tagged , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

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How to get your groove back

February 27, 2011

Regaining your kitchen mojo: the chicken stock method

This week, my dear friend Ms Manners remarked rather sadly that it seemed she never cooked anymore.

She works incredibly hard at a stressful job, her partner is a good cook and happy to do it. But these weren’t the only reasons she had virtually abandoned the pots and pans, she said wistfully. The major problem was that, despite being an excellent cook at various times of her life, it seemed now she had simply lost the zest for it, and didn’t know how to get it back. She’s lost her kitchen mojo.

We all know how this feels, right?  The day you try to come up with an idea  for dinner and decide that, think as hard as you might, there are only two possibilities, grilled chicken drumsticks or pesto, and you’ve had them both already this week. It’s not that you don’t want to cook other dishes – it’s that you simply can’t imagine what other stuff there might be to cook. The books on your shelves, full of recipes and ideas, are like holiday brochures: full of gorgeous places you might like to visit one day, but simply too distant, too exotic, too out of reach for now.

This is a very common syndrome, known as Culinarus Mojous Interruptus. It is characterised by a light melancholy and an overwhelming fatigue whenever the sufferer glances at the cook top. It can last for years, and the same cure doesn’t work for everyone. Fortunately though, there are a few remedies that, taken as directed, can slowly but surely restore the sufferer’s confidence and enthusiasm for cookery.

The other night I found myself in the throes of a syndrome at the complete opposite end of the spectrum; an episode of Culinarus Hyperstimulatus which manifested in waking at 3AM, insomniac with excitement about a bag of chook bones in the fridge.

This was partly inspired by my cooky brother-in-law (one of several!) marvelling recently over why people pay good money for tetra-paks of stock full of salt and perservatives when chicken stock was quick and so simple to make. I confessed I was one of these ninnies; I had not made stock for months, and I often use those cartons (my view remains that using packaged stock is pretty far down the list of culinary sins, so I have no problem with it).

But of course he’s right about it being so easy to make, and cheap. You can buy a bag of chook bones from chicken shops for around a dollar, but since I pledged allegiance to free-range or organic chook only, don’t eat all that much chicken anyway and often buy boneless thigh fillets, my supply of bones has diminished. Until this week, when I came to my senses and asked the lovely peeps at Feather And Bone to sell me some carcasses along with the whole chooks I ordered this week. A bountiful bag of four beautiful, fresh, meaty, free range chook skeletons arrived on my doorstep for the princely sum of $5.

As I flung these into two big stock pots along with the other bits and bobs, it occurred to me that maybe making a pot of chicken stock could be a first step towards regaining one’s vanished culinary mojo.

First, there’s no pressure to actually complete a whole dish, and surely there is no less stressful task than hacking up a carrot, an onion, a celery stick and a tomato and tossing it into a pot with a couple of herbs (bay leaf, thyme, parsley, whatever), the chook carcass and some water.

Second, the sensory delight of this little job is immense. For one thing, there’s the luscious smell – our front door was open to the street when I made mine, and I actually saw passers-by stop and peer into my hallway, provoked by the cooking aroma. Then there’s the visual beauty of it – the glistening little baubles of  fat separating and rejoining, the gentle steam, the gradual transformation of your wan bunch of ingredients into a potful of golden goodness.

But most of all, I reckon making chicken stock provides one with an instant and very rewarding Real Cook glow.

Partly it’s to do with the busy productivity of the water toiling and simmering away (while you get to read the paper and drink coffee). Partly it’s to do with the virtue factor involved in making wholesome good use of otherwise wasted vegetable crisper odds and ends – all those tough bits of leek, nubs of carrots, limp herbs and otherwise useless parsley stalks, mushroom trimmings and overripe tomatoes. And partly, of course, it’s the incredible usefulness of the result: a splash or a litre of gorgeous home-made chicken stock can enrich anything from a risotto to pasta sauce to tagine to poaching broth to bouillabaisse to minestrone.

I have mostly made stock by bunging the leftover bones from dinner into a little saucepan with the veg trimmings before the dishwasher is stacked, then simply turned off the heat before going to bed.  Recipes are everywhere and recommended simmering times vary anywhere from twenty minutes to four hours, so it’s pretty much a no-brainer, deadset simple thing to do. But I have to say there is a leisurely pleasure in the long-simmered type that doesn’t really shine through so much in the quick apres-dinner simmer. For me, anyway – I welcome dissent on this!

The other virtue of this stock remedy for getting your mojo back is that you can enter into the kitchen spirit without having to make it a performance – there’s no tricky timing to worry about, no dinner party stress, not even anxiety about a raised eyebrow from your partner, housemate or cat!

So, there’s my first tip for reviving Ms Manners’ enthusiasm for the rounds of the kitchen. Some others I’ve thought of while writing this post include:

  • Have a well stocked pantry & freezer. That way, when inspiration strikes there’s no dreary going to the shops involved. Let’s face it – supermarkets drain the life force out of the most committed cooks, so you don’t want that giant obstacle in your way. My pantry essentials are mostly listed here (and lots of good advice in the comments too), but of course there are much more obvious things – salt & pepper, spices, canned tomatoes, olives, anchovies, pine nuts, etc. For the freezer, my essentials are butter, couple of bits of chicken, some chorizo sausage, a couple of other good sausages, and loads of nuts.
  • Start small, start simple! Don’t try to cook a special dinner for eight until you’re really firing on all burners – you need to rebuild your confidence cooking simple but interesting things. Even if it’s just sparking up a salad with a few nuts or some lentils & goat’s cheese, start small and get the mini-buzz first.
  • Go to a grower’s market or a really good fruit & veg grocer, sniff the air and get inspired (I love Addison Road Sunday market at Marrickville for its lack of pretension, cruisy vibe and good veg stalls).
  • Use good equipment. No need for loads of gadgets, and nothing need be really expensive – but decent saucepans, at least one sharp chef’s knife and a sturdy food processor make otherwise tiresome chores easy and pleasurable. Would love your ideas on the basic essentials.
  • Watch a bit of Jamie Oliver. He has naysayers aplenty, but I love his exuberance and egalitarian insistence that anyone can cook good food. We have two of his books and they’re both great, and I am a huge fan of the 30-minute meals show that screened here recently. Always felt the urge to cook after watching.

Okay, enough from me; it’s your turn. How do you get your mojo back back after a holiday from the hob?

 

Posted in failure, herbs & spices, poultry, techniques, Uncategorized, vegetable | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments »

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Dusky secret: the power of porcini

July 15, 2010

You know those slightly unusual ingredients that give a layer of extra flavour and complexity to any dish they’re in?

Well, I think the porcini mushroom – Boletus edulis – is one of these, and certainly deserves its own entry on the essential ingredients page. Apart from being lovely to look at, they’re earthy in flavour, silky in texture, store well and have a cooking aroma to die for – which in my book makes them a perfect zing-thing pantry staple.

I’ve used both dried porcini and the frozen fresh variety, but the frozen seemed to have only about as much flavour as a good fresh mushroom, whereas the dried really pack a punch (if you are very keen, there’s a long discussion about the comparative flavours here).

The way to use the dried porcini, of course, is to toss them into a cup with a little water to rehydrate, and then chop roughly to throw into any ragu or mushroom dish. I use them in mushroom risotto along with other fresh ones, but lately I’ve also used them a couple of times in this very luscious duck ragu.

From what I can tell a typical Italian ragu is basically any Bolognese-type meat sauce for pasta, cooked as slowly as possible depending on the meat you choose.

I made this ragu by combining elements of this recipe from The Cook and the Chef (oh, how I miss them!) and this one from Mario Batali. Duck legs can be hard to find; I’ve made this both with fresh duck meat from the wonderful peeps at Feather & Bone and with confit duck legs from the butcher – either way it’s delicious. (If you use the confit, just shred the meat,  put it into the sauce after it’s been cooking for a good hour and warm the meat through. I left it for a couple of hours to absorb the flavour of the sauce.)

This is quite a simple but decadent dish to serve when you want something fancier than spag bol. And with the addition of the mushrooms, it becomes even richer and more velvety. What’s not to love?

Duck ragu with porcini

  • 4 duck legs and thighs, skin removed
  • 4 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 medium onion
  • 1 medium carrot, peeled and finely chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 1 stalk celery, chopped
  • 1 bottle red wine
  • 2 x cans tomatoes
  • 1 cup chicken stock
  • 30g dried porcini, rehydrated & chopped
  • handful chopped fresh field or other mushrooms
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 2 sprigs thyme
  • 1 sprig rosemary
  • Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1. Remove as much fat & skin as possible from the legs & discard, then remove meat from the bones & chop into small pieces.
  2. Heat oil & add celery, carrot, onion, garlic and some sea salt, sauté until translucent. Add the bones from the duck.
  3. Add wine, tomatoes, stock and herbs and bring to the boil, then turn down to a simmer.
  4. In a separate pan, heat some oil and add a pinch of salt and sauté the duck meat till lightly browned, and just cooked. Set aside.
  5. In the same pan, fry the chopped fresh mushrooms till liquid has evaporated, then add these and the chopped porcini and liquid to the sauce. Stir, then simmer uncovered for around 30 minutes or till the sauce has reduced by half.
  6. Remove the bones, add the duck meat and cook over low heat for another 20-30 minutes or until the meat is tender and the sauce is thick and rich. Add stock or water if at any stage it becomes too thick.

Serve with rigatoni or papardelle or other boofy pasta, plus grated Parmesan or Pecorino.

Have you used porcinis in other ways? Do tell …

Posted in herbs & spices, pasta, poultry, winter food, zing things | Tagged , , | 15 Comments »

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The chicken and the egg

December 8, 2009

During this last week I have been bestowed with one of the greatest honours of my life. Booker Prize, you ask? Bip-bow. Pulitzer? Shmulitzer. Miles Franklin? Huh – that old rag!?

Nope – this week, I had a chicken named after me.

That’s right, read it and weep, non-chicken-namesakers.

My friend Mistress Alice of the Mountains, aged eight and a half, and her brother Paddy, four and a half, are the proud new carers of two lovely chooks from the increasingly famous and brilliantly conceived Rentachook, where you rent chooks and coop for six weeks on a try-before-you-buy basis, so you can see if chicken-human cohabitation suits you both.

And I am told that on the journey home to the mountains with the chooks in the back of the car, Paddy and Alice pondered on the names for their new friends. By the time they reached home, Paddy’s chook was named Shirley, and Alice had chosen Charlotte. Both fine chook monikers, I’m sure you’ll agree (although Monica would have been nice too?), and I am assured by Mistress Alice’s parents that Chicken Charlotte genuinely is named for me and not some schoolfriend competitor for Miss A’s affections. Strange but true.

I am more chuffed than I can say. And here she is, above. Has there ever been a more beautiful specimen of chook womanhood?? Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in eggs, ethics, poultry | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments »

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The platters that matter…

October 13, 2009

4candlesMenu for a 40th birthday lunch

My absence here over the past week has, till now, been almost entirely food-related. Well, celebration-related anyway – and in my family that means food. My sister’s 40th birthday on the weekend involved a bunch of us staying in houses on the coast just south of Sydney, and a few others popping down for the day. The main event was a birthday lunch for 25.

All our old family favourites (both human and culinary!) came to the table – a table groaning with platters of lovely food, it must be said, and as the last stayer at the coastal house I am the beneficiary of my sister’s generosity, still chomping my way through the leftovers.

Sadly I was too busy on the day to take pictures, which is a shame cos it looked beautiful. But nevertheless thought I’d share the menu with you here in case you ever need some stalwart standouts to cook for a crowd – everything on this menu is low-stress, almost all of it can be made ahead of time, every dish can be served warm or at room temperature, the platters set down a long table create an impression of great, colourful generosity and luscious diversity, and with a couple of vegetarians and one coeliac among our guests, this menu makes everyone happy. I’ll gradually add these recipes to the blog down the track – right now I’m still in culinary recovery – but let me know if any strike you as desperately urgent to have now.

  • Oysters – of course! – freshly shucked, with a squeeze of lemon
  • Rare rump of roast beef, according to Stephanie Alexander’s instructions
  • Poached whole salmon (with a horseradish cream for both this and the beef)
  • Zaatar chicken – from the fab Ottolenghi lads
  • Green beans braised in olive oil, garlic, tomato & dill
  • Roast carrot salad with mint & balsamic
  • Citrus couscous salad
  • Fennel, feta, tarragon & pomegranate salad – another Ottolenghi fave
  • Chickpea, roasted red pepper & marinated feta salad (all from jars & cans, but it looks and tastes fab)
  • Lentil, sundried tomato, parsley and Balsamic salad (ditto)
  • Crisp roast potatoes with minted creme fraiche dressing
  • Dessert, made by sweeter cooks than me, was an incredibly good chocolate and coffee birthday cake (Alice, we’ll have the recipe for that, please?) and the Manna from Heaven chocolate crunch made by Miss Jane; this is a lusciously dastardly version of the old fave hedgehog cake, updated into an utterly irresistible  death-by-chocolate experience.

Lunch went on for hours, the birthday girl looked a million bucks, the speeches were lovely, the wine flowed and the love goes on. Thanks Lou and J&B for a great weekend.

And thanks for the leftovers…

Posted in dessert, food as love, generosity, meat, poultry, pulses, salad, summer food, vegetable | Tagged , , | 5 Comments »

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Roast chook, the kitchen’s little black dress

July 26, 2009

roastchookRoast chicken, as you’ll know well, is the little black dress of the culinary repertoire. Simple, elegant, timeless and understated – but with a bit of bling it can be transformed into a truly spectacular performance.

I started musing on this today because I have some writing buds coming round tomorrow evening. We meet frequently to eat dinner together and take turns wailing about our work. They are all fine writers and fine cooks (in fact I think every writer I’ve met loves good food – is there a connection?), and the meal is central to our enjoyment of these evenings. But there’s also an unspoken rule that dinner is a simplish affair so as not to distract the cook from the natter, the real heart of the matter.

As I still haven’t got used to the joy of a generously sized and perfectly working oven (the old one had two temperatures – off, and 240 degrees C), I’m going with roast chook for tomorrow night’s dinner, prompted in part by Andrew McConnell’s great-looking chickybabe in yesterday’ s Good Weekend – roast chicken with brussels sprouts and bread sauce.

This brings me back to the endless potential for blinging up little black dress – the fact that an LBD will go just as well with a teeny pair of diamond stud earrings as it does with one of those whopper seventies copper-enamel whirligig pendants.

So here is a short list of easy suggestions for roast chicken bling – but I want more! Do add your contributions, please … ( I’m very much hoping that Chefbro Hamish, who is sadly now almost totally blocked from chatting to us here by the great firewall of you-know-where but is presently holidaying in France, land of the free and greedy, might be able to pop in with some chook-bling suggestions of his own before returning to Shanghai.)

On & in the chook

  • Under the skin: butter with thyme, garlic & salt; or same with tarragon.
  • Under the skin from Neil Perry – compound of butter, garlic, coriander, parsley, cumin, lemon zest, saffron, salt.
  • Maggie Beer’s fabulous recipe here suggests whizzing  the under-skin butter in the food processor (not too much or butter will split) with chopped preserved lemon & tarragon. Of course she also adds verjuice towards the end, which helps moisten the chook – and see below for Maggie’s resting tip.
  • Stephanie Alexander says rub the chicky inside and out with lemon, crush 3 cloves garlic with the back of a knife, roll in salt & pepper and bung in the cavity with 2 lemon halves, rosemary sprig & butter.
  • Karen Martini advises a stuffing of bruschetta, porcini mushrooms, chicken liver & rosemary & check out Jules of Stonesoup’s adaptation of same.
  • In the chook’s cavity, says Skye Gyngell, stuff half a lemon, thyme, bay leaves, parsley, garlic, crumbled dried chilli.

Cooking the chook

  • Maggie says roast in a fan-forced oven at 170⁰C for 40 minutes, pour verjuice over and return to oven for 10 minutes or until cooked through (juices run clear from the thigh). If using a meat thermometer, it should read 68⁰C at the thigh.
  • Maggie’s all-time best chook tip, I reckon, is to rest the chicken in a warm place for 20 minutes turned on to its breast side – and Damien Pignolet repeats it in his book French: “Maggie Beer taught me this excellent technique, which allows the juices to circulate from the thighs into the breast, keeping it moist.”
  • Andrew McConnell (can’t find any online references but he runs Cutler & Co in Melbourne) in his Good Weekend recipe suggests smearing a 1.8kg bird with butter & salt, roasting it at 180⁰C, breast side down for 20 minutes, then reducing the heat to160⁰C, turning it over and continuing for 40 minutes or till cooked.

Sauces, accompaniments

  • In Rockpool, Neil Perry suggests simply tipping the chicken juices from the cavity into the pan, adding lemon juice and extra virgin oil, scraping the pan to loosen the crispy solids and chucking the lot over the whole bird (with garlic roasted in the same pan) at serving time.
  • Skye Gyngell serves pan-roasted chicken with braised lentils, roasted tomatoes, basil oil and a big blob of aioli  – and elsewhere Neil Perry serves pan-fried chicken breast with tzatziki.
  • From an issue of Delicious magazine years ago I have kept a Steve Manfredi bread & tarragon salsa recipe (it goes with an incredible slow-roasted lamb, but is fab with poultry too) – basically you just whizz up some day old bread soaked in lots of olive oil and red-wine vinegar with a couple of cloves of garlic and a bunch of tarragon, sale & pepper, adding more olive oil to loosen. It’s sharp and fragrant and delicioso.
  • I often throw some quartered fennel bulbs along with unpeeled garlic cloves & French shallots into the pan beneath the chook – they all go sticky and sweet but the fennel’s aniseed sharpness gives it a lift.
  • When we were in Puglia a couple of years back, one of the finest things we ate was a chicken simply roasted on a rack over a tray of potatoes, which catch the chickeny drippings and are soft and flavoursome as anything. I have never, ever, ever eaten chicken as good as that – in Australia even the best chooks are a poor substitute but it’s still worth a crack if you get a really good chook. While you rest the chicken, whack the oven heat up to a zillion and blast the hell out of the potatoes. It’s good.
  • Yesterday’s Good Weekend Andrew McConnell bread sauce – bring half a litre of milk  to a simer with a couple of cloves, half an onion and a bay leaf and then remove from heat and leave for 15 minutes (sounds remarkably like the start of Jane’s polenta recipe) – then add 120g dried breadcrumbs, stir, reduce heat and cook gently for 10 minutes. Cool and whizz in a blender, adding nutmeg & salt to taste.

Ah, we could go on … so why don’t you?  What are your favourite roast chook tips, tricks, accompaniments & complements?

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