Pot Roast Chicken

"What is your favourite food, Mummy?"

Well now, there's a thing. What actually IS my favourite food?

Blue particularly seems to be troubled by my inability to answer this question - or to give him a the same answer when he asks me again...

You see my favourite thing to eat depends on so many things: the weather, the time of day, who I'm with, where I am. My favourite thing to eat in Venice on a bright March afternoon is fritto misto washed down with a glass or two of chilled prosecco. My favourite thing to eat immediately after a long walk along the North Pembrokeshire coastal path is a toasted teacake with lots of Welsh butter, washed down with a cup of builders' tea (and then some Lamb Saag Balti). My favourite thing to eat after a day body boarding in North Devon is curry. You get where I'm coming from...

The other week, Sunday afternoon, the end of a busy weekend and a late night on the Saturday, my favourite thing to eat was this pot roast chicken. It's a recipe my mum passed on to me in typically vague form, but the combination of the juicy free-range chicken, lemon-scented sausage-meat stuffing, smoky bacon, meltingly soft caramelised onions, the potatoes luxurious, essentially 'confit'-style, cooked in the fat of the chicken - it's just got comfort written all over it. It's definitely not a meal for the calorie counters amongst you, but I make no apology for that. This dish is all about comfort food. And if you were wondering about what could possibly follow this pudding-wise, I recommend some butterscotch apple pudding. With cream. Waistlines are for wimps...

Pot Roast Chicken

Feeds around 6 (although if you feed 4 with it and have some bacon & potatoes left over, it makes great soup if you chuck in a leek or 2 and some chicken stock...)

Ingredients

1.5kg free range chicken

freshly ground salt & pepper

100-120g sausagemeat (or around 4 decent size, good quality sausages)

1.5 tbsp breadcrumbs
small bunch of thyme stalks, leaves only
grated rind of a lemon
50g unsalted butter
1 tbsp vegetable oil
300g shallots
200g bacon lardons/pancetta
1kg waxy potatoes
large bunch of parsley

Method

Season the chicken and set aside.

Mix together the sausagemeat, breadcrumbs, thyme leaves and lemon rind, stuff into the chicken and pull down the neck skin over the opening of the cavity.

Pre-heat the oven to 160C.

Melt the butter and oil together in a large casserole with a tight fitting lid.

Brown the chicken all over in the hot fat then reduce the heat under the casserole to low.

Peel the shallots and place in a small pan with the bacon. Cover with water, bring to the boil, then remove from the heat and drain. 

Add the shallots and bacon to the casserole with the chicken, cover the casserole with the lid and cook gently for 15 minutes.

While the chicken, shallots and bacon is cooking, dice the potatoes. Once the initial 15 minutes cooking time is up, add the potatoes to the casserole and turn in the fat. Pop the lid back on the casserole and put the whole thing in the oven for around an hour till the chicken is cooked.

Chop up the parsley. Remove the chicken from the casserole dish, toss the parsely into the potatoes, shallots and bacon, then serve.

And don't forget the butterscotch apple pudding.

Posh Poached Eggs for the big 3-0

 
I'm a relative newcomer to the Random Recipes challenge, but it's become bit of a fixture for me. I don't have any sort of pattern or routine to my blogging (you may have noticed), but I find myself looking out for the announcement post every month, and then getting my random recipe selected more or less straightaway in order to have a fighting chance of working it into a meal plan somewhere. You see while I'd love to spend hours in my kitchen designing dishes, tweaking recipes, arranging food beautifully on a plate and taking gorgeous photos, the reality is that the food that goes up here is what I've cooked to feed us, there's no room to re-make and take a better photo (or to take a photo at all if we were all so hungry that it got eaten before I'd got the camera out...).




This month, the 30th month of the challenge, the selection criteria for the recipe was the number '30' (Dom, you're so original!). 30th book on the shelf/ves of cook books, 30th page. 

At the time I made the selection, '30' gave me Posh Poached Eggs in a Cup from Leon - Family & Friends. If I made the choice another time, it would be different because the books don't stay in the same order, or even on the same shelves, depending on what I've been up to in the kitchen.

So, Posh Poached Eggs. "That'll be easy to squeeze in somewhere", I thought.

We ended up having it for lunch yesterday, the kids and I, another sultry day (the rain didn't reach us till late last night) when the last thing I wanted to do, really, was make a cheese sauce - or even poach an egg. The things I do.

So you make a cheese sauce using gram flour and butter, quite a lot of cheese and some truffle oil. I didn't have gruyere or truffle oil in the house, so cheddar and some nice olive oil had to do.

You fry some thin slices of chorizo till they are nice and crispy, and poach some eggs, then layer it all up in a cup.

It's delicious. Even Blue, who, as I have bemoaned before, normally avoids cheese sauce with a barge pole, and isn't massively keen on poached eggs, enjoyed it. Result.

The only thing I'd say is that the recipe in the book makes a huge amount of cheese sauce. More than you could possibly use feeding the 4 specified in the recipe, however hungry. The rest of it is in the fridge covered with greaseproof paper. Pasta bake for dinner tonight, then.