Spatula, Spoon and Saturday

Cookbook Challenge Week 42 Bird

Book: The Return of the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver Theme: Bird Recipe: Roasted Hamilton poussin wrapped with streaky bacon and stuffed with potatoes and sage

Wow that’s a mouthful of a name. I have to say I miss poetic names in food. There’s no fun naming food after its actual description. That’s just plain boring. Here’s something we could learn from the Chinese. Think about it ‘ants climbing a tree‘ and ‘Buddha jumped over the wall‘ are much better names than ‘roasted chicken wrapped with streaky bacon and stuffed with potatoes and sage.’ What do you think?

Anyway, since I barely keep up with the Cookbook Challenge, I might as well just do what I can.

We had a couple of people over for dinner one night and me being a lazy person that I am, I decided to do a roast. Let’s face it, roast is really the easiest way to feed lots of people at once. I flipped through the earlier Jamie Oliver books because it seemed like he had a thing for roast chicken – each book would have about 3-4 different roast chicken recipes. So I picked out this one. Jamie used poussins (which are small chickens) but I used a full-sized roast chicken.

One Scrumptious Roast Chicken (fed four people with sides) – recipe adapted from Jamie’s

1. 1 large chicken (about 1.8kg)
2. 12 rashers of streaky bacon (I only had pancetta)
3. 5 medium potatoes, peeled, slice in to thin pieces lengthwise
4. a big handful of fresh sage leaves (Jamie said fresh thyme and rosemary are also good)
5. 12 cloves of garlic, crushed
6. 1 glass of white wine
7. Olive oil
8. Salt & pepper

Preheat oven to 220′c. Place potatoes in a saucepan of cold water and bring to boil. Simmer for about 5-10 minutes until the potatoes are tender (if you sliced the potatoes quite thinly, they won’t take long to cook). Drain the potatoes.

Make sure chicken is brought up to the room temperature before you start. This saves you a lot of cooking time. Clean the chicken and trim off excess fat around the cavity. Season the potatoes with salt and pepper, add torn up sage leaves. Stuff the chicken cavity with half  of the potatoes.

Place the stuffed chicken, breast side up, on a tray with the rest of the potatoes and garlic in the preheated oven for about 30-40 minutes until the skin starts to look nice and brown. Lay the streaky bacon (or in my case, pancetta) over the breast and tuck them in. Roast for further 15 minutes and check if the chicken juice runs clear by inserting a skewer. Unfortunately, my pancetta didn’t really want to stay on the chicken (see the photo) but that’s okay.

Serve with the roast potatoes and garlic. You can make gravy using the roasting juices, if you like. I also served it with green beans with almonds and shallots and spinach with porcini, rosemary and lemon (recipe also from the same book but I won’t put it here).

This time last year I made: Som Tum Thai (Green Papaya Salad, Thai Style)

I am going through a fish phase since I discovered that I can easily run to the Queen Vic during the lunch hour to be the best fish imaginable. I have been wanting to make something with fresh tuna for a while and I figured the classic nicoise salad would be ideal. I bought some really nice yellow fin tuna steaks and seared it quickly before tossing it into the salad.

I had all the ingredients for the nicoise salad except for the actual nicoise olives and dijon mustard. So I improvised a little with the dressing. I decided to marinate the tuna in the salad dressing and since my new thyme was growing rather nicely, I thought I would make the dressing a combination of thyme and lemon zest.

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Right. So I have so far done roast chicken, roast lamb #1, roast lamb #2, so now we’re onto roast pork. I suspect one of these days I’m going to make roast beef and yorkshire pudding to complete the set.

So as usual, we start with our roasting base which are off cuts of vegetables that we use the rest the meat on and use it for gravy a bit later. Leave the skin on these if they are clean, otherwise peel them. The quantity is enough for about 4-6 people.

Roasting Base

1. 2 onions, sliced
2. 1 bulb of garlic, each clove lightly crushed
3. 1 large carrot, thickly sliced
4. 1 stick of celery, thickly sliced
5. 2 fresh bay leaves (or dried)
6. 2 large sprigs of rosemary
7. olive oil

Scatter all the chopped vegetables on the roasting tray and drizzle with some olive oil and season with a bit of salt and pepper.

Roasting the Pork

1. 1 kg. of boned roasting pork
2. olive oil
3. salt and pepper

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This is basically the easiest chicken stew in the world. I hope so anyway. I made this once for a friend who was very impressed with it and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it’s just fried chicken with canned tomato soup.

This is for two people (plus leftovers):

1. 2 pieces of chicken maryland, cut into drumsticks and thigh pieces
2. 1 can of condensed tomato soup*
3. 1 onion, chopped
4. 2 small carrots, chopped
5. 3 small potatoes, cubed
6. 1 can of champignon (optional), drained and rinsed

Take a large non-stick frying pan and drizzle it with a tiny bit of oil. You won’t need a lot of oil at all because the chicken pieces will render more fat. Trim off any excess fat on the chicken pieces. Read the rest of this entry »

Preheat the oven to 210′c.

Take three large potatoes, leave the skin on and cut the potatoes into large-ish, chunky chips. Place in a saucepan and cover with some cold water. Bring to boil and immediately turn the heat down to simmer for about 5 minutes.

Make brushing oil by combining three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, 1 tsp of sea salt flakes and 1/2 tsp of chilli flakes (actually this depends on how hot your chilli flakes is).

Drain the chips. Scatter them on a baking tray. Brush the chips on all sides with the olive oil mixture. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes or until brown.

Serve with sour cream and Thai sweet chilli sauce or as a side dish to a few gzillion things

Haha! I made a roast! I am generally so impatient that roasts rarely get made in this household (if anyone doing the roasting, it’s usually Josh. He is the patient one). But I figured, hell, I’m unemployed anyway.

So for our little Saturday roast dinner for two, there are a few components: roast chicken, roast potatoes, parsnip and carrots, gravy and braised cabbage. These are based on Jamie Oliver’s* Perfect Roast Chicken,  Roast Potatoes, Parsnips and Carrots, A Consistently Good Gravy and Braised Bacon Cabbage from his Ministry of Food book but with my own twists and limitations, obviously.

Roast chicken: I send Josh off to do the neighbours a favour by pruning their way-overgrown rosemary bush. Meanwhile, I turn the oven on to 2oo c. (with fan on). I wash and pat the chicken dry**. I had to cough up and buy a lemon because the really nice lemons that Jim gave us are way too big for the chicken’s jacksie. I prick the lemon  few times*** and then nuke it in the microwave for about 30 seconds. Good luck and timing have it, Josh came back with some rosemary sprigs. I put some rosemary leaves with the (hot) lemon up the chicken cavity. Dress the chicken with some olive oil, salt, pepper and some more rosemary. I also cut up an onion and a carrot into thick slices and place them on the roasting tray. I rest the chicken on the onion and carrot slices and pour a little bit of water on the roasting tray to prevemt the roasting tray drying out and cremate the veggies because I’ll need them for gravy later. The chicken (weighing about 1.5kg) goes in at 200′ c. for about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Check the roast and baste the chicken when necessary. If the onion and carrots are drying out, add a little water to the tray. Not too much because you’ll end up steaming the chicken. Don’t forget to rest your chicken before serving for about 10 minutes.

(Before)

(After – yes I cremated them a little. Oops.)

Roasted Potatoes, Parsnips and Carrots: Because they only need about 30 minutes in the oven, you can do this while the chicken is roasting in the oven. Start by peeling the 4 small potatoes, halve them if they’re too big and cover with cold water. Bring to boil for about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, peel two parnsips and two carrots (again halve them if they’re big). Add to the boiling potatoes for about 3 minutes. Turn the heat off. Put the carrots and parsnips aside while you shuffle the potatoes around in the pan so the outside of the potatoes are a bit mashed up. This is this bit that will get really crispy. Bang them all on the tray with some more crushed garlic, rosemary and olive oil, salt and pepper. Put this in the oven when you have about 30 minutes to go on the chicken on the top shelf.

Braised Cabbage: Slice 1/4 of a cabbage into thin strips (I usually just roll up the leaves and chop them). Pour a bit of olive oil and saute a finely chopped strip of bacon. Add a glug of white wine and a knob of butter and a table spoon of Worscestershire sauce. Add the cabbage, cover and turn the heat down to braise for about 6-7 minutes.

Real gravy: I love gravy! I drink it. I sometimes eat roasts with a spoon so I can get more gravy on it. When we go to Josh’s family for dinner, he usually says ‘don’t drink it all up’ when he passes me the gravy and I have to restrain myself from dumping the whole lot on my plate. Once you’re done with your roast, take out the tray and place the chicken aside to rest covered in foil. Your tray should now have mushy onion and carrots and roasting juicesand fat (some celery would be nice but there is none). Very important: skim off as fat much as possible otherwise your gravy ends up being too fatty.

Bung the roasting tray on the stove and add 2 cups of water and bring to boil. I also splash in a bit of white wine (hen’s night leftovers. I’m really not a wine person) and crumble in a vegetable stock cube. Try to mash into the carrots and onions to get as much flavour out of it as possible. Add 2 tablespoons of plain flour and stir until the gravy thickens and the flour is cooked (about 2 minutes). Turn off the heat and sieve off all the veggies and any lump of flour. That’s it. Best gravy ever.

Plate them all up. Bon Appétit.

* Jamie Oliver is god. I worship him. End of public announcement.
** It’s probably better to take the chicken out of the fridge and leave it outside to bring it up to the room temperature before you cook it. In Melbourne weather, this is about 1/2 hour. In Singapore, this is about 10 minutes. Don’t do leave it out too long if you live in a really warm place (but then you’ll probably not be making roasts if you live somewhere really warm anyway). Do not refreeze/refridgerate this chicken. You must cook it.
*** I learn that you prick the lemon too much, the chicken ends up with a lot of lemon juice inside it and steamed rather than roasted.

PS: We did the following with the leftover roast chicken:

1. Chicken, cheese  and salad sandwich – cold chicken, Colby cheese slice, tomato, rocket, lettuce, raddichio on Turkish bread roll.
2. Chicken roll – hot chicken, hot gravy in warm Turkish bread roll.
3. Tossed into Leftover Curry Briyani (story for another day).

Edit: who noticed the sad potato?

I thought I might share some pictures from Brotzeit, a German restaurant in Singapore. From recollection, there are two outlets: one in Vivo City and another at City Hall.

Just the two of us for lunch on the day. We ordered the usual favourite, the mixed platter. It included a few variaties of the German wurst (sausages) with pork, beef, lamd and chicken with some saurkraut, pickles and a bit of salad on the platter.

We also ordered the German-style potato salad:

And ‘roasted’ vegetables (although I wasn’t quite too sure why they came out looking and tasting just like a bowl of  steamed, buttered vegetables but I was hungry and really couldn’t be bothered arguing):

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How does one make potato and cauliflower soup look sexy? I can’t. But it tastes really good!

Chop an onion and two strips of bacon finely and slowly fry that off with a little bit of butter and olive oil. If you have some fresh sage leaves, now it’s the time to throw them in. But of course I don’t. Meanwhile, chop up about a cup of cauliflower florets and cut two really huge potatoes (or five normal-sized potatoes) into small 2cm cubes. Put them on a steamer for about 15 minutes until the cauliflower starts to fall apart.

Add the steamed cauliflower and potatoes into the bacon and onion mixture. Add two dried bay leaves and two pinches of ground nutmeg. Add a cup of water and a cup of milk. Add a vegetable stock cube.

Let the soup simmer for about 20 minutes, keep stirring constantly. I usually just mash the cauliflower and potatoes and I stir it. Don’t add too much water, you want a nice creamy texture at the end. Imagine a really watery mashed potato. That’s what we’re aiming for.

We got a Sunbeam Stickmaster as a wedding present from Kenny and Kirin. I tell you, it’s the most useful thing ever! Once the soup is ready, I blend it up a bit with the Stickmaster. I do like to leave some texture in the soup so I don’t really blend the hell out of it. I think it’s up to you. You don’t even have to blend it at all.

Swirl in two tablespoons of sour cream.

Serve with nice, fresh bread and butter. Sprinkle with freshly ground black pepper.

Meanwhile, I got a new batch of freshly picked figs from Lyn. I love her.