Objection: Salad!

Rummaging around on Sunday morning, looking for stuff to eat, I...

penllawen — Wed, 30 May 2012 22:45:55 +0100

Rummaging around on Sunday morning, looking for stuff to eat, I found eggs, onion, chorizo, a couple of cold boiled potatoes, and some leftover pastry that needed eating. Hence; breakfast quiche! (Danielle’s idea, not mine.)

I diced about 60 g of chorizo (it was the uncooked kind), and fried it briefly to release some oil. Added a sliced onion and the potatoes and continued to fry until they’d crisped up a bit. Danielle rolled the pastry out and somehow made it fill our pie dish (if you look closely you’ll see it’s a very thin layer — I don’t know how she managed it!). Poured the potato/chorizo/onion mixture into the pastry base, topped with grated cheese, and poured over four beaten eggs, well seasoned, with a little milk added. Finally, I baked the whole lot for about half an hour at 175 deg C.

Necessity is the mother of invention.Problem: Leftover pie...

penllawen — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:52:58 +0100

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Problem: Leftover pie crust, but not enough to fill any pie tin we have. For some reason, we have no muffin tin in the house.

Solution: individual pies in a Yorkshire pudding tin.

Problem: no pastry cutters the right size for the tin.

Solution: use an upside-down saucepan.

Three cheese and shaved asparagus pizza

penllawen — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:07:00 +0100

(Bigger on flickr)

Longtime readers will know that I’ve been practicing my pizza for a long time. Tonight, inspired by Smitten Kitchen, I unexpectedly made my best one yet: three cheese, shaved aspargus, and spring onion (that’s green onions to you USAians).

As before, I’m still using the Cook’s Illustrated NY pizza dough, although I’ve moved on to using Italian 00 pasta flour instead of bread flour now. I find this gives me a more pliable dough that’s easier to stretch and shape. I’m remarkably bad at getting the dough to anything vaguely approaching circular so that’s a good thing in my book.

I made this more-or-less according to the Smitten Kitchen method. I dotted the bare pizza crust with goat’s cheese…

…and mozzarella…

…and Parmigiano-Reggiano:

I deliberately chose to chop, rather than grate, the first two cheeses. I prefer my pizzas to have a less homogenous texture than that provided by an even pillow of grated cheese. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Next, I took my asparagus. Using a swivel peeler, I shaved each stalk down into ribbons — leaving the woody bit at the bottom of the stalk as a handle. I tossed these ribbons with olive oil, salt and pepper, and a pinch or two of red pepper flakes. I sprinkled these over the pizza…

…and baked at a really high temperature on a preheated pizza stone for 12-15 minutes or so.

When it came out, I sprinkled with finely sliced spring (green) onions…

…and there it is!

It’s pizza, so the quantities don’t matter very much, but for the record I used:

one-half the dough in the recipe I linked to above (so, 235 g of flour); stretched out to a 12” (almost) round
about 40 g goat’s cheese, crumbled
about 60 g mozzarella, cubed
about 20 g Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated
about 200 g asparagus — 8 or so stalks, shaved
two spring (green) onions, finely sliced

I was utterly unprepared for how delicious this was. Truth be told, I made it mostly because I had asparagus to use up. I thought it would be decent but I wasn’t expecting it to be so delightful. Plus, it tastes like Spring from beginning to end, and here in Wales we’re currently basking in sunshine after a week of solid rain. That probably helped my mood as I bit into it, too.

I served this with… Well, I’d love to confess we ate it with a side salad or something healthy like that. But in fact, I served it with another pizza! Specifically, Iberian ham and Portobello mushroom:

This was also good, although less good than the asparagus (sorry, noble Iberian pigs!)

For the tomato sauce, I tried a new recipe from Serious Eats; it came out better than the one I’ve used previously. I cut the sugar to half a teaspoon and added a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar. I like the extra depth of flavour the vinegar gives it. I found two UK tins of tomatoes (400 g each) made enough sauce for four 12” pizzas.

I was particularly pleased with how the crust turned out today:

Bon appetit!

(Thanks, as ever, to my long-suffering wife Danielle for pictures and help. —Rich)

Pasta alla carbonara This was what I made for dinner tonight....

penllawen — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:59:00 +0100

Pasta alla carbonara

This was what I made for dinner tonight. I’ve been making a lot of carbonara lately, trying out various minor variations; this one was based on this post at Serious Eats which was in turn based on a recipe from Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon. I doubled the cheese, though (using a 50/50 mix of pecorino and parmigiano-reggiano), and on a whim I added half a finely diced shallot in with the pancetta.

Overall, I’d say this was the most successful one I’ve made yet. All my previous attempts have used a modest amount of cream and wine in the sauce, and consequently have been too wet on the plate. This one had a much better texture to the sauce. The only criticism I’d make is that the caramelised shallot added a slight brown tinge to the sauce which I wasn’t quite happy about. On the other hand it added a subtle sweet note to the flavour that I really liked, so maybe I’ll use shallots next time too.

Dinner tonight was my first attempt at quick-brining meat 1; in...

penllawen — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:57:00 +0000

Dinner tonight was my first attempt at quick-brining meat ¹; in this case, pork chops.

We used a brine based on this one; a simple mix of water, brown sugar, salt with peppercorns, thyme and a clove of garlic. We gave the meat 24 hours in the brine before washing it, patting dry, and frying over medium-high heat for about eight minutes.

It turned out great — nicely seasoned, and with a strong taste of pork (but not overpowering). In the past I’ve often found pork chops bland but these certainly didn’t suffer from that. The texture was good too, although that’s probably partly down to buying good quality meat from my local butcher (Douglas Willis in Cwmbran) and cooking it well. The last time I made pork chops was years ago; I expect I was using supermarket meat and probably massively overcooked it.

I served the pork with green beans and smashed potatoes based on a method from The Pioneer Woman. They are just visible in the photo, lost in a haze of bokeh. These also turned out very tasty, and I would recommend that recipe to anyone. —Rich

My fellow O:S! writer Nick points out I’ve made salt (corned) beef a few times, which I’d forgotten. That takes weeks though, and produces a food which is basically a whole other thing to what you started with; so it feels like a different category of technique to me, even though it’s not really. ↩

Chorizo, red onion, and cheese quesadilla Just something we...

penllawen — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 15:37:00 +0000

Chorizo, red onion, and cheese quesadilla

Just something we threw together for a quick lunch based on the contents of the fridge.

Thinly slice about 60 g / 2 oz of cooking (raw) chorizo. Fry for a few minutes until it’s given up its fat, then add half a red onion cut into thin slices. Fry for a few minutes more to soften the onion.

Thinly slice about 60 g / 2 oz of cheese. We used some Mexicana brand spicy cheese, but almost anything will do.

Get a tortilla and wipe both sides of it with a piece of kitchen towel dipped in oil or melted butter. Put it in a hot, clean pan and cook for 30 seconds. Flip it over and quickly scatter the chorizo mix and the cheese over one half of the tortilla. Fold the other half on top. Keep on the heat for a minute or so to crisp up the outside and melt the cheese. Repeat with a second tortilla and the remaining chorizo, onion, and cheese.

Delicious served with sour cream. —Rich

A three-course dinner for Pancake Day

penllawen — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:32:06 +0000

Here in the UK (and a number of other Commonwealth countries like Australia and Canada), the Tuesday before lent isn’t Mardi Gras — it’s Pancake Day. For no good reason¹, we eat pancakes on this day.

Normally, I make something fairly simple — a big pile of American style thick panackes or British-style thin ones (which are very similar to, although not quite, French crêpes). This year I decided to do something different and serve up three courses, all with pancakes done different ways. Here, then, is my Pancake Triple.

Appetiser: blinis with smoked salmon, cream cheese, green onion and cucumber. All credit here to my wife Danielle for the lovely presentation, including the genius idea of piping the thick cream cheese through a cookie press.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t source any buckwheat flour, so I had to use just plain wheat flour instead. They still came out good though.

Main course: galette complète with a salad of avocado, bacon, balsamic vinagrette, and goat’s cheese.

Dessert: crépes with homemade blueberry syrup and vanilla ice cream.

The syrup recipe is amazing and definitely something I’ll be making again. A few small notes. UKians should note that the “1 cup” of blueberries it calls for weigh about 100 g, which is about half of a standard supermarket punnet. If using fresh blueberries, go easy on the water. Leave it to stand briefly after simmering and it’ll thicken a little more — I found it didn’t form a skin. And don’t skip either the pectin or the balsamic.

All in all, this was quite a lot of prep and cooking to do on a week night but it certainly felt special. My friend Dave said that he made pancake cannelloni this year (exactly what they sound like: pancakes filled with ragù, topped with béchamel, and baked). I think they may be on my menu for 2013. —Rich

Allegedly, it’s to use up the rich foods that cannot be eaten while fasting for Lent but that would go off before Lent ends — butter, eggs and milk. But I cannot help but notice that animals will continue to produce these things during Lent. If you have a laying chicken or a dairy cow, you can’t actually eat these things up, because they just keep coming. ↩

Dinner tonight: leftover jambalya enchilada Last night, we had...

penllawen — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:35:12 +0000

Dinner tonight: leftover jambalya enchilada

Last night, we had blackened tuna with a “chorizo rice” recipe from the BBC. The rice dish ended up basically being jambalaya, particularly once I’d finished throwing celery, mushrooms, and some extra spices and herbs into it.

We had a lot left over though. Lacking inspiration, I idly asked my friend Scott how he thought I should use it up and he suggested a burrito. Of course, a burrito is good, but it’s sadly deficient in melted cheese; and hence we arrived at enchilada town. I bulked the rice out with some chunks of chicken seasoned with fajita seasoning and my wife Danielle made fresh guacamole and assembled the burritos for me.

It was delicious. It wasn’t as greasy as that photo makes it look either. The halogens in my kitchen are quite harsh, you see, and —- oh, who am I kidding. It was exactly that greasy. And definitely delicious. —Rich

Beef and chorizo stew with suet dumplings Stew is something...

penllawen — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:56:32 +0000

Beef and chorizo stew with suet dumplings

Stew is something I’ve been cooking for years, and something I can knock together with approximately zero mental effort. But it’s also a recipe which is endlessly flexible and adaptable to your whims — and whichever wilting items of vegetation lurking in the bottom of your fridge are in the most urgent need of being eaten. Which is why, this time, I decided to search for a recipe which did things as differently as possible to my usual methods.

I came upon this recipe from Delia Smith which was unusual (to me at least) for a few reasons:

slow-cooked for five hours (I generally cook at medium heat two or so hours).
a gravy made from cider (I use stock, maybe with some wine).
the meat wasn’t fried first (I always fry mine to provoke the Malliard reaction and all its tasty, tasty byproducts).
beef suet dumplings (a bit of extra work, but a tradition that harks back to an earlier era of British cooking).

Obviously, being me, I didn’t cook Delia’s recipe as-is. I made some changes of my own, and I ended up with this recipe. It still turned out delicious, though. I think it’s hard to go very wrong with stew.

Beef and chorizo stew

(serves four)

100 g (4 oz) chorizo
600 g (1.5 lb) of stewing beef — shin or a similar cut
2 medium sized or 1 large carrot (about 220 g / 7 oz in weight)
Half a swede or rutabaga (same weight as carrots)
3-4 parsnips (same weight as carrots)
4-5 small onions or large shallots (same weight as carrots)
25 g (1 oz) plain flour, seasoned with plenty of salt and pepper
568 ml (1 UK pint / 20 fl oz) of premium dry cider (I used Stella)
2 sprigs fresh thyme or 1 tsp dried thyme
1/2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp tomato purée
1 beef stock cube

Preheat the oven to 140 deg C (275 deg F).

First, the mise en place. Cut the beef into two-inch chunks. Cut the swede into half-inch chunks — it’s much harder than the other vegetables, so needs to be smaller to make sure it cooks through. Cut the carrots and parsnip into two-inch chunks. Skin the onions or shallots, but leave all except one whole. Dice the last onion and dice the chorizo too.

Put a little oil in the casserole pan you’ll be using for the stew and warm it a little. Add the diced chorizo and keep it on a low heat until it gives up its oil and aroma. Add the diced onion and fry slowly until softened. Turn the heat off and add the cider to deglaze and cool the pan. (Note that Delia’s recipe calls for quite a bit less cider; I prefer my stew to have a bit of sauce with it.)

Put 25 g of seasoned flour in a bowl. One piece at a time, dip the beef chunks in the flour. Make sure each one is well coated then put it in the pan. Once they are all done, toss the vegetables in any remaining flour, and put all that in the pan too. Sprinkle any remaining flour in on top.

Put the heat back on under the pan and start bringing it to a simmer.

While that’s happening, add the rest of the flavourings: the mustard, Worcestershire sauce, tomato purée, thyme, and the stock cube. Add salt and pepper too. Stir to combine. Once it’s simmering, put a lid on the pan (with a piece of foil if it’s not a tight fit) and put in the oven for four and half hours.

Go out, because it’s going to start smelling really good a long time before it’s ready to eat.

After four or so hours, check on the stew. The vegetables should be tender but hopefully not falling apart, and the beef should be cooked. You can serve it up like this, but there’s an optional step you can add if you’re feeling indulgent and/or nostalgic.

Caramelised onion dumplings

Suet is an incredibly old-fashioned British food, consisting of the hardest, most saturated fat a cow has — taken from around the loins and kidneys. It’s used as a shortening to make pastries and doughs, as well as being an important ingredient in the traditional version of mincemeat and Christmas pudding. Obviously, it’s incredibly unhealthy, so has rather fallen out of favour as dietry science came to understand the dangers of saturated fats. As such it’s not something I’d eat very often.

Americans — you can probably stop reading now. It’s almost impossible to find suet outside the UK, and there’s no substitution that is close in flavour or richness. Note that these dumplings don’t bear very much resemblance to the sort of ones you’d make for chicken and dumplings.

1/2 a small onion
100 g (4 oz) self-raising flour
50 g (2 oz) shredded beef suet — I used Atora brand
1 tsp mustard powder
1 Tbsp fresh chive

Ahead of time, finely dice the onion and fry in flavourless oil (groundnut or vegetable) over a very low heat for half an hour or so until caramelised and brown. Leave this to cool.

Once the stew is cooked, sift the mustard powder and flour into a work bowl. Add the suet and stir that through, followed by the onions and chives. Sprinkle over about five Tbsp of cold water and bring the mixture together with a knife or — if you have one — the dough paddle of a freestanding mixer. The mixer is a lot less work! Add more water if you need it to make a firm but soft dough.

Separate the dough into eight portions and roll them by hand into spheres. Get the stew out of the oven, pop the dumplings in the top so they are half-submerged in the gravy, and put it back in the oven for 20-30 minutes.

Now, this is where my advice parts ways from Delia’s. She suggests leaving the lid off the casserole at this point, and increasing the temperature. I tried this and found that too much of the sauce boiled away and the tops of the dumplings became quite dark, almost burnt, where there were tiny pieces of onion on the surface. You can see this in the photo at the top of the post. Next time I will keep the lid on the pan, which is the usual way to cook dumplings, to give a softer, part-steamed texture.

Finally, serve with some good bread and a glass of full-bodied red wine.

In the spirit of championing food producers that absolutely do...

mrcraster — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:18:56 +0000

In the spirit of championing food producers that absolutely do it right, I want to give a hat-tip to the East London Steak Company, who’ve been providing me with superb quality beef throughout 2011. They inform you exactly where the beef is from, the breed, when it was slaughtered, and by whom.

Not only that, they have an excellent selection of hard to find cuts, do next day delivery (within Greater London) and get it to you before 8am.

Keep up the good work - Nick

A post from me? It must be New Year. We had a couple of...

mrcraster — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:32:00 +0000

A post from me? It must be New Year.

We had a couple of friends over for New Year’s eve, and I wanted to do some cooking that would allow us to sit in the kitchen and eat things as they came off the stove, so I decided to put together a selection of things that were a bit more than a mouthful, but not something that needed us to sit down with a knife and fork.

With that in mind, I put together the selection shown in the picture. Clockwise from top left:

‘Tuna Nicoise’ - this was a slice of fresh tuna, seared on the outside, with a soft-poached quail’s egg sitting on top, and dehydrated olives, capers, and shallots ground in a spice grinder on top of that. Unfortunately the olives retained too much oil and the powders clumped a bit as a result.
Steak tartare served on dripping-fried toast. Dripping is rendered beef fat, and frying the little toast slices in it adds a delicious beefy flavour while making the ‘toast’ crisp enough to hold the steak. The beef was skirt steak from Dexter cows (hanger steak in US terminology), finely diced with shallots, capers, and anchovies, seasoned, and bound with an egg yolk.
Smoked salmon parfait with caviar. The salmon parfait was made that morning to give it time to set. It’s very simple - smoked salmon simmered with cream and a little water, then pureed. Bloomed gelatine is added, then more cream whipped until stiff is folded into the purée then chilled until set.
Poached trout and black pudding. Because on paper it looked much too healthy, I poached the trout in butter until it was just cooked, then flaked it up with a little of the butter and served with a simple grilled chunk of black pudding (a British type of blood sausage). The richness of the black pudding and the lightness of the trout were a lovely combination.
Not pictured was a garlic soup - as it was a white soup in a white cup. A whole roasted bulb of garlic, simmered with onions and cream, then pureed. Thick and powerfully garlicky.

I was thoroughly pleased with everything cooked there, and as such have a New Year’s resolution - cook more little things!

Happy new year, everyone. —Nick

Weekend meal planning

penllawen — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:35:38 +0000

Friday night: ribeye steak, mushrooms fried in garlic butter, sweet potato roasted with olive oil and heavily seasoned with cayenne, oregano, thyme and paprika.

Saturday brunch: toasted (English) muffins with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs.

Saturday dinner: roasted cod loin with grilled mushrooms stuffed with n’duja and courgette ribbons.

Sunday brunch: waffles with bananas and maple syrup, with a side of bacon.

Sunday dinner: roasted pork loin with roast potatoes and parsnip and Yorkshire pudding.

Should keep me busy! —Rich

Blackened seared tuna with cajun rice This was our dinner...

penllawen — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:51:28 +0000

Blackened seared tuna with cajun rice

This was our dinner tonight. Despite seeming very fancy, it took less than 20 minutes of prep time and only about 45 minutes to cook from beginning to end. I’d say this is pretty good cooking-to-impress food — although it does fill your kitchen with an alarming amount of smoke.

I’ve written up my recipe for O:S! previously. This one came out a lot prettier than the one I pictured there, though. —Rich

Lunch today was caprese grilled cheese sandwiches. No recipe...

penllawen — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:07:00 +0100

Lunch today was caprese grilled cheese sandwiches.

No recipe required, because it’s pretty obvious: cram slices of mozzarella, tomato, and pesto between pieces of bread, brush the outside of the bread with butter or oil, and lightly fry to melt the cheese. I found it worked better if I put a lid on the frying pan to trap more heat in and make sure the cheese was properly melted.

I also made my own pesto for this, because I don’t like pine nuts so pre-made stuff isn’t to my taste. Authenticity demands that pesto is ground by hand in a pestle and mortar, but I’m far too busy and important (read: lazy and inept) for that. Instead, I simply used a small blender to combine a handful of basil leaves, a few table spoons of grated parmesan, a diced clove of garlic, some salt and pepper, and enough decent quality olive oil to give a gloopy consistency. This worked well enough for the sandwiches, though I daresay it’s not the last word in pesto-ness. —Rich

Tex-mex weekend brunch: eggs roasted in sweet pointed peppers,...

penllawen — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:46:00 +0100

Tex-mex weekend brunch: eggs roasted in sweet pointed peppers, with chilli and freshly made tortilla chips.

Both Danielle and I are pretty lazy and slow-moving on weekend mornings, so it’s usually 11 o’clock or so before we get around to eating anything, by which point we’re starving. So elaborate and hearty brunches are very much a thing for us — you can see some of my previous efforts.

This dish was inspired by a post by Delishy Town that I spotted on Tumblr’s food tag page.

It was easy to make, too:

Pre-heat oven to 180 deg C (375 deg F).
Dice half an onion, fry gently for a few minutes.
Finely dice a handful of mushrooms, add to the pan with the onions.
Optional: discover some leftover taco meat in the fridge from when your wife made nachos. Throw that in too.
Add a tin of chopped tomatoes to the pan. Bring to the boil, season, add spices if desired, and leave to simmer and reduce a little while you do the next bit.
Get some of those long, red, pointed peppers that most supermarkets sell these days. Halve them through the stalk and carefully remove the ribs and seeds.
Turn the chilli mix out into an ovenproof dish. Put the peppers on top. One by one, crack eggs into a small bowl, then pour them into the peppers.
Cover with grated cheese.
Put the whole lot into the oven for 10-15 minutes, until the cheese is browned and the egg cooked through.
Get a couple of tortillas and quarter them with a sharp knife. Dip some kitchen towel in flavourless cooking oil (vegetable or groundnut) and wipe the tortillas down. Put them on a baking sheet.
Put the tortillas in the oven for the last 5 minutes of the cooking time.

It was very tasty, and a nice change from the normal sorts of things we eat for brunch. —Rich

For dinner tonight, I made: roasted sea bass flavoured with...

penllawen — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:30:57 +0100

For dinner tonight, I made: roasted sea bass flavoured with lemon juice and fresh herbs, served with blanched runner beans and potatoes sautéed in garlic butter.

The other half of the corned beef I made (see my previous post)...

penllawen — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:06:00 +0100

The other half of the corned beef I made (see my previous post) was chilled overnight, diced, and used to make this corned beef hash (with poached duck egg), which I served as breakfast to Rob, Amantha and Danielle. I’m particularly pleased with how this came out. —Rich

Corned beef, or as us Brits call it, salt beef. I started with...

penllawen — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:06:00 +0100

Corned beef, or as us Brits call it, salt beef. I started with beef brisket, cured it for two and a half weeks in a seasoned brine with saltpetre (for the pink colour), then braised it in dark ale for 6 hours at a low heat. Although it sounds like an ordeal, it’s actually a very straightforward process, and it tastes superb. It’s very hard to find good salt beef here in the UK, so I’m glad I can make my own.

This half of the brisket was served as-is for sandwiches to our guests, Rob & Amantha, when they came from America to stay with us for a week. The rest of it was used for corned beef hash —Rich

Any night I get to fry fillet steak is a good night.

penllawen — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:51:37 +0100

Any night I get to fry fillet steak is a good night.

Deboning a whole chicken

penllawen — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:01:08 +0100

Last week I chanced across this Youtube video where legendary chef Jacques Pépin demonstrates how to completely debone a whole chicken. “Hmmm,” I thought to myself, “that looks far easier than I would have thought.” So, naturally, I had to have a go at it today — with somewhat mixed results.

First, the good stuff. Without cutting myself more than a little tiny bit, I started with this…

… and 37 minutes later (after a lot of headscratching, fumbling, and rewinding and rewatching the Youtube video) I had turned it into this…

In this picture, every bone except the very ends of the legs have been removed, and some of the meat has been strategeically re-arranged. The idea is that you’re left with one neat layer of skin and one neat layer of flesh, of even thickness. Mine wasn’t so neat but hopefully you get the idea. Now, admittedly 37 minutes is a long time; but that’s my own ineptitude to blame, not anything inherently difficult about the technique. I can easily believe that once you’ve done a few of these you can do them in very quickly indeed and I’m sure my next one will be done lot faster.

(Just out of shot is the remainder of the carcass, which I later boiled up for stock with some ginger, chilli, garlic and onions; I’m going to make a noodle soup out of that this week.)

I then took a stuffing I’d made the day before, a simple mushroom duxelles made from finely diced shallots slowly fried with minced chestnut, portobello, shiitake and porcini mushrooms until it reduces into a paste.

(The shiitake and porcini mushrooms were dehyrdated, not fresh; I reconstituted them with a soak in warm water for half an hour first, then mixed the soaking liquid back in with the pan so I didn’t lose a drop of flavour.)

I spread this stuffing all over the chicken and packed it down into the leg cavities:

Then I rolled the chicken up, almost back into the shape I started with but with solid meat and stuffing now. So far, so good. I had some slightly scruffy spots where the skin wouldn’t quite cover all of the flesh because I’d cut into it too ham-fistedly, but nothing too bad.

Sadly, this is where stuff started to go wrong.

I had been unable to locate butcher’s twine in town during the week, so my butcher had supplied me with these elasticated things that they use in the shop. My plan was to use a few of these around the body of the chicken to hold it together. However, as soon as I put one in place, it was obvious this wasn’t going to work: the elastic was too tight, causing the stuffing to shift around and the bird to bulge outwards on either side of it.

Plan B, then: I stuck a few toothpicks through the seam to try and hold it together during the cooking process (I didn’t have any short skewers, which would have been preferable.) Then I considered how I was going to cook it and chickened out (pun intended) of using my usual big roasting tray with a rack; instead, I put it in a smallish earthenware bakeware tray. The idea was that the chicken was a snug fit in the tray, which means it wouldn’t have any scope to fall apart while it was cooking.

Here it is, seasoned and ready for the oven. I roasted it at 180 deg C (350 deg F) for about 1hr 45min, until my digital temperature probe recorded an internal temperature of 80 deg C (175 deg F).

That bakeware was a mistake, on two levels. Firstly, it was too snug a fit and provided nowhere for the pan drippings to go; so the bottom of the chicken was rather greasy. Secondly, it’s rather thick and is light in colour, so tends to be rather heat-absorbing. So when the chicken came out of the oven, it looked pretty good:

But when I cut into it, it was obvious that the bottom half-inch or so of meat was hopelessly undercooked, raw and pink-looking. On top of that, I was unable to get clean slice through the meat; I think my carving knife needs a good sharpening.

Nevertheless, I soldiered on. Well, more accurately, I started to sulk before my wife pointed out that this could still be rescued. I sliced the chicken as best I could and flashed the meat under a hot grill to ensure it was cooked through before serving. Here’s how it ended up looking:

I served it with a gravy made from the pan drippings and a splash of Madeira, some garlic and rosemary roast potatoes, some fantastic glazed carrots (I cannot recommend that recipe enough), and a Yorkshire pudding. Yes, it’s traditional to eat Yorkshire puddings with beef, not chicken; but frankly I don’t care.

All in all, my first attempt at deboning a chicken turned out okay, although there are certainly lessons for me to learn for next time. It tasted great — moist and succulent, with plenty of flavour both from the meat and the delicious duxelles stuffing. I’ll certainly be trying it again. If I can get the technique down, it’ll make a great meal to serve to friends I think — it’s looks impressive and all the complex stuff can be done entirely ahead of time. It’s also a very practical way to cater for a large group from a small oven because what you end up with is a solid ball of meat, as opposed to the space lost to the bones and chest cavity of a normal roast chicken.

Footnote: if you take this process a stage further and do a chicken, and a duck, and a turkey, then layer them one on top of the other before rolling them all up together, you get what us Brits call a three bird roast but some Americans call by the clanging awful portmanteau “turducken”. I always wondered how they were made.