52 weeks, 52 chickens: Week Two - Super Tasty Spanish Roast Chicken

So, week two got off to a good start, after I went to the Hampshire Farmer's Market to pick up a lovely free range chook from Noah's Ark Farm. I was making another Jamie Oliver recipe, also from Jamie's Dinners, called Super Tasty Spanish Roast Chicken - how could I resist, really? There's no 'cooked' photo in the book, and I haven't got one either, as I ran out of light, but the thought of crispy roast chicken skin tinged with the dark crimson of smoked paprika from the chorizo garnish was enough to get me motivated. I had to cheat here slightly as Jamie's very keen that I buy an organic free range bird, but the only ones I found at the market were about double the price of a supermarket one. Why should I pay for a chicken to eat what I can't afford? Pah!

So, here's the bird - £8.41, not too bad. And with giblets... scary! Luckily, these were bagged and were swiftly removed to the freezer. I haven't come across a recipe that needs them yet, but I'm sure I will, and it always seems to be when you don't actually have any... I've had a traumatic past experience with giblets which gives me a totally legitimate reason to get freaked out by them, I'll have you know. As a spotty youth I was charged with making the roast dinner at my uncle's house one Sunday, and, for some reason, this involved me submerging a whole chicken in a sink of water, probably to defrost it. As I did so, the cavity filled with water, and out popped a dishevelled brown bag filled with chicken guts, which promptly exploded and covered my hands and the dead chicken with scraps of heart and liver. Ugh. I tend to keep away from guts now...

Anyway, so. Here's the costing:

Noah's Ark free range chicken, 2.2kg : £8.41
Tesco chorizo sausage : £2.99
2 for 1 baby potatoes, costed for one 1kg packet : 59p
4 lemons : £1.00
Bunch parsley : 79p
Garlic : 20p

Grand total : £13.71

Chorizo is so damn expensive, but luckily, it's totally worth it.

So, Jamie wants you to make a (looks it up) gremolata, which is chopped lemon zest, raw garlic and parsley. Never made this before, and it was delicious. I don't know that it will be my condiment of choice for roast chicken hereafter, but a little exploration is what it's all about, right?

Note that Jamie's recipe calls for a beaten egg - this phantom egg doesn't appear in his online version, but it's been confuddling cooks online for a while, because it never gets used in the recipe. I think maybe Jamie just wants you to beat an egg for this recipe so that you can ponder that age old question - which came first? His answer being, presumably, that the egg never came at all. Wow, philosophical...

So, here is the chicken all dressed up and ready to party. The cavity is filled with hot lemons and parsley stalks - I definitely will always boil my lemons first before adding them to a chicken to roast. I first came across this in another Jamie recipe and it really helps the lemon scent to flavour the bird - it steams it in lemon scent. Of course, I am an idiot, and I turned the oven off about ten minutes before this step, so the chicken had to sit on the side and generate some delightful bacteria before I could put it in the oven. No, luckily that didn't happen, but obviously hot food + raw poultry + sitting around = bad idea.

Before you pop the chook in the oven, though, you have to cover it in damp parchment paper, which 'seal in the juices'. I have to say, this part didn't work so well for me. The paper got quite burned, and left a bitter taste to the flesh and juices, and charred paper also coloured the stock a muddy grey. I don't know how necessary it is, but I might use foil if I did it again... Which I won't for a WHOLE YEAR. Probably.

This is the stunt double meal - like I said, by the time I got to serving dinner, the light had totally gone, but luckily there was enough left over for me to take this shot the next day.

I served the chicken with ratatouille and Leon's Magic Beans, and it was delicious.

Scores:

M gave it 8.5. He likes chorizo, he likes chicken, he likes potatoes. Altogether, a pretty good combo. The gremolata went down well, so a good success. But he did wonder how it was possible to ever score a 10, and frankly, so do I...

I gave it 8. I really liked it, but it somehow wasn't chorizoy enough for me. I wanted the rich, greasy, spicy taste of the chorizo, cut with the zesty fire of the fresh lemon. It was a lot more subtle than that. Also, the parchment paper really didn't do well on top, and I didn't like having grey gravy... And, as per Jamie's instructions, I sprinkled parsley on the top, which was a mistake, as it pretty much got cremated and turned very bitter. On the up side, it made delicious spuds and we had loads for lunch the next day!

52 Weeks, 52 Chickens: Week One - Leftovers, hoisin chicken buns

I thought I'd see whether I could adapt a recipe I'd used and loved before - hoisin chicken buns from Cooking Light, by way of Cooking Cute. I tried it, and it worked well, although I'm always a bit funny about using leftover chicken and not cooking the hell out of it. I'm still alive, though... so I guess in that respect it was a complete and utter success. Maybe if I made this again, I'd heat the chicken before stuffing it in the bun, but it does get cooked again in the oven, so maybe that would be overkill.

To make this recipe, I made a batch of white bread dough, which is never any sweat with my bread maker. The original recipe calls for frozen dough, but I've never seen that before here in the UK - and it's just yeast, water, salt and flour after all, so easy to put together.

The filling I stripped from the chicken carcass - I must have used the meat from one leg and two thighs, plus whatever I pulled from underneath. Shred it up, then add it to 3 tbsp hoisin sauce, 1 tbsp oyster sauce, 2 tsp rice vinegar and a bunch of spring onions you've shredded finely. I also added salt to mine, but my hoisin sauce was that terrible cook-in sauce stuff, rather than the proper condiment you eat with duck. If you manage to pick up some real hoisin sauce (why was that so hard, Sainsbury's?) then you should reduce the amount you use down to 2 tbsp.

Once you've made your dough, turn it out and cut it into eight pieces (or more if you're making them for bento), and roll each piece into a size slightly bigger than your palm. Place a spoonful of the chicken mix into the middle. Pull four corners into the middle and pinch, then do the same again with the leftover tabs. It's helpful to rock the bun back and forth at this point to shape the top nicely. Set it on an oiled tray and put the rest together.

Cover and allow to prove for 20 mins in a warm place. Preheat your oven to 190C and then brush the buns with beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Bake for 15 mins, or until golden. You can also bake them for a shorter amount of time (12 mins or so) and then freeze them to bake again another day. (There are great instructions here for freezing and then reheating the buns at Cooking Cute.)

Allow to cool slighty, then eat!

These also make a great lunch or snack, and can be eaten hot or cold. I really love these chicken buns! But, please make sure that everyone has one before you start to eat... unfortunately, the spring onions are a little whiffy. M ate one in the cinema the other day when we went to see Inglourious Basterds, and it didn't really help the atmosphere, I have to tell you.

In other news, I'm off to the farmer's market tomorrow to pick up my second chicken. Whoo! Wish me luck - I'm leaving really early so hopefully I can bag a good chook!

52 Weeks, 52 Chickens: Week One - Leftovers, hot and numbing chicken

So, here we are on our first round of leftovers with the chicken from Jamie's Feel Good Chicken Broth. I don't have very much in the house, so dispensing of the rest of the chook is going to be a real challenge. Luckily, I have the very handy and excellent Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop, which has about four or five easy and tasty recipes for cooked chicken at the front. Today I made hot and numbing chicken (not to be confused with numbing and hot chicken, which mixes spicy chilli oil and toasted, ground sichuan pepper together with soy sauce and sugar to create a really delicious cold dish.

You're supposed to serve this with spring onions, but sadly I don't have any in the house, so we made do with half a cucumber. Pretty nice! I'm growing to really appreciate cucumbers as an accompaniment to hot Chinese dishes, as the slippery, refreshing crunch is a great counterpoint to the spicy, salty tastes from Sichuan cookery.

I served the salad with hot plain rice and the last of the chicken broth. I thought this would make a cleansing balance for the spiciness of the chicken salad, but sadly, I was wrong. The broth was totally overwhelmed by the chilli and ended up tasting of nothing. Shame. But hey, it all looked pretty on the table, and that's all that matters... Right?

In other news, I need new placemats. Look at them. Shabby.

52 weeks, 52 chickens: Week One - Feel Good Chicken Broth

I'm always one for jumping into things immediately, both feet first. So, after making spreadsheets about chicken prices in supermarkets at one o'clock in the morning and devising a list of chicken recipes I wanted to try out, I decided to make my first chicken recipe on Monday evening.

I've been feeling a bit under the weather for a good few days now, so I decided to make Jamie Oliver's Feel Good Chicken Broth from Jamie's Dinners. At first this was partly because I thought it would be one of the cheaper recipes, because it's basically chicken, boiled with carrots, celery, bacon and rosemary. And it would have been, except Jamie expressly lists an organic, free range chicken in the ingredients. Damn.

I decided to add another rule to my list since yesterday, but I'm perfectly willing for this to be optional, money permitting. The idea is that if the recipe expressly calls for a certain kind of chicken - corn-fed, organic, whatever - I'll hunt that out. That way, I can judge the recipe fairly. After flicking through Jamie's Dinners, it seems as though Jamie is a chicken snob of the highest order - who would have guessed, right? - as every recipe calls for an organic, free range chook. Free range I get, but organic? Organic chickens are significantly higher in price (I know, I did the spread sheet at one o'clock in the morning) than any other kind of chicken, and I have to be honest, I don't know whether that makes any difference to the chicken or the taste. So my cheap mid-week dinner (all right, start of week dinner) turned out to be really pricey.

So here's the costing:

Sainsbury's SO Organic Chicken, 1.5kg : £9.16
Two carrots : 10p
Basics celery : 55p
Two rashers smoked bacon : 76p
Three sprigs of rosemary : free, from garden

Total cost : £10.57

Ah, would have been so cheap if I'd been able to get an abused chicken. Oh well. To be honest, I've always wanted to try something like this, to see how good good ingredients can really be if they're cooked simply.

So, I popped into Sainsbury's and picked everything up before borrowing my dad's Nikon D50 to take photos. Only, I'd left it a little too late in the evening, and with the light rapidly fading I was forced to take the final photos today.

As far as ease of method goes, this is a pretty simple recipe. You simply simmer the chicken with two roughly chopped carrots, two sticks of celery and 1 rasher of smoked bacon (I used two, because I felt like a dip asking for one rasher at the butcher's counter) for one hour and five minutes, then add three sprigs of rosemary in for another ten minutes, ensuring you skim the white residue off the top every now and then.

So I was very good and followed the recipe exactly, until I got to the end and wound up with lots of vaguely chickeny flavoured water. So I strained it like Jamie said, but instead of serving as it was with salt, I put it back in the pan and simmered it until it tasted stronger.

I ended up finishing this task after 11pm. Good job I'd already eaten a baguette stuffed with pancetta that was going to go off the next day, slathered with French mayonnaise and my favourite mustard ever. With litres of chicken stock and a whole poached chicken sitting in my fridge, it's a good job Jamie posted this about how to use up left over chicken. Another addition I made at this late stage was to sit the chicken in some of the stock in the fridge, to keep it tender and moist. In theory, anyway...

So, today, I got the chicken and stock out and did a test run for tonight to see what the soup would taste like, and to take some pictures before I had to give the camera back.

As you can see, Saffy was a fan of chicken au natural. I found it to be rather tough. Maybe I overboiled it, or maybe as this is a recipe for chicken soup and not poached chicken, the point is that the stock is flavourful and not that the flesh is tender.

After all my boiling down, I ended up with about 1.2 litres of chicken stock, which didn't quite set to jelly. After I'd removed all the chicken and flavourings yesterday, including the rosemary, the taste of rosemary was there, but very faint. Today, it was barely there at all. I guess reducing the stock damaged the taste of the rosemary, so maybe it should only be added ten minutes before you intend to stop cooking if you're going to reduce it like I did. So, in order to bring the taste of rosemary back, I added a rosemary garnish, just like the photo in the book.

The end soup is rather greasy, thanks to all the fat given off by the chicken in the cooking process. I had to add a tonne of salt, but when I did, the chicken stock was really delicious and flavourful. The meat, as I said, was slightly tough. I didn't cook it again after yesterday, just put the cold pieces in and covered with hot stock, so it can't be down to cooking it twice. Ah, well.

All in all, a tasty, simple chicken soup. But that's all - chicken soup. You can't really get around that this is a simple dish - I would love someone to cook this for me when I'm sick. But whether it was worth a tenner, I'm not so sure.

I'd imagine we'll use all of the stock in our soup tonight, along with maybe a quarter of the chicken. That gives me quite a lot of left over chicken meat to use in meals for the rest of the week, so it's actually not a bad dish, economy wise. Thank God for that. (But of course, it would be cheaper again if you didn't buy an organic chicken...)

So, the scores.

M gave it 6, saying that the rosemary garnish really packed in some extra flavour. But, it's soup. Very nice soup, but soup.

I gave it 6.5, for pretty much the same reasons. It does feel really luxurious to be able to make soup with a whole chicken just to get some tasty stock, and I'm glad I did it. But there's no way this is going to be the highlight of the challenge. I hope! I'd make it again, but I don't know if it's worth making it with an organic chicken.

52 weeks, 52 chickens

So I'm thinking, I need a challenge. Almost instantly I started thinking about cooking a whole chicken every week, for a year. I really can't remember how my thought processes got to this so quickly. I think roast chicken has been on my mind for a while, ever since I found a delicious chicken, ready to cook in an enamel tray, for sale in Jamie's Recipease in Brighton at the weekend.

Probably not the most daring or extreme challenge anyone's ever come up with, but hey... I'm a real person here, and I've got stuff to do most of the time. Like, work, and watch crap TV. But this challenge isn't going to be a walk in the park. I've decided to impose some rules.

1) No cooking the same recipe twice. If I cook the same recipe twice this year, it won't count towards my 52 chickens goal.

2) The recipe must involve a whole chicken. Although I thought about including recipes that involve cutting up the chicken, I'd like to see whether I can keep up a challenge of cooking the chicken whole, to make it slightly more difficult. Spatchcocked chicken is fine!

3) The goal is 52 chickens in a year, preferably one per week, but I'm giving myself leeway to cook two in one week, provided they're different recipes. You know, because I'm going to be jetsetting and terribly busy for moments of this year, I can feel it.

4) The price of the chicken, the origin of the chicken, the recipe and what happened to the leftovers must all be recorded.

5) The overall price of the dish must be recorded, along with marks out of ten from M and I. Obviously, every dish must be blogged, with photos if possible. At the moment, I have no camera, so this should be really interesting...

I'll be really interested to try out different priced chickens. I don't think there's a foodie on the planet who doesn't want to buy high welfare chicken every time they shop, but there are loads of budget ranges for whole chickens out there, so I'll be testing those out along with the corn feds and the organic free range chickens to find out what the difference really is. I figure this will give it a bit of a variety, and hopefully save me a bit of dosh to counteract the cost of the pricey ones.

I'm also really looking forward to scouring my cookbooks for some really unusual recipes, and working hard to ensure that I don't get totally sick of roasted chicken... If anyone knows any good chicken recipes, let me know!

Sadly, today's salt-baked chicken doesn't count towards my total, because I actually made that way back in June. (Still looks good though, after all that time...) For shame!