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!

My Franch Holiday

A while back, in my Economy Gastronomy post, I wrote that I had been living off about £15 a week for food for two people for a few months. Maybe some of you read that and went, "woah, what a liar", or possibly, "why?", or maybe even "£15? She's the lucky one, I have to walk ten miles every day to eat food from a rubbish dump". No matter what your reaction, I feel like I must explain myself.

I decided to go on holiday with my dear beloved to Franchland, so we could visit a few of the places that we used to when he lived there. We stayed in Granville and drove up from St Malo, and had a blast visiting Cherbourg and Mont-St-Michel. But, in order to fund this jolly, we had to seriously scrimp on the shopping, fasting in order that we may feast our little hearts out eating chips and steak twice a day the whole time we were there.

(Mont-St-Michel - like Lord of the Rings meets Harry Potter. Totally fricking awesome, didn't think I'd like it half as much as I did, but it rocked.)

We worked out a budget of £60 per week for food, and then, whatever was left at the end of the week, we put into a pot to save for France. We ended up taking over £700, which should indicate how much we've been scrimping. But, it was worth every single last can of Tescos Value Beans, because I bought everything that wasn't nailed down, including copious amounts of fleur de sel de Guerande and salted caramel everything. My cupboards are now full of delicious French foods from the supermarche, and I am content. AND I'm back up to £60 a week for food, and I feel absolutely rich beyond my wildest dreams. I even bought a sliced white loaf of bread from Sainsbury's the other day, which is the first time in ages I've not baked my own. Yes, baking your own bread is fun to begin with, but when you have to do it three times a week to save money, the novelty soon wears off, even with a breadmaker.

(Picnic on the beach at Granville - worth every scrimping minute)

As far as how you live on £15 a week, it's pretty easy. Bake your own bread, like I said, that saves money. Having a well stocked larder and freezer is obviously a cheat, but also pretty damn essential. I buy huge packets of chicken thighs and drumsticks and freeze them in pairs, which is very thifty. Mince is a massive essential around here, as well. Eating very little meat makes things easy. I make massive batches of chilli and bolognaise when I can. Eggs are great value and Sainsbury's do these great family packs of free range ones which are really cheap.

I reckon it generally just helps if you're really stingy, and your OH doesn't mind eating wheat biscuits and marmite sandwiches every single day of his life (he actually insists on it). Even so often, I'd cave and buy something with my own money, rather than our joint account, so I can't claim to be totally angellic about this, but I'm sure you can see why I feel totally vindicated in laughing my ass off at the fantastic savings to be made from following Economy Gastronomy.

Salt-baked chicken

I've always wanted to try this dish, and it was absolutely amazing. I bought a corn-fed chicken and it made a huge difference. The chicken was fantastic - so tender and moist. Honestly, I never thought it would come out that well, but I was wrong! The only downside is that it was really hard to get a hold of the right amount of sea salt at a reasonable price.


Also, try the dipping sauce, it is amazing. There's really no other word for it.

Chicken, weighing approximately 1.6kg
1 tsp fine salt
3kg coarse salt, or more, depending on your pan
Bunch spring onions
Large piece fresh ginger
2 tsp sugar
Pinch salt
4 tbsp cooking oil
Steamed pak choi, to serve
Cooked rice, to serve

Wash the chicken thoroughly inside and out. Sprinkle 1 tsp of fine salt in the cavity of the chicken and rub in. Add an inch of smashed ginger and one spring onion to the cavity. You can also add dried tangerine peel.

Select a heavy bottomed saucepan with a lid which is slightly larger than your chicken. Ensure that there is not an excess of space around the chicken, as you will need to use extra salt to cover the space.

Place the salt in the saucepan and allow to heat for five minutes, until slightly browned and smoking. Remove half of the salt and nestle the chicken on the top layer of the salt, then pour the rest over to cover. Cover the chicken and cook over a low heat for 10 minutes. Then, remove the pan and place it in a pre-heated oven at 200c or gas mark 6. Cook for 45-60 minutes, or until the juices run clear.

Remove the chicken from the salt, and brush off the excess, and rinse before allowing to cool for 20 minutes. Then, chop the chicken into bite-sized pieces. The traditional Chinese method is to cut straight through the bone of the chicken, but you may wish to remove the bones to serve.

To make the dipping sauce, peel and grate the remaining ginger, and finely chop the spring onions. Heat the oil in a pan until smoking, then pour the oil onto the ginger and spring onions – make sure you use a heat proof bowl for this! Mix in the sugar and salt to taste.

To serve, plate the chicken and allow diners to help themselves, dipping the chicken into the sauce and alternating between the accompaniments of steamed pak choi and rice.


I'm not going to lie, it was scary. It was fiddly. It was pretty expensive. It involved a lot of trial and error, and also I'm still not totally sure about the best way to cover the chicken economically, but I would so do it again. It was that delicious.

Choccywoccydoodah

I had to pop into the Choccywoccydoodah cafe, even though all I drank was tea... Of course I had to. Just check out the menu, for cripes sake. M had a delicious peanut butter shake. After stealing a sip, I have to say it was exactly what was called for - a real thin, subtly flavoured shake which was really refreshing in the heat. I'm sure most people would have wanted something thicker and stronger, but we had to save ourselves for Jamie's Italian...

While we were in there, a couple were browsing through a catalouge of cakes,while the waiter hovered over them. This made me prick my ears up because I'd only just been talking about how I used to drool over Choccywoccydoodah wedding cakes a few years ago during my first round of wedding planning.

"This one would be about £800." the guy was saying.

I nearly inhaled the milkshake straw.

K, M and I exchanged glances filled with the agony of being too poor to spend £800 on a cake.

"Or something like this would set you back about two grand," the Choccywoccydoodah man was saying.

I didn't see exactly which cake this was, but I'm sure it was suitably amazing.

"It's not the materials that cost, it's the work that goes into it," he continued.

Blimey. For someone who takes nearly two months of sweating over a keyboard to earn that much cash, that was one painful sentence. I'm definitely in the wrong profession.

To check out the host of chocolatey delights we could have chosen from, follow this link to the cafe's menu.

Jamie Oliver in Brighton

Yesterday I went to visit my lovely friend Katie in Brighton and stumbled upon Jamie Oliver's Recipease, which is a food and kitchen shop that runs cooking lessons and sells kitchen equipment, ready prepared food and other bits and bobs.


I was totally shocked. I had no idea there was one in Brighton, but I'd been lusting over the one in Camden a while back, trying to see if I could fit in a recipe sesh during one of my trips to London. Ach, as if. So when I went into Recipease, I was, as usual, like a kid in a candy shop. I must have walked around that shop about three times, touching everything.


"I want to buuuuy something..." I moaned.

I'm always like this. If I go somewhere cool, and there is a shop, I must buy something. I feel like an explorer gathering exotic artifacts to bring back home - to prove I've been somewhere. Like, if I don't bring something back, I might forget I ever went. It's sort of a way of taking a bit of that coolness and preserving it forever in my house - which is of course what those hard hearted marketing bastards want me to think.

So I wandered around and around, a helpless consumer, past the class learning how to make pasta (I'd love to be in a pasta cooking class!), past all the ready cooked meals, past the mixing bowls and glassware, past all the bread and the jam, and back again. Eventually, I bought a set of measuring spoons, cos I always run out, even though I have three sets already. That'll show those doubters back home I went to Jamie's place!On the way back out I picked up a leaflet about the store, and we retreated to Starbucks to spend M's vouchers - which he turned out not to have, but that's another story. I took a look at the leaflet, and on the inside it had a map of all the foodie destinations Brighton had to offer - including a place called 'Jamie's Italian'.

WHAT?

I knew Jamie Oliver was making a chain of Italian restaurants, but I didn't realise there was one in Brighton. Why had no one told me? I like Jamie Oliver. I like Italian food. I like Brighton. Why did the world conspire against me to hide this amazing combination of pleasing concepts? I'm totally shocked I didn't get invited to the launch party.

So of course, we had to go check this place out, and very nice it was too. We got in about ten past six and waited for about forty minutes - nowhere near as long as the 1-2 hour waiting time we'd been warned about earlier in the day by the host. We were seated right near the entrance, so it was only until someone ventured forth to find the loo that we realised how big this place really was, with loads of tables behind the bar, plus a whole floor upstairs. There was a really fun, foodie vibe about the whole place, generated by the chefs slicing up ham and waiters cutting hunks of bread, plus the chalkboards and Italian paraphernalia about the place like olive oil and legs of dead pigs.

Unfortunately, I only have one very bad photo of my food, which was taken on my phone, so you'll have to forgive the crapness. I had a small portion of 'delicious crab spaghettini' and a 'seasonal antipasti meat plank', which I had brought at the same time as the mains because no one else was eating a starter. In my defence, my whole meal cost less than K's main, so there. It's really good to be able to get a cheaper, smaller main course if you fancy pigging out on a starter. I wonder how long they'll keep it up before deciding it's losing them too much money though...


M had the sausage pappardelle, K had lamb chop lollipops, and I think J had spaghetti bolognaise. We all enjoyed ours - K the most. I think it definitely lived up to the brief of showing Italian food to be a celebration of simple ingredients and flavours. The food was lovely, but not overly 'special' or fancy. I definitely appreciated being able to have a couple of smaller courses without spending a fortune.

Of course, this will be the last time I ever need anyone to make pasta for me, as I'm definitely going to enroll in a course and become a pasta-making guru myself. I don't know if I'll do a TV show about it, I haven't decided yet.

On my Brighton trip, I also managed to fit in visits to Inside Out, Choccywoccydoodah and Montezuma's. More on that in other posts...