Making Stock & Roast Chicken Othello

Posted on    by

This week finds me typing merrily away as my homemade chicken stock reduces over a low heat, ready to be labeled and frozen in one cup-size containers.

Also just in the freezer are the remaining three portions (in individual containers of course!) of the batch of Chicken Paprika that I made for our dinner tonight. I had made my Roast Chicken Othello on Sunday, you see, and had saved the carcass for just this purpose. As it was a small carcass, I also roasted a couple of chicken thighs and added them when it came to making the stock along with:

  • a couple of onions
  • a couple of carrots
  • fresh thyme – the remainder of which also went straight into the freezer for future use
  • two bay leaves
  • some black peppercorns
  • and a healthy dash of salt

Then let it simmer away for several hours. I always take the lid off for the last hour or so, so the stock reduces and intensifies in flavor.

The Roast Chicken Othello, by the way, is quite the nicest way to roast a chicken.

What you do is

  • blend together three tablespoons of runny honey and one tablespoon of softened butter
  • slather it over the chicken
  • roast at the highest your oven will go for the first 20 minutes – basting from time to time – or until the skin turns a very dark brown (hence the dreadfully un-pc name).
  • turn the heat down to medium for the remainder of the cooking time. This, by the way makes for a shorter cooking time, so check the chicken about fifteen minutes before you would usually.

It also almost hermetically seals the chicken, and makes for an unbelievably juicy and sweet bird, so much so that you don’t even need gravy.

Don’t stuff the bird, but instead shove a lemon half and a clove or two of garlic in the body cavity to balance the sweetness of the honey and you have yourself a feast o’ fowl.

One Man’s Attempt To Snack Like A Princess

Posted on    by

“Life,” the writer Shirley Conran once famously noted, “is too short to stuff a mushroom.”

Now however much I may disagree with her about stuffing mushrooms (gorgeous little button mushrooms stuffed with a brandied chicken liver mousse! meaty portabello mushrooms stuffed with brie and garlic and walnuts!), I must concede that Ms Conran was not on some anti-fungal crusade. She was, instead, making a much larger point about the uselessness of engaging in needlessly fiddly and time-consuming activities simply to prove their status or- even worse- their worth. Boiled down, if you think that presenting the world with a stuffed mushroom is what will finally show them all that you have it all and can do it all, you’ve probably got a very skewed idea of what having it all and doing it all actually means.

This thought, amongst a colorful array of others, occurred to me the other day when I faced up to the realities of a challenge I had set myself: making homemade potato chips. Continue reading “One Man’s Attempt To Snack Like A Princess” →

What American Food Means To Me

Posted on    by

Earlier today, on the eve of that Birthday of the United States of America, the 4th of July, Deborah posed a real, well, poser of a question:   “What is American food?”

On the surface, this was a very easy question to answer. “Hamburgers!” “Hot dogs!” “Apple pie!” “Chop suey!” “Barbeque!” “Pizza!” were amongst the most vociferously voiced suggestions. And despite the fact that each of those originated in another continent (if not country), I completely agree.

But as an amateur food historian, I could counter those with “Popcorn!””Peanut butter!” “Turkey!” “Cranberries!” as each of those foods are actually native to the USA. Well, … Okay, so peanuts are actually native to South America, and the peanut butter we eat today was possibly loosely based on a Cuban culinary practice-but it became peanut butter in the USA. And no, it was not invented by George Washington Carver, but I’ve covered that story here.)

And anyway, I started to think about the question in a different, more personal, way. Continue reading “What American Food Means To Me” →

Pickled And Baked – No, Not Like That!

Posted on    by

It’s not what you think.

I’m not wallowing in wine or whacked out on weed. (At least not right now.) I do, however, have homemade bread baking in the oven, and I’ve just put up a bunch of pickles.

Again, it’s not what you may think. I haven’t joined a commune in Vermont, delved too far into the world of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or taken up extreme right-wing ideologies and moved into a nuclear bunker in Tennessee. I’m just trying to stay hip. And for once, I’ve found I haven’t already aged out of the latest trends.

Both baking and pickling are tres chic here in the UK. That runaway smash tv show The Great British Bakeoff has taken the nation by storm over the last few years.

What was once the province of the WI has now become a national craze. Artisan bakeries are opening across the land, companies are holding their own employee cake contests, and near strangers are getting friendly jabbering about their Genoese sponges.

In the restaurant and television cookery worlds, pickling is equally de rigeur. TV shows like Masterchef: The Professionals are giving us weekly bites of the latest fine dining trends, and along with pistachios, apricots, cauliflower and cured mackerel, pickled vegetables adorn pretty much every plate. In fact, sometimes they’re all on the same plate, which strikes me as a digestive challenge.

Now I don’t, as it happens, have much of a sweet tooth. I’m not a big fan of cakes or pastries. And I’ve never before felt a particular need to knead. Nor do I, living on the third floor of an apartment block as I do, own acres of farmland replete with legumes that need preserving before they rot.

But still, a boy can get to feeling left out. Continue reading “Pickled And Baked – No, Not Like That!” →

Shakespearean Noshes, A Literary Nibble

Posted on    by

It is April 23 – National Cherry Cheesecake Day. Do we really need to expound on the glories of cheesecake? Don’t we all know it already. Instead, let us turn our culinary attention to Shakespeare. Yes, you heard me right. Shakespeare.

Today is the day of Shakespeare birth in 1564 (at best estimate) and his death in 1616. And on both those occasions, I bet food was prepared, served, eaten and shared. But which foods? Continue reading “Shakespearean Noshes, A Literary Nibble” →