I am the sort of person who entertains fantasies about being the sort of person who has endless supplies of home roasted cold chicken in the fridge; partially because I watch / read too much Nigel Slater, he of “Ohh I’ll just look in my fridge, ooh look there’s some of Saturday’s roast chicken left, one courgette and a lump of parmesan” and he goes and makes the most divinely gorgeous meal out of it but principally because I love proper cold chicken. I say ‘proper’ cold chicken because the little lumps of cold roasted chicken, you get in trays in the supermarket, neatly sliced into suspicious looking fatty lumps covered in a coating that you don’t particularly want, don’t really count. I feel almost the same about cold turkey (yet don’t particularly like hot turkey) and one of the highlights for me, of a post Christmas party on Mr. Lacer’s side of the family, is a ready supply of the stuff. I am of course, also aware that buying a whole chicken is a lot cheaper than constantly buying chicken breasts.
Anyway, so, I just happened to be sitting on my sofa, about a week and a half ago, on a Monday, laptop on lap, midway into doing my Ocado shop, when the postman just happened to deliver my copy of this month’s Delicious magazine, I put down the laptop and had a flick through the magazine for some timely grocery shopping inspiration and came across a couple of recipes that involved chicken, the sort of recipes where you buy a whole chicken, cook it and then divide the meat up into two or three dishes, thus making the purchase of a chicken a rather cheap option. So, I picked my laptop back up, searched for chicken and there was a special offer, two chickens, so I ordered two.
The chickens arrived on the Wednesday, I had to hurriedly rearrange my fridge to fit them in and there they sat, on the bottom shelf, starring at me every time I opened the fridge door, going “Are you going to cook us then, use by date of the 9th you know!”. Unfortunately, for the very reason I hate menu planning, the latter half of last week involved me coming down with a heavy cold, again and as usual my idea of the most strenuous time consuming cooking I could do, involved opening the freezer door and getting out the packet of Birds Eye chicken dippers. So I had two dead birds in my fridge, taunting me. It wasn’t until early Sunday evening, did I feel up to cooking at least one of them and even then I didn’t really want to. So I dug out the now cursed magazine (which was making me feel even more enthusiastic about cancelling the subscription for, for daring to give me ideas above my time and energy levels*) and stuck chicken number one in my stock pot and then went and did bed time for the kids.
Now, I’ve never poached a whole chicken before, I normally roast them, but that is what the recipe called for and I was actually quite pleased with the result, as when it came to removing the meat from the chicken, it was a lot easier and I feel I got far more meat off it than I would if I had roasted it first. And of course I was left with the water the chicken had cooked in. The recipe also required stock, so as instructed I had also bunged some carrot, onion, leek and bay leaves in with the chicken originally, however not according to the recipe, but using an extra step I remember reading from Jamie Oliver, before adding the water and the chicken, I had browned the vegetables off first, as I’ve only made stock once before and I remember not browning the vegetables off first and being distinctly unimpressed with the results. So, by the end of poaching the chicken, I was left with a chicken which was easy to get the meat off and a stock that had the weirdly pleasant smell, exactly like that of Walker’s Roast Chicken flavoured crisps.
After getting the meat off the bones, I stuck the bones back in the pot with the stock and continued cooking for a few hours whilst I made the first of the magazine recipes; chicken enchiladas (which in my opinion were a bit stodgy, Mr. Lacer liked them though) and caught up with Being Human. I then went back to my stock (it was about 10.30pm by this point), drained off the stock and started cooking the next recipe, chicken and butternut squash gratin (which required the stock, which meant I couldn’t start cooking it earlier). By the time I had made up three dishes of the stuff, ready to go in the freezer, unbaked, it was nearing one o’clock in the morning and I still couldn’t go to sleep, much as I desperately wanted to, as I had to wait for the rest of the stock I had made and decanted into freezable containers, to cool enough to put in the freezer. I got to bed at 2am, exhausted and in the way how sometimes if you’re so tired and with no chance to properly wind down, before going to bed, I slept badly and consequently had to go through Monday on two and a half hours sleep. Needless to say, those three dishes of gratin, taking up space in my freezer, right now I don’t really fancy them.
I was curious however to try out one of the containers of my plentiful supply of stock, so last night, for the kids’ tea, I made the best test of a good stock I know, risotto. I made a fairly plain risotto, so that the flavour I was convinced was there, would shine through. So, I defrosted some stock, used it, came to taste the risotto, about twenty minutes into making it and it was the most dish water dreary risotto I had ever tasted! I quickly made up some stock cube stock and added that for the last five minutes, but oh dear, it wasn’t the nicest risotto I’ve ever given to the kids (not that Boy Lacer ate it anyway) and to compensate I had to smother it in more parmesan than usual, which is probably why Girl Lacer said she liked it more the normal. The only good thing about my home made stock, was that the colour of the risotto was a little more darker than normal.
So, I’ve got a lot of vaguely tasteless stock in my freezer and there I was looking forward to endless runs of gorgeous risottos and maybe some chicken noodle soup. I will still use it, but probably for home made soups instead.
So, you may possibly be thinking (if you’ve read all this way far down), what about chicken number 2? Well that was going out of date yesterday, so I had to cook it, despite not really wanting it, after trying a few spoonfuls earlier of the kids’ leaden risotto. Unfortunately it was the day before my next Ocado delivery and I had virtually nothing in the house to go with it. But looking through (of course) Nigel Slater, I found a simple roast chicken recipe that involved massaging it with butter and ramping up the temperature of the oven for the first fifteen minutes, so I tried that. The recipe called for potatoes to roast with the bird and it sounded so nice, the way how the potatoes roasted in the chicken-y, buttery juices, but I had no potatoes, not even a potato waffle to my name, so I cooked it without. Taking that chicken out of the pan without potatoes to toss in the lovely juices was almost criminal, so I will do that recipe again, properly this time, next time I can bring myself to order chicken.
* Actually, I was thinking of cancelling it anyway, I’ve done well over the last year or so, reducing the number of magazines I read and only still read Delicious because it was the one magazine I had on subscription and I’ve been too lazy about finding out how to cancel it.
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