Gestalt Cooking on an Open Fire – a Festive Roast Chicken for the Masses.

 

Ever felt the burning urge to create? Like, ya fingers start itching and you get jumpy and must channel this into something? Maybe I’m mixing this up with ADD. Eck, the principle stands.

Hoe dan ook, the need to create flashes through me more than occasionally, and I usually act upon it by going mad in the kitchen. Some days I write, badly, and oftentimes (adverb credit to Meredith, my American flatmate) I play the piano. Creating for sake of creating is wholesome and liberating and you should damn well try it. If you’re at a loss, try matching smells and colours. I never said it had to be useful.

However, my culinary creations are useful in a sense; the next few posts will be a manifestation of recent adventures, for the fun and joy and inventiveness. There’s a couple more recipes from my procrastibaking, a fish chowder and some snippets from the 3 course roast dinner I cooked a few nights ago – I have exams for goodness sake, how else am I meant to prepare? I’ll attempt to do another post-per-day but we all know how that promise ended last time.

In the words of John Lemon:

“Thyme you enjoy basting is not basted thyme”

Yawyna, here’s a chicken wot I made earlier:

Roast Chicken Embolicated with Bacon and Rammed* with More Bits of Pig

I’ve fallen off the clean green eating machine that was me as a vegetarian, bc Christmas. And at Christmas, you tell the truth: a golden, sizzling, smockely, happy, turkey is approximately 65.46 times more delicious and inviting than a dry, zickledy-splatt nut-roast. I’ll be a vegetarian apologist on other bloody days, but Christmas deserves good, flavoursome stuff that should be regarded as a treat. For this reason, I bought a deluxe free-range, grass fed, slow grown, mortgage free, clean eating wellness chicken, whose shakras were in line all of its life and who was on track to be reincarnated as soup. But seriously, buy good meat and you’ll be fine.

This is relatively economicish as a recipe and fed 5 of us on the night very well, giving us two more large meals more plus soup from the bones and trimmings. It’s quite a cool thing to do to impress someone, unless they’re a vegetarian, in which case you’ll get a stern telling off and told that you’re a murderer (despite not actually killing the chicken myself, Hugh).

Anyhoo, this is what you’ll need for a pfecking** tasty roast chicken

1 pretty big chookon – 1.5kg – £5.68 cos I bought a nice middle class one.

8  NICE FCKING BANGUURRS – £1.29. (This means ‘sausages’, btfw)

1 pack of Beaky Stracon – £1.29

1/2 a packet of basic Sage and Onion stuffing mix idk it was 40p and I thought 4uck it I’ll use it at some point

Thyme/sage/wisdom/dust

Salt

Pepper

Butter or oil

What you are doings

Get ur chicken out from fridgeland and put him/her/it/they (it’s 2017!) on the counter. Sing to it. Be grateful you have a chicken that you can call your own.

Let it sit for a while while while while while while while you make your stuffing. It’s quite good to bring your meat up to room temperature, as standard parenting practice dictates. Gives more evener cooking, innit. sMaSh ur oven all the way to 190 degrees.

Remove all the sausage-meat from the skins and put it in a big bowl with some pepper and many herb. Add 1/2 your stuffing mix and stir to combine – should be v paste-like; might have to use your muddy paws to get everything homunculus.

Stiff staff stuff the whole of the chicken until it’s bit to first. Rub it sensuously with butter or olive oil (I was cooking for Jenny, who literally, literally, explodes if she touches anything that has passed through the mammary glands of a cow, sheep, prawn or goat so naturally I used oil) and scrapple a few solid twists of black pepper and a smattering of salt all over the bird. Pay particular attention to the insides of the legs, in that sort of moist slot betwixt the thigh and the body. Make sure that bit’s oiled up good and proper.

Now, lay your strips of bacon all over the breast (could have just nicked that quote from Cosmo) so it’s completely covered. You could the chop the bacon up a bit and drape the legs with it too – lady Gaga style.  Season with more pepper and herbz and slam it in the oven on a big roasting try for 1 hour and 25 minutes. I sthmacked a load of choppedly roughed veg underneath my chicken but u can do what u like. You can baste it every so often with a spoon and the pan juices, but only if you remember, or even care for that matter.

When it’s done, the juices should be running clear as day and the legs should yield when pulled away from the body. (Cosmo, or Murder Monthly?)

Leave it to rest for about 10 mins before you serve it and if you’re feeling waaaay fancy, make gravy from the pan juices and chicken stock.

This chicken will smell like Sundays and taste like the colour orange. It’s a bit of Christmas magic in poultry form.

*should be lamb, really

**German chickens go “Pfeck, pfeck”