Pass it On:Week One

A couple of days ago I bought Jamie Oliver's new book Jamie's Food Revolution: Rediscover how to cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals. Maybe I am just a sucker for his accent and charming smile because I don't think of myself as someone that needs to rediscover cooking and by comparison I know cooking at home is a lot cheaper than going out. I have oodles of books already about simple & delicious some of them being his, so why add another book to collection? Because of what he says. I saw his TED acceptance speech and was overwhelmed by his passion and sentiments. I know many of us in the food blogging community echo his beliefs and also want to do something about the state of food in our own communities. I joined his pledge, but who would I pass it on to? I decided to pass it on to this community, the one that has been inspiring me to cook better meals and be more active with my own family.  So each week I will cook one of his recipes from the Food Revolution book and pass it on to the each of you. I would appreciate that you take this recipe, make it yourselves and blog about it in your own words and then link it back to my site each week. The idea is to see how many people we can get to pass on each recipe to a larger global community.

Because I had a whole chicken in my fridge the first recipe was a no brainer.

Perfect Roast Chicken 

• 1 chicken ( 3- 3 1/2 lbs) Jamie suggests that you use the best bird you can find ie, organic free range etc- A happy bird makes a better tasting meal.
• 2 medium carrots roughly cut
• 2 stalks celery roughly cut
• 2 medium  onions
• 1-2 garlic bulbs
• salt & fresh ground pepper (what a day for me to run out of pepper corns, had to use the reserve)
• 1 bunch of fresh herbs such as thyme or rosemary
• 1 lemon

A Consistently Good Gravy

• vegetable trivet
• 1 heaping teaspoon of all purpose flour
• 1 cup of wine, sherry or vermouth
• 4 cups stock or water
• salt & pepper

This recipe should be called "easy peasy roasted chook". The hardest part was making the gravy.

Take the bird out of the refrigerator, Jamie recommends that the chicken has half an hour to come to room temperature before it goes in the oven. I made the mistake of getting the chicken out of the fridge the same time as the rest of my vegetables... Preheat oven to 475F and get your vegetables.  Dust of any dirt and remove any excess skins from the onion and garlic but other than that no need to rinse or clean. Roughly chop all the vegetables and lightly crush the garlic. Put the the vegetables in the roasting pan or dutch oven, drizzle with olive oil, salt and toss. Jamie calls this the vegetable trivet.... (ah now it makes sense).

Rinse and pat dry the chicken (I found other chefs recommended this, so you can skip this step if you want). Prick the lemon all over and microwave (if you don't have a microwave skip) for 30 seconds to soften it up. Stuff the cavity with the lemon and the herbs. Drizzle the chicken with more olive oil, and massage with seasonings and place it on top of the vegetable trivet.

At this point it took longer for my oven to come to temperature and my bird to hangout for half an hour. So I waited and calculated that my chicken cost me $13.50 for nearly three and a half pounds, my vegetables cost a couple of dollars and I was going to feed the family for about $4 a head if all four of us ate it. Truth be told I am vegetarian that loves to cook all things! 

Put the roast in the oven and turn down to 400F- if you are making roasted vegetables prepare then now. I did but did not follow the recipe %100 so I am not including it here. 

Bake for an 1hr 20 minutes, basting occasionally. Then remove from oven, cover with tinfoil and prepare gravy.

For gravy, tilt pan with vegetable trivet and remove as much fat as you can (Jamie says %90 but really who can tell?). Put pan on a medium high heat on the stove and add flour making a slurry of vegetables. Then mash all the veg and slurry as much as you can. Add the wine, stir and remove bits from the bottom of the pan. Then add stock or water. Once all stirred and mashed together drain through a fine mesh colander. Return gravy to stove, bring to a boil and simmer to ideal consistency, about 10 mins. Taste for seasoning and adjust or if you are like me and you use veggie stock because you are ill prepared, add a knob of butter- fat carries flavour.

To serve, carve your roast remove the wings and reserve for another use or you can rip them off when resting your roast and break them up to use in the gravy. Remove the the legs and cut down the breast bone removing each breast and then pick away at the extra meat.

I started cooking at 4pm and wanted dinner on the table at 5:30 and I was nearly on that mark. I made roasted chicken, some baked veg, a marinated grilled bread salad (I needed something) and gravy in an hour forty-five minutes. This was/is a very successful meal and I am happy to pass it on.

ps... just incase you noticed I roasted this particular chook upside down... what can I say? But my husband did exclaim it was the moistest breast (meat) he has ever had...

photos by me.

Please leave a comment & a link to your site describing this recipe! Wednesday night before I post the next recipe I will blog a recap of those that participated, Cheers.

Fermented Black Bean Drumsticks *warning this post is NOT vegetarian friendly*

My children are carnivores at heart. I know this, I accept this, so I do the best I can with this. Such as buying local, hormone & antibiotic free, free run birds. We usually buy whole birds that way we can make stocks and have different cuts, but my children have been showing a preference for the drumsticks. They're easy to hold, they can eat them directly of the leg and are convenient little servings of protein. So I bought a family pack of 12 drumsticks, figuring that I was going to divide them up.... but I didn't and had to cook them all in one go. As it turns out that was fine. Organic birds are usually a bit smaller than their industrially force fed counterparts. So really 2 or 3 legs is a reasonable serving size for two hungry toddlers. The remaining meat can be cleaned of the bone and used for leftovers.

Fermented Black Bean Drumsticks 

(or other chicken parts) 

Adapted from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything

• 1 1/2 tbsp peanut oil
• 12 drumsticks or about 3 lbs bone in chicken parts, rinsed and pat dry with paper towels
• 2 tbsp minced garlic
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp fermented black beans, rehydrated in  just enough water to cover and drained.
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1/2 cup water
• salt & pepper
• juice of one lemon

While preparing all the ingredients, soak the black beans in water. Heat large lidded skillet on medium heat for a few minutes, add oil  and coat. Add chicken brown quickly on each side. As this is being done drain black beans. *It took me about 3/4 minutes each side. Plenty of time to combine the drained black beans, soy sauce, honey  and water in a bowl.

Turn skillet off and remove from the element. Remove the chicken parts and pour off all but a tablespoon of fat from the pan. Put the skillet back on the element and reheat to medium and add the garlic. Cook garlic until soft, about a minute. 

Add chicken back in, pour combined soy sauce, water mixture over the chicken. Salt and pepper to taste,  turn to coat drumsticks and cover with lid. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook for 20-30 minutes, turning a couple times during the cooking process.

Make rice according to package instructions or your favourite method, this is mine (but I left out the onion and cumin seeds).

Serve over rice, drizzled with the black bean sauce and finish with lemon juice.

photos of carnage by me.

Trussing the bird

My husband laughs at me every time I truss a bird. He says it is because trussing is useless and doesn't do anything (he read that somewhere so now he is the authority) but I think it's because I don't eat meat. So really he is laughing at me manhandeling the fleshy pink rump of a bird and bindings it wings to its chest.

For the trussing I thought I would use Thomas Keller's instruction on 'How to' from his book Ad Hoc At Home. I slipped, twisted and tied, but my bird just did not look like his. So I flipped, bound and tightened again. Still did not look like his. I even got the aid of my three year old, who is an expert in 'reading' pictures.

But alas, I decided to try a new tactic, follow more instructions. This time from my very faithful and dependable mentor- Mark Bittman (he doesn't know this). Somehow his instructions make sense to me and... ta da, my bird looked like this.

Meanwhile on the couch I had another bird baking.


images by me.

Planning

The babies requested chicken for dinner so I searched for a recipe that I thought would be appropriate - Soy Braised Chicken Thighs and off to the grocery store we went. Where we got a chicken primer from the butcher on different cuts, organic vs not, size and cooking methods. I told him what I intended to do and he talked me through it, including holding up different pieces so that the babies could choose what cuts they wanted.... Home we went with various other ingredients and they went down for a nap. They knew that we were cooking chicken for dinner and that we had picked it out so when daddy called after nap and said lets go out for dinner, I put it to the babies they responded with an emphatic "no". They were excited to cook the chook and it was already part of the plan.