Gluten-Free Roast Chook with Apple Gravy

It's been a little while since I actually posted a recipe here. I have a dozen food posts drafted, but more interesting stuff seems to keep coming up that I feel the need to blog about.

But since I'm also dealing with a serious case of writer's block right now, I figure it's time to get back to what I do best: making your tummy rumble.

It was Nan's birthday, and I hadn't shoved my fingers inside a dead chicken for some time, so I decided to do a special birthday roast chook. This recipe is based on a Jamie Oliver classic, but it incorporates my trademark apple gravy, and is Gluten-Free. (JO's is also GF, but he doesn't have the added bonus of apple gravy).

Gluten-Free Roast Chicken with Apple Gravy

(Serves 6)

Ingredients:
1 Large Whole Chicken, (size 20) fresh or thawed
50g Butter, softened
3 Cloves of Garlic, finely chopped
3 Stalks of Rosemary, leaves roughly chopped
Zest of 1/2 a Lemon (Keep the lemon to stuff the cavity)
Freshly Ground Salt and Pepper

For the Gravy:
1 Apple, cut into eighths
1 Onion, sliced
Pulverise together all ingredients except the chicken, apple and onion. Preheat the oven to 220C.
Take a small sharp knife and slit the skin away from the breast above the neck. Carefully prise the skin away, being careful not to let it split. Stuff the butter into the space between, pressing it as far as you can over the breast and into the thighs and legs. Spread any leftover butter over the skin.
Season the skin. Slice the lemon in half and squeeze into the cavity (the lemon that is, not you).
Place the segments of apple in the centre of a roasting dish and layer the onion rings over the top of this. Place the chicken on top, breasts up.
Roast at 220C until cooked, about 2 1/2 hours. Turn and baste after 40 mins and again after 80 mins.
And now for a picture of a posh-looking beer, cos we haven't done that for a while. Not necessarily recommended as an accompaniment to this dish, but certainly recommended. (Thanks Uncle I!)
When the chicken is done, remove it to a cutting board to stand for about 10 minutes. What you have left should look like this. To make the gravy, simply blitz everything in the roasting dish, either using a hand-held blender, or by straining it into a blender, or even by mashing it all through a sieve. It will self thicken without you needing to add anything or heat it again.
Serve with roast veges, fresh garden veges, and a nice crisp Pinot Gris. Then get out of the kitchen before they make you do the dishes.

Pineapple Chicken with Moroccan Couscous

Do you ever feel like it's really time you did something different with that plain old slow-cooker chicken?

I get that feeling all the time. It's only sometimes that I have the imagination to actually do something about it.

Slow-Cooker chicken is so easy, and so good just as it comes, that it must be hands-down one of the best family meals you can cook. I was looking in the fridge for something that might make the bird more interesting when I spotted some pineapple rings from the night before, and I was inspired.

Don't forgot to pay very close attention to hygiene if you're going to get this intimate with a chicken...

Also pictured here is my latest obsession: Couscous. With apologies to anyone who already knows the joys of couscous, this stuff has to be the best carbo alternative there is. It takes just a few minutes to cook and tastes like whatever you choose to make it taste like. I'll be throwing around heaps of suggestions for how to make this stuff a normal part of your weekly meal routine as I discover more interesting ways to deliver it to the table.

Here it's cooked with a pre-packaged Moroccon spice blend. If you have the skill and the means to prepare your own spice blends, go for it - and maybe drop us a link here to share. From everything I've ever read about making up things like garam masala or other spicy mixes, the quantities involved are usually such that we would never use it all before it goes stale. So we stick to the pre-made ones for now. Suggestions welcome!

To cook couscous, just boil an equal quantity of water (ie, 1 Cup) with 3T olive oil and 1-2 T of flavouring, remove the water from the heat, add the couscous (again, 1 Cup), allow to stand off the heat for 3 minutes, then stir through 1T of butter. Fluff up with a fork and serve. Yummy stuff.

Now, onto the main event:

Pineapple-Stuffed Chicken

(Serves 4)

Take one whole chicken of a size suitable to feed your family, and make sure it is either fresh or completely thawed.
Slice the skin of the chicken near the tail on the breast side. Carefully prise the skin away from the flesh, making sure that it remains firmly attached down the length of the breast. Gently slide in two pineapple slices cut in half lengthwise, being careful not to break the skin, as per the picture.

Halve an onion and jam it firmly into the cavity.

Toss the chicken (gently) in a large bowl with 3T Soy Sauce, 1/4C Pineapple juice (reserved from the canned slices), freshly ground salt and pepper, and 3T of flour. Place on a low rack in the slow cooker, and cook on high for 2 hours, reducing to low for a further 3 hours. And yes, after all the care you took not to split the skin, it'll split anyway. But you didn't do it. The laws of physics did.Anyway, when you try to get the chook out of the cooker, it'll just fall apart. Dish the chicken and top it with the pineapple rings and fresh diced capsicum, alongside Morrocan Couscous and fresh veges.

Lemon-Garlic Chicken

This meal follows on from an absolute travesty that was committed against a poor innocent chicken the night before. I do like to branch out and try new things, and after seeing a few recipes for Poached Chicken and scoffing at it, I suddenly had a change of heart and decided to try it out.

What a terrible idea. My heartfelt apologies go out to Liz E. Bear and Dessert Chef C for that one. I think I need to research the concept a bit more thoroughly. Suffice to say that if anyone ever tells me that they like their chicken rubbery, I'll know exactly what to cook for them. I'm sure that it all comes down to technique, but it'll be a while before I give that one another crack.

Thankfully, I had jointed off the legs, thighs and wings and put them aside for another meal, and my spur-of-the-moment Lemon-Garlic Roast Chicken Pieces more than made up for the previous night's sad debacle. I dare say this one will make it up there with Slow-Cooked Paprika Chicken and Zesty Crumbed Chicken, except that its quicker and easier than both of them.

Lemon-Garlic Roast Chicken Portions

(Serves 4)

In a pestle or large bowl, grind up the following to make a rough paste:
Zest and Juice of 1/2 a Lemon;
6 Cloves of NZ Garlic;
2T Soy Sauce;
Freshly Ground Salt and Pepper.
Score the Chicken pieces (I had 2 Leg quarters and 2 wings - increase your quantities accordingly to serve more) and press the garlic mixture into the skin and meat. Place the dressed chicken in a bowl with some olive oil and sprinkle with semolina flour. Toss gently until coated.
Place in the oven at 220C, on a rack to allow the fat to drain, and cook for 1 hour, turning twice in that time. Baste if the chicken looks like it might be crying out. I used my oven's Pizza setting, which gently grills the chicken from above while the bottom element does most of the work from below.
Serve with roasted onions and kumera and steamed veges fresh from the local market.

Where's the Food?

I didn't get to post yesterday, mainly because our house is a shambles due to the ripping up of carpet and flooring in the kitchen and dining room. The process of putting the new stuff down has, for some reason, not happened as quickly as it came up. Why do you think that is?

We also watched a doco which deserves a mention, but I'll come back to that or I'll be here all night.

On the writing front, things are looking good. For a start, waiter has elucidated to me why it's so hard to write both a blog and a book at the same time. Here it is in a nutshell, for anyone who is trying to do just that and can't figure out why the two don't seem to go together:

Quite simply, blogging didn’t prepare me for the emotional ferocity of writing a book. It didn’t prepare me for the claustrophobia and fear, the exhausting concentration coupled with tedium, and the isolation compounded by occasionally crying like a little girl. (How embarrassing!) Psychologically speaking, writing a book is like getting into a knife fight with yourself in a phone booth.

As for my own projects, yesterday I officially passed the 3/4 mark in revising my novel. I'm presently up to the start of Chapter 35, on page 926 of 1229. I didn't even see the critical page 908 go by. But I'm seeing lots of scrawled pencil marks on the coming pages, so I might have a bit of slog ahead.

After 9 years of inception (detailed here), the first four proof copies of Urban Driftwood have been printed and shipped by Lulu.com. Very excited about that.

In other news, Freshly Ground has made an appearance on the Cooking Gadgets website, mainly by dint of me pushing them into it. Yip, those are really my hands.

Over at Culinate, it would seem I'm not the only one encouraging folk to really get the most out of a chicken.

On the Zero Waste topic, Barbara at winosandfoodies has some tips on not letting food go to waste, while Treehugger reports that a staggering 50% of all food produced worldwide is wasted, and that the same goes for water. Aside from water lost in irrigation systems and through leaking taps:

To produce the $48 billion in food that is wasted each year in the United States took ten trillion gallons of water.

That's a lot of water. It's hard to fathom how there can be a global food shortage if there's so much food and water being wasted across the planet. I've made this point before, and it's something we all need to take a bit more seriously.

And it seems that there are a lot of people out there taking this very seriously. As well as reducing, reusing and recycling, there is a growing trend (particularly in the States but I'd love to hear about any local efforts) towards the Urban Homstead. It seems that no matter how small a bit of land you have, be it rural or suburban or even urban, you can grow! The Dervaes in California are a shining example of just how successful growing in limited spaces can be.

The family harvests 6,000 pounds and more than 350 separate varieties of fruits, vegetables and edible flowers annually. They brew the biodiesel fuel that powers the family car. Solar panels on their roof reduce energy bills to as little as $12 a month. Goats, chickens, ducks and two rescued cats are in residence. Red wiggler worms turn the kitchen and garden waste into compost, which is then recycled back into the garden.

That's impressive.

So I really have no excuse not to have stuff on the grow out the back and down the front. Which brings me back to my original question: Where's the food?
Righto. It's Spring, its getting warmer, and this weekend, these bad boys (being sprouting potatoes) will be nestling down in a lovely pile of compost somewhere in the vicinity of the pumpkin seeds that I rather eagerly but probably quite prematurely planted way back in May. I still have faith that they'll sprout. Pumpkins seem to crop up everywhere I use compost whether I want them or not!

Stuff That

As my regular readers (and dinner guests) will have guessed by now, I love roast chicken and our new obsession, slow-cooked chicken. On that note, here's a big high five going out to Giffy and Morgue, who did a slow cooker high 5 for us all the way over in Edinburgh :) Can you get any further on the other side of the world?

But as a post topic goes, it gets pretty mundane to read yet another version of how to cook a chook. So for this recipe I kept the chicken itself really plain and simple - just salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil on the skin. What makes it interesting is the stuffing. It's been years since I tried making stuffing, and I seem to recall that back then it didn't come out very well at all. Accordingly, I never tried again.

Until now. Sometimes my food inspiration comes from using up whatever we happen to have left in the kitchen or what might actually be growing in the garden, and this is one of those times. So next time you've got a whole chicken to cook,I say to you: Stuff That!

Herbed Apple Stuffing

(serves 1 chicken)
In a mixing bowl, blitz up 2 slices of bread into crumbs. While stale bread is fine for this, for some reason stale breadcrumbs aren't. Finely dice half a small apple, preferably as sweet and juicy as you can find. I used Pacific Rose. Also, the sharper your knife, the less juice you'll lose in the chopping process (thanks to Gallimaufree for the tip). Add the apple and an onion similarly diced to the breadcrumbs. Finely chop 5 fresh sage leaves and the leaves from a sprig or two of oregano, and add these to the bowl. Grate in the zest of half a lemon, and season with freshly ground salt and pepper. Add an egg and mix thoroughly. If the mixture is too dense, add a little olive oil until it reaches a light but compact consistency. Force it all together with a rubber scraper and jam it into the chicken's cavity. Truss the legs with some cooking twine and cook however you prefer.
I slow-cooked ours in the crockpot on low for about 6 hours, but you should able to roast it just as easily by the usual methods.
When the chicken is done, joint and carve as per normal, then extract the stuffing and slice like bread. It should be moist but not soggy, and adds an explosion of flavour to the plate. Nom nom nom. Suddenly I want roast chicken...

The Ultimate Chick Fight

Roast vs Slow Cooker

In a completely arbitrary manner (my notion that this could be any sort of valid test was thoroughly disabused by Obi), I decided to put the Slow Cooker to the test against the good old Oven Roast.Well, I have to be honest. Chicken #1 was in the crockpot already when I learned that there were so many people coming to dinner that it would be a two-chicken night. So the second chicken had to be roasted, and the idea of the ultimate taste-test was a secondary consideration.

A lot of firewood was then moved. An awful lot of firewood. Did I mention that there was a lot of firewood to move? Again, I have Obi to thank for much of the firewood moving. But that has little to do with the Chick Fight.

After the firewood was moved (a lot of firewood), I put on Chicken #2. Both were cooked, along with a tray of roast veges, some steamed veges, some fried veges, and some boiled carrots, just to make sure we had all our vege bases covered.

The chickens were dished and I asked that everyone take a piece of each and tell me which they preferred and why. In other words, who would win the Ultimate Chick Fight? Not unanimously but overwhelmingly (in an MMP Democracy), it was Chicken #2 that was described as moister and tastier, and everyone trying it assumed that it was the Slow Cooked Chook. It wasn't. Roast Chook won the Ultimate Chick Fight.
But here's the thing. Because Chicken #1 was still a teensy bit frozen, I put it on at 10, on high for 2 hours, before turning it down to low for a further 6. Also, it was a size 12, and Chicken #2 was a size 16. Chicken #2 was also a different brand from Chicken #1. So its possible that Chicken #1 got a wee bit overdone, and since its not fair to compare apples with pears, the entire debate is, as Obi has said, a load of...

Or so any statistician will tell you.

In any case, Chicken #1 carved much easier than Chicken #2. Dinner was delicious, and both chickens were enjoyed equally. I'm not sure that we proved anything, except that after two bottles of wine, all chicken is good.

But here's the final word: As you'll see below, I took Giffy's advice and put a whole apple in Chicken #2, which I think is the reason it came out so moist.

Chicken #1: Slow Cooked Garlic Chicken

Dress the chicken with:
Freshly Ground Salt & Pepper
Olive Oil
Grated Garlic (about half a head)

Stuff the chicken with:
1 lemon, pierced all around
4-5 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed

Cook in the slow cooker on low for 6-7 hours.

Chicken #2: Apply Roast Chicken

Dress the chicken with:
Freshly Ground Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil
Gluten Free Flour

Stuff the chicken with:
1 apple, sliced into eighths

Roast at 200C for 2 hours (allowing for a tray of roast veges underneath for the last 1 1/2 hrs).

And for good measure, dress your tray of roast potatoes, kumera and onion with freshly ground salt and pepper, olive oil, dried mixed herbs, and gluten-free flour.