Lemon Roast Chicken

Ah, the roast.

It's one of those dishes that a lot of us grow up with, and then tend to end up taking for granted and ignoring once we start cooking for ourselves. Which is kinda dumb, as roasting a piece of meat - be it bird, beef or whatever - introduces a whole mess of flavours you otherwise can't replicate, as well as whole lot of cooking methods to explore.

And when it comes to roasting a lovely free-range organic chook, the thing that's really going to set the stage for the food itself is the choice of stuffing. Always important in terms of flavour, it's also very important in the technical sense. A good stuffing both stops the bird from drying out during the cooking process, and shapes it as well, making for much easier serving and slicing.

Plus, if you're a highline glutton like me... it tastes really, really good.

Lemon Roast Chicken

This is essentially Stephanie Alexander's excellent roast chicken recipe, though some small changes of my own have crept into it over the years. And I'm also a much lazier cook than her, so essentially cheat on some of the steps.

But it's still tasty!

ingredients

One realistically scaled organic chicken (so much smaller and tastier than the hormone monsters you normally get in supermarkets)

One lemon

Kalamata olives

Goose fat

Salt & pepper

See? It's such a simple recipe you don't even need to see a photograph! Also, this was meant to be a meal that my partner was cooking, since I was stupidly tired, but I did my usual trick of performing a drive-by take-over of the kitchen, and we worked on this together.

So once your partner realises what's happened and goes off to play World of Warcraft in between chopping vegies and brushing stuff with tasty, tasty fat, you need to stuff the bird. This sounds rude, and feels even ruder - you are essentially shoving stuff in the hollowed out bottom of a dead animal. But it's for a noble purpose.

In this case, we're using a lemon, cut into quarters. Take one quarter and rub the bird down vigourously with the fleshy side, then get stuffing. You want to place the quarters so that the rind is innermost to the body cavity - this insures that the juice of the lemon will cook through the chicken as it roasts. Add the olives as well, sliced up roughly. This adds a wonderful savouriness to the chicken, and let me tell you - they also taste great as you graze over the carcass after the meal!

Then, all you need to do is taking a basting brush, and brush the bird with the goose fat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and you're ready to roast! This is where I get lazy; if you're really serious about roasting, you should turn the bird once every ten to fifteen minutes from side to side, top to bottom, so that it ends right way up for the final bit of cooking. I just left it on the roasting tray.

You can also add whatever veg options you want. In our case, we chopped up some kipfler and congo potatoes, added a couple of small onions, and sliced the top off a head of garlic, and surrounded the bird with it all. All the veg also got a liberal splash of fat. Finally, while the bird cooled, we steamed some broccoli.

So, after about 50 minutes of cooking you should end up with this:

Which when carved and plated should end up like this (and also end up with your mouth watering):

The real beauty of this method is that you don't need to baste the bird during cooking at all, making it a really easy dish to make even after getting home from work. The chicken's flesh is tender and lemon flavoured, with just a hint of saltiness from the olives. The skin is also just about perfect - the goose fat (trust me, a whole entry is coming on goose fat soon!) crisps the skin beautifully, and the lemon rub goes even further toward making the skin the most indulgent part of the meal.

Except maybe for those olives... *drools*

Roast beef on a bed of bok-choy, with kipflers, peas and tomato

I'm not really one for formal recipes most of the time. I like to look at what's in the fridge or in the pantry and work from there; plus, I like the challenge of making something that looks and tastes good from relatively first principles.

Of course, sometimes this doesn't quite work out - some things that sound great in your head don't quite work on the plate (or palette). Similarly, it can be really easy to overdo a dish or the amount of ingredients when you start thinking that you should start using a certain ingredient (like when it's been sitting there for a while and you want to use it before it collapses under its own entropic field).

My roast beef attempt last night was pretty much a success, but also - I think - one ingredient too far...

Roast beef on a bed of bok-choy, with kipflers, peas and tomato

Pretty much everything here is care of the food co-op, including the excellent slab of beef. In fact, this dish is pretty much inspired by a fellow Feedbagger (our delightful name for our co-op), who used a similar combination a few nights ago to very good effect. She went for a sweet sauce, though, while I was feeling like something a bit more savoury.

ingredients

Slab (it's a metric measurement) of grass fed sirloin

Three Kipfler potatoes

Goose fat

Dijon mustard

Two bunches of bok-choy

Peas

Cherry roma tomatoes

Coriander

Sea salt

Pre heat the oven to around 200 degrees celsius, or whatever's good for roasting - so many inner city ovens in rental houses are so wildly different in their heating that real measurement's a quaint whimsy rather than a hard rule. Unless you're clever and have an oven thermometer.

I'm not that clever.

While the oven's warming up, work on the slab and the 'taters. Arrange them on the baking tray, with the meat resting on a raised grill or similar, for even roasting. Use a basting brush to coat the meat and veg with a liberal coating of goose fat (ah, goose fat... I'll wax lyrical about you in a later post!), then brush on a good coat of dijon mustard to the upper surface of the beef. Sprinkle it all with some salt and pepper, and whack in the oven.

A piece of meat that size should take about a half hour to 45 minutes to cook to medium rare, and you'll also want to give it some time to rest once you remove it from the oven, so now's a good time to refill that glass of wine and check Facebook. Alternatively, it's a good chance to consider why you need to rest meat.

When you apply heat to steak or large fillets like this one, it contracts. It's a muscle, after all, and as the muscle squeezes itself, it squeezes all the tasty juices into the center of the cut. You can perfectly cook a steak, but if you serve it straight off the pan it'll be less than stellar. One cut will see all those juices flooding the plate, and the meat's colour will be quite uneven.

As a rule of thumb, you should rest meat cooked in a pan for as long as you cooked it. With a roast, like this, something like ten minutes will suffice for those juices to have suffused the entire cut. It'll be more tender, tastier, and look a lot better.

So, having pondered the importance of rest, you can now prep the rest of the meal.

Remove the bok-choy leaves from their stalk, wash, and place in a steamer (or a collander, if you're kind of half-arsed about having the right tools). Set a pot of salted water boiling, and then switch off your brain while you're shelling peas. Once you've got a good handful, set aside, and chop up some baby romas quite finely, and add some similarly chopped coriander.

You can plate the tomato right away, making a circle around the edge of the plate. Check the meat, and either guess it's done or be fancy and stick it with a thermometer: 60 degrees in the center means medium rare - the only way to eat good meat. Rest the meat in foil or in a warmed bowl, leave the potatoes in the turned off oven to stay warm, and get to steaming your bok-choy.

You want the bok-choy just wilting, when the leaves no longer look dry and unappetising. Create a mound of bok-choy in the center of the plate, then add the peas to the boiling water you've just used for steaming. Get the potatoes out, chop them into halves or thirds, and arrange around the bok-choy. Uncover the meat, slice thickly, and carefully place the slices on the bok-choy, before sprinkling some sea salt over the tomatoes and potato. Finally, spoon the peas over the meat, letting them fall where they may.

Serve to a salivating partner, and ponder your greatness.

Now, this was quite good if I do say so myself, but I regret including the potatoes. The kipflers are great, and tasted wonderful, but they really didn't add anything to the dish, and I think they actually made it a touch too much - and I'm not pleased with their aesthetic impact, either. I think this would have looked much more appetising without them, leaving the bold colours of the greens, the meat, and the tomato to speak for themselves.

That said, my partner devoured it no time, with a slight look of possibly wanting a bit more. So who am I to judge?

And the meat was perfect. Annoyingly, it was cut in such a way that a seam of connective tissue ran right down the center, but otherwise it was tender and juicy, and the mustard crust was a simply and very tasty addition that did away with the need for a sauce to add interest. The tomatoes with sea salt were fresh and tasty, and the steamed but still crunchy bok-choy complemented the meat superbly.

Done hard, played strong.