The Ultimate Roast Chicken

I've admitted to my food magazine problem before on this blog. One of those magazines is Good Food, which always has the most to read and often has some seriously good recipes tucked inside. In terms of presentation, Good Food is less glamourous than Olive, but it has more substance; it feels more experienced too, less prone to the superficial and more seasoned, somehow. Or perhaps that's just me. Anyway... one of the features I enjoyed in Good Food when it was running was Angela Nilsen's Ultimate regular feature, where she took a recipe and tried endless variations, seeking worthy expert advice, until coming up with the version she and tasters found best. Being an occasional borderline perfectionist myself (but lacking the culinary expertise to back this up), I liked Angela's articles. I was therefore only too pleased to splash out on her new book, The Ultimate Recipe Book, published by Good Food. In this book, Angela tackles fifty well-known recipes and works on them until finding the definitive version of, say, Thai green curry, or lemon meringue pie, or gooey chocolate cake. I have a bit of a quibble with the idea of an 'ultimate' recipe - mainly because I don't fundamentally believe in perfection; I believe in keeping on trying with the aim to be perfect but with no hope/expectation of getting there. That sounds too negative - what I mean by this is something altogether more positive: this recipe is fantastic, say, but I can (possibly) look forward to even better versions in the future. Recipes should be start-points, not endings. That said, it's always enticing to see how someone perfected a dish and to try it, given that there is no lack of mediocrity out there.

Entirely predictably, I started with the ultimate roast chicken recipe. Most people know by know about turning the bird over during cooking; Angela's recipe does that. For me, the revelation of this recipe lay in the suggestion for gravy: roast wedges of red onion in with the chicken for the last 45 minutes or so of cooking; when you remove the chicken, add creme fraiche to the red onion to make a tasty gravy. The gravy can be thinned down with chicken stock if you wish. I didn't thin my gravy down, but it certainly wouldn't have hurt to do so. The gravy was delicious, though - really tasty and simple, and definitely one to make again, even if I wouldn't necessarily see it as the ultimate gravy recipe. (My nana makes that, and I'm not particularly sure how come hers is so different from everyone else's. The Yorkshire blood, maybe.)

So. Easter is almost here and the weather shifted disconcertingly quickly from icy this morning to radiant this afternoon. I was shivering at 7.30 as I made my way from the front door to the car, huddled inside my winter coat; by lunchtime I was carrying my coat over an arm and office workers were sitting around on benches eating M and S sandwiches. I can't pretend to suffer from SAD, not really, but I do know that the sunshine makes a difference. I've been filling in bureaucratic forms all day, the sort that ask the same questions in different words, repeatedly, and that when you try to print them, exceed the margins of the printable page. I can't even begin to describe the tedium, frustration and irritation that these forms induce in me, so I won't bother. Instead I should confess that on my mini lunchtime wander in the sunshine I somehow found myself buying Marcus Wareing's new book (blame frustration with the forms...) about which more, soon, no doubt.