Picture the scene. It's 4pm Sunday evening. The fear of work is seeping through the air of your living room. Spiritually, you, and anyone you love are a spacemen, drifting without a tether, further and further away from the world.
Here is my solution, in two meals from one supermarket shop. It's a roast dinner, amped up to bring you back to earth.
Ingredients:
1 Chicken, 1600g. The best you can get at 5pm on a Sunday. Like, you would probably buy a better chicken at a farmers market on a Saturday morning, but this is a dinner of healing and comfort, not inadequacy. Buy a chicken, feel good about it.
Garlic, you'll need a lot - at least a whole head.
Fresh Thyme - I grow and kill those supermarket fresh herb plants. This is because I want to be the sort of person who grows fresh herbs. Instead, I am an architect of herbal genocide.
A lemon - no notes, just buy a lemon. Lemon and thyme and garlic is probably an ancient remedy for unease and depression.
Two sticks of Celery
A carrot
a couple of small onions.
Salt
Pepper
Olive Oil
Potatoes. Take as many as you think you should eat, multiply by the number of people and add more.
Some Goosefat - it keeps forever, buy a jar, use it when you make roasts, ignore it the rest of the time. If you ever make duck, keep the fat in a clean jar and use that here. If you don't want to do this, use olive oil. Remember, this is a dinner for comfort.
Peas, frozen. (I'm not going to mention these again, just do them per the bag, boil them up and throw them on a plate. If you're really feeling bereft, mid-boil, strain the water out of the pan, then throw a half-teaspoon full of butter back in with the peas.)
Now, you're back from the shops. You should be ready to go. Take a minute, make some tea. If you're sensible, you bought some sort of fizzy water, or a coke, or something cool and non-alcoholic while you were in the shop. Drink that, and think about the task ahead of you. This will be all right. It's a comforting job. People have done this for millions of years. Look at your loved ones. They are, much like you, in a state of chaos.
Preheat the oven to 200. You've begun!
Potatoes
1) Peel the potatoes. That's the worst part, and now it's done.
2) Bin the peels, cut the potatoes in half, and chuck them in a microwave-safe bowl, with a half cup of water in the bottom, cover and nuke them for 5 minutes.
3) Heat the goosefat in a roasting tray.
4) When the potatoes are nuked, take them out of the bowl, let them steam for a moment, then put them into the roasting tray. Shake them around, to cover them in the oil - then, bam, back in the oven.
Chicken
1) Roughly chop your carrot, celery and onion. You're not going for fancy, just a pile of cubed vegetables. Make the veg into a pile in the roasting tray. You'll put the chicken on top of this, presently.
2) Cut your lemon in half - around the equator. Stab one half of the lemon with the tip of a knife. Over and over again. Smell it. Zest the other (non stabbed) half. You might go ahead, and chop that into bits, and throw it into the bottom of the roasting tray. Why waste anything?
3) Chop, or press, or mush, or grate your garlic. I have a grater, use what you want. Throw that in a bowl, with a load of salt, a good chunk of thyme leaves, the lemon zest and some pepper. Pour in some olive oil, and stir it to make a paste of deliciousness.
4) Rub the paste all over the chicken. Jam a lemon up its arse, jam some of the thyme sprigs up there while you're at it. Look at it, all tied up, covered in oil with a lemon up its hoop. More comforting than it should be, right?
5) Put the kinky chicken on the pile of veg, and put it in the oven.
6) Here's how I do it, but lots of people do it differently. 20-25 mins at 200, then down to 160 for an hour. The chicken on one shelf, the potatoes on the shelf below.
7) Once the chicken is done, take it out. Take it out of the roasting tin, cover it with foil, and it let it sit. I bet it smells amazing.
Finishing up
1) Jam the temperature way, way up on the potatoes. They will be creamy and delicious in the middle. Going in at a high temperature now will just add a final colour and crisp to the outside.
2) After ten, fifteen minutes, start to carve the chicken. This is easy to fuck up, but here's what you're looking for at the end:
- 2 wings
- 2 drumsticks
- 2 Thigh joints
- 2 large breast pieces (you can half these)
You'll need a really sharp knife. To start, cut the wings off, then the legs (at the hip joint). Separate the drumsticks and the thighs (the knee). Here's the hard part. Run your knife up the spine. Then cut the breasts off. Go as deep as you can, before you hit bone.
3) Take your potatoes, peas, and chicken. Put them on a plate, and give them to people you love. You'll start to feel human. This is home. You are alive. Everything is ok.
Postscript.
Do this right, and you'll be left with a chicken carcass. That chicken died so you could eat it. You owe it to the chicken to eat every single bit of it. Even if it was a weird Tesco battery chicken.
Here's what you do:
Get your biggest pot.
Take your chicken carcass, and that vegetable mountain that you had, and any juice lying around the bottom of the roasting tray, and throw them in the pot.
Grab some fresh herbs, throw them in the pot. Cut up an onion, throw that in there too. Salt and pepper. Any garlic you have around, give it a wallop with the side of a knife and throw it in. A glass of white wine, if you have a bottle open, will do nicely - don't open one especially though.
Fill the pot with water, stick it on a low heat until you're about to go to bed. Then strain it. Voila, chicken stock.
Tomorrow evening, saute an onion and a grated carrot, pour in the chicken stock, throw in some of the leftover chicken and a handful of noodles. Simmer the lot of it until the noodles are soft. That'll cure you of the worst of a Monday.
