BBQ Chicken.

I love barbecue.  We have a gas BBQ outside our kitchen door so I cook on there most nights.  We don't have great weather here so we don't always eat outside but I do cook there if it isn't raining too heavily.

I tried a John Torode recipe from Good Food June 2011.  His recipe was for Chicken with Lemons, Sumac and Spiced Yogurt.  I couldn't find any sumac so I used smoked paprika in its place and made a lovely roast chicken on the barbie.

The flesh of the chicken was really tasty, mainly with a garlicky lemony taste and the skin looked beautiful with the golden paprika.  I LOVE crispy chicken skin - all that wonderful flavour and so salty.  I just served it with boiled tatties and some spinach.

And, of course, I used the scrappy bits of meat from the carcass and the stock to make a chicken noodle soup the next day.  Anything with noodles always goes down extremely well with the kids!  And we had a lunch with the chicken legs too.  So, although I balk at the cost of a free range chicken these days, it actually works out as very good value.  Three meals for the family, wonderfully tasty and healthy too. 

Recipe - Chicken With Lemons, Smoked Paprika and Spiced Yogurt (adapted ffrom BBC Good Food June 2011).

Serves 4.

Ingredients - 

1 large free-range chicken

3 lemons, cut into eighths

handful of black, pitted olives

3 small shallots, peeled but left whole

8 garlic cloves, peeled and squashed

2 tbsp smoked paprika

1 tbsp vegetable oil

For the spiced yogurt - 

1 tsp each ground coriander and cumin

1/2 tsp ground turmeric 

1/2 tsp chilli powder

500g pot natural yogurt

1 tsp Harissa paste

1 bunch spring onions, sliced

Method - 

1. Heat gas BBQ (or oven to 200C/180 fan/GM6.  In a bowl mix the lemons, olives, shallots and garlic with half the paprika and some salt.  Scrunch them all together and add 1 tbsp of water.  Open the bird up and pour the mix into the cavity.

2. Take the oil and the rest of the paprika and rub onto the chicken, massaging it into every part possible.  Roast for 1 and 1/2 hours or until cooked through and the juices run clear when a skewer is inserted into the thickest part of the leg.

3. While the chicken is cooking, mix all the ingredients for the spiced yogurt with some salt.  Carve the chicken and serve topped with a dollop of the yogurt.

Recipe - My Chicken Noodle Soup.

Pick all the scraps of chicken from the roasted carcass and set aside then use the carcass, some onions and carrots to make a lovely stock.  Put the stock into a clean pan then throw in the scraps of chicken, some noodles, some sliced pak choi, some sliced mushrooms, sliced spring onions and anything else you fancy.  Boil for a few minutes then eat.  Comfort food but light and healthy. 

Sticky Chicken With Plums.

My younger boy and I found we had some time to kill while waiting for the puncture in my tyre to be repaired so we each got a magazine.  He got a 'Show Me Show Me' one and I picked up a copy of December's Delicious.  So, all our cooking this week has been from this magazine.

Started off with this one because everything is cooked in the one roasting tin and it is nice and easy with little in the way of preparation time.  

Recipe - 

Ingredients - 

2 tbsp runny honey

3 tbsp wholegrain mustard

1 whole large free-range chicken jointed into 8 pieces (I just used a pack of thighs and drumsticks)

2 red onions

6 plums, halved and stoned

1  tbsp olive oil

small bunch fresh thyme, leaves stripped

15g unsalted butter

Method - 

1. Preheat the oven to 200C/fan 180C/GM 6.

2. Mix the honey and mustard together in a small bowl, then brush all over the pieces of chicken.  Season.

3. Mix the onion wedges and plum halves together in a roasting tin, with the olive oil, fresh thyme leaves and some seasoning.  Dot over the butter and top with the chicken pieces (skin-side up).

4. Roast in the oven for 35-40 minutes until the chicken is cooked through, sticky and golden.  Serve with creamy mash.  (I served mine with roasted potato wedges because the oven was on anyway).

Well this was so very quick and simple to make and with minimal washing up.  I enjoyed it - I like most things with fruit in but Steve wasn't so keen on the plums.  Rufie ate up all the plums and potatoes but only a little of the chicken whereas Adam LOVES nothing more than chewing chicken off a bone so he got through all his chicken, all Rufie's and asked for more.  Didn't eat his plums, though!  Pah, kids!

Little Kitchen.

Some lovely food again this weekend.

Steve has made more wholemeal bread.  Not as good looking this time but just as tasty.  He got up early on Saturday morning to bake it so we had it warm from the oven with melting butter with our morning coffee. Mmmmm.

Rufus and I had been to the library last week and I had managed to pick up a few new cook books to have a look at.  We used the first one today.  It is called Little Kitchen by Sabrina Parrini. It is Australian and looks like it was only published in 2009 so quite new.  It is a lovely book especially for cooking with children.  Laid out very well with photographs of a completed version of every single recipe as well as other fun or stylish photos. 

I see they have a website and sell baking equipment in Australia -  Little Kitchen

So, for lunch today, we decided to go for the Crunchy Chicken Fingers.  We had some Ruskoline in the cupboard so we used that instead of making our own breadcrumbs and we just served them with peas.

Adam did most of this himself and I was impressed at what a neat job he made of it.  He is getting really good at cracking eggs into a bowl and there was no shell in the egg at all.  I think I usually underestimate what a 3 year old can actually achieve.

Because it's the tattie holidays, Adam will not have pre-school for the next two weeks so this will give us more time to do loads of cooking and baking.  There are a few recipes in this book that we have our eye on - can't wait to get cracking!