Jubilee Extravaganza Day 4 - English Roast

After our lovely curry the night before, we finally reached the end of the Jubilee Weekend and I celebrated by randomly cooking a dinner for my friends!

Sunday Roast - There's not much for me to say on this weekly English dish.  Although, as someone who likes to cook, improvise recipes and present visually pleasing and tasty meals, I've always got to put my own twist on things!

As I was trying to do only British themed activities this weekend, my roast (which is basically a lightweight Thanksgiving dinner to my American readers) couldn't include my staples of mac n' cheese, some form of green veg in pork and vinegar and cornbread. Tragic, I know.

I did make a roast chicken that was meant for 2-3 but fed 5 in the end!

Orange and Herb Roasted Chicken

Orange and Herb Roasted Chicken

I'm not very good at recipes but here goes

• 1 whole chicken
• 1 orange cut into quarters
• 1 onion cut into quarters
• 1 sliced clove of garlic
• fresh thyme, rosemary and sage
• 2 tablespoons of softened butter
• salt and pepper
• 1 tablespoon of oil (I think I use EVOO)
• Dried mixed/italian herbs if you want

Pre-heat oven to 210ºC. Run the chicken under cold water, plucking any extra bits that are still on it and rinsing out the cavity completely. If there are any necks or giblet type thingies get rid of that. If you know how to make gravy with it, go for it but I normally have these already removed.

Place chicken on its back on a clean surface or even in the pan you'll be cooking this in.  At this point, I start thinking of the chicken as a little person that's getting a massage and going in the sauna for a bit. (Don't judge me, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen by myself - gotta stay entertained!)

In a small bowl mix the butter, salt, pepper and dried herbs (if you're using them) together. With the cavity facing you, just at the top you should be able to lift up a bit of the skin and fit most of your hand underneath the skin over the breast. (If you're squeamish about touching meat, imagining this as a massage helps!) The slit between the skin should go down to the legs as well. Keep using the butter mix and massaging the chicken under and over the skin, front and back, until you're happy with the seasoning. This butter mix will also help the chicken have nice and crispy skin.

Transfer the chicken to the pan if it's not already there and top with more salt, pepper and dried herbs if you wish.

Take one orange quarter and squeeze over the chicken. Put one quarter inside the chicken, another quarter behind a wing, and the last quarter behind a leg diagonal from the orange wing.

Take one onion quarter and put inside the chicken, use the other 3 to put around the chicken behind the wing and leg with no orange and peel the last quarter to sprinkle around the chicken.

Put several slices of the garlic inside the chicken and sprinkle the rest around him er her er it. :) See, it becomes my little friend before I send it off to the nice warm sauna. 

Decorate it with the fresh herbs as you wish. I normally tuck rosemary sprigs on its legs, and put a mix of the herbs inside the chicken.  Finally prop the wings behind its neck like it's lying back and kicking up its legs to relax (this helps the wing tips not to burn). People wrap up the legs with poultry string for the same reason, but I never have a problem with them burning. 

Drizzle a bit of oil at the bottom of the pan.  Set in the oven, on the middle rack, for however long the pack tells you since it depends on the size. I think this bird took about 30 - 45 minutes but you want it to look like the second picture up there (obvs). If you see it turning brown too fast, turn down the heat. If by 30 minutes it's not brown enough, turn it up to 220ºC for the last 10 minutes or so and it should be good. 

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I also had my first stab at Yorkshire Puddings, which must've been created when someone didn't know what to do with their excessively soupy bread mixture. I found this recipe online, followed it to.a.T. and created these bad boys as my cornbread replacement!

Best Yorkshire pudding recipe evar

Gorgeous yorkshire puds on the first try!

I'm stil amazed by how they work, how do they grow like that?!!? Apparently the trick is heating the pan to cooking temp with vegetable oil before adding the batter. The more oil, the more they rise. The hotter the pan, the better they rise.  Give it a try!

Here's the final dinner feast!

Orange and Herb Roasted Chicken, steamed broccoli, roasted carrots and potatoes, Yorkshire Pudding, gravy

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And finally, I may have broken my 'no American' things rule a bit with dessert. Well technically it's Sicilian, but who cares - it's my beloved Cassata Cake that I blogged about over a year ago.  I haven't made it since moving to England, and to be honest it's a bitch of a cake to make. It takes up your life, but it is WELL worth it once it's done. I normally try to save it as a summer weather cake as it's heavy in fruit and cream ingredients, but, well, like I said I haven't made it since moving to England. (Will it EVER be summer here!?)

I wanted to make a Jubilee themed cake so here are the results.

Cassata Cake

Click here for the recipe: http://arielcking.blogspot.com/2011/03/cassata-cake.html

This was my first time making everything, even the cake from scratch (I normally use box cake)! Very pleased with the results!

Building a Cassata Cake 

So that's that for my English Roast and Jubilee Weekend.

If you have any questions, have tried these recipes before, or have similar dishes to share let me know in the comments!

Chicken Soup for the Hay Fever pt 2

A year ago, I blogged a recipe for making chicken soup whilst sick.  A year later and London's trying to kill me again. I've tried my best to push through it, but sometimes all you need is a lot of drugs and about 3 days of straight sleep. Because of this I haven't been able to go out in London and find new gems to blog about this week.

I did, however, make a roast earlier in the week and used that to make another chicken soup dish.  If you have a whole chicken on hand, you can use so many of the bits that you wouldn't eat for added flavouring in the stock.  (Don't be afraid of skin, gristle and bone!) This time, I made white rice and boiled it with spinach, mushrooms and a chicken stock cube in the water. SO good! And it's lasted me all week.

So next week I should be back to blogging about London but until then, drink Benadryl, pound the lemsips and eat some chicken soup.

Chicken vegetable soup with spinach and mushroom rice

Asian Persuasion

Hands down, next to all the fantastic people I've met through life and travel, meeting their cuisine is the next best part.  Over the past year, I shared a kitchen with 2 Japanese, 2 Cubans, 1 Chinese, 1 Greek and 1 Ukrainian - their cooking styles will stay with me for years to come.  I like to take bits and pieces of different recipes that I like and put them in one dish as I did tonight.  This dish was practically done in a hobo style, that is, I just took random things I had and threw it together - but some of the greatest meals started that way, no?


One of my all time favourite dishes is chicken adobo, a Filipino dish that was cooked for me while I was living in Australia.  I wasn't going to go all out on the adobo, but I still had those drumsticks from before.  I really have a thing for vinegar for some reason, but that's one of the most familiar flavours/smells of this dish.  So I whipped out my white vinegar, and soy sauce, turned a frying pan on high heat with some vegetable oil and threw in the drumsticks.  A bit of salt and pepper, naturally, for taste.  When the drumsticks were nearly done I poured out the excess oil and covered them in the vinegar and put it back on the heat.  But wait, I need rice! 


Here are a few cool tips learned from my former kitchen mates: Put extra cooked rice in the freezer, and when you need it later, use it.  More importantly, if you're making a dish that requires fried rice old rice is better than freshly cooked rice!  So, when I ordered a Chinese takeout earlier last week and I didn't finish my white rice, I popped that in the freezer.  Zapped that in the microwave today for about 2 minutes and then added it to my vinegar chicken fry-up situation.  Now I've got fried rice, which I added about 2 or 3 tablespoons of soy sauce in the pan to get those fried rice characteristics.


One thing that the English grocery stores do well is help with pre-selected, single-serving veggies.  I feel a bit bad buying a bag of mixed vegetables when I could just as easily buy each of the ingredients and mix it together myself, for probably cheaper (if you think in bulk).  But in reality, a lot of people do house/flat shares here - I don't have all the space in the world in my fridge.  So I picked up a bag of what was considered "Mushroom stir-fry vegetables" including cabbage, carrots, mung beans, red onions and mushrooms and threw that in to the pan as well.  


Semi-chicken adobo, fried rice and mushroom stir-fry vegetables in the pan and sizzling away.  To me, no dish is complete without garlic.  Literally, I could eat a whole clove, I love garlic that much.  I didn't this time, I finely chopped some garlic and sat it to the side.  One root that has grown on me is ginger, which one of my housemates used a lot for her dishes.  To be honest, ginger practically made this dish, and almost gave it a Thai taste with the tangy-ness from the vinegar. I chopped it, zested it, diced it - there was a lot of 'it' in there.  Also I had some spring onions left over from many many dishes ago (I made a mexican layered chili dip - which unfortunately I haven't documented on here as of yet) and I chopped those and added it to the mix. 


Last but not least - an egg.  In my opinion any asian dish is made awesome-er when an egg is involved. I made an open spot on the pan, cracked an egg there, and scrambled it in the same spot before stirring it into the other ingredients.


At the end I threw in a quick dash of this "Chinese 5 spice" BS that I've never heard of before.  My current housemates had some in the drawer, but I have a bit of a hate for store-bought and packaged spices that are a mix of spices that you can put together yourself. Italian seasoning, Emeril's Essence, even All-spice, I have all those things lying around anyhow, I'm not gonna buy a specific container that you so conveniently mixed for me! Argh!  Anyhow, this 5 spice really overpowers with the anise, so I didn't want much of it - but if you like liquorice scents, add more.


So there we go, left over rice, left over onions, some drumsticks, garlic, ginger, and pre-packaged stir-fry veggies.  Quick cook, cost about a fiver, and delicious.

Soul Food a la Europe

I think the biggest qualm I've had since moving to London, is that I miss American food.  I miss the taste, I miss the smell, I miss the convenience, but most of all I think I miss the diversity.  I'm sure some Brits could argue that the UK is a hub of diverse food, but in my opinion 15 curry shops and twice as many kebab stands isn't my idea of diverse.  It breaks my heart when I go to the shop, ready to make some sweet Mexican food and the only "Mexican" flavours they have come from Old El Paso (Oh how I miss the days of Goya) and to be quite frank, when asked if I want peppers on my burrito I want to punch someone in the face. If I wanted a fajita I would've asked for one damnit - get those peppers outta here!  Recently I've been craving what I consider to be the tastiest food ever - soul food.


To be honest, this post is a bit of a disgrace to soul food, as what I actually made is far too healthy to be listed in this category.  Nonetheless I was determined to get some form of collard greens, cornbread, fried chicken and/or pork in my belly.  Being in London, I was a bit limited, so I settled for a bag of mixed veggies, some drumsticks and I made cornbread...sorta.


I'm quite used to seeing the happy Quaker guy on my box of corn meal so I'm weary of anything outside of that.  I had to make due with whatever was eventually found at the shop, but it seemed to be ground a lot finer than the typical corn meal.  I used the standard recipe sans the Pam cooking spray since I haven't seen any of that here either.  Also I forgot to pay attention to the recipe whilst shopping and didn't have any milk!!! Luckily I made some buttermilk pancakes the day before and had leftover buttermilk and yogurt.  I took the last of my buttermilk (about an ounce) and filled a measuring cup to about 3/4 with that and the yogurt.  Poured that in to the cornbread recipe and added about 1 cup of water and had my milk substitute! It actually worked quite well!!


For the chicken, I decided to bake it rather than fry.  I love baking chicken because you don't have to add anything to it for it to taste great. EVOO, salt, pepper, high heat, 20 mins, done. The second day I made this I added rosemary and diced potatoes and had a mini English roast.  I made gravy the English way as well.  Granules + boiling water. I've never seen anything like that before. I still like the natural way (juices from the meat your cooking + flour + stock etc) but this was quick and worked just fine.  And of course, I can't do just what a recipe says, so I added some sauteed mushrooms and onions to the mix. Good choice!


The veg was a pre-selected assortment from Sainsbury's; broccoli, carrots and green beans and 'courgette' (aka zucchini).  I couldn't find any greens that I trusted to taste the way I wanted.  But let me tell you, when mom makes baked mac n cheese, collard greens with vinegar and ham hock, and cornbread I mix it all together it put it directly in my face. Words can not describe the deliciousness that comes from these dishes, but I shall try.  Everyone loves butter, everyone loves cheese, and how can you not like pork?! If you like them all, your mouth will be happy having them all at once.  But I digress, I didn't make this, I just steamed the veg and went for the healthiest half-assed 'soul food' meal I've ever made.  Someone's rolling in their grave right now.