Living Greener: Everyone can make these simple dishes
Not everyone is a chef, but everyone can make simple dishes like these
EVERY Christmas we’re pressured to provide a dinner like the fantasy spectator ones on television, with all the mutant food items — Christmas pudding, mince pies — that we only eat once a year. However, most of us have jobs, errands and other obligations, and don’t actually have the spare time or budget to create such a display, and don’t need to. Yet many of us will be called upon to cook something when we have people over, perhaps on short notice. Not everyone is a chef, but everyone can make simple dishes like these
Turn the oven on a ‘roast’ setting — about 200 degrees centigrade — and let it heat up. While that’s heating, take the chicken and put it in a large metal oven dish with high sides. Peel eight of the garlic cloves, grate them finely, and mix them in a bowl with the butter, stock powder, salt, lemon zest, cayenne and sage. Mix this together and then rub it under the skin of the chicken – start lifting the skin along one end at the edge of the breast, and work your fingers under it until you can slide your whole hand between the skin and the meat. You’re not trying to remove the skin, just to coat the meat underneath with the garlic-butter mix. When you’ve used all you can, take the remaining mix and add a cup of olive oil.
Place the chicken in the centre of the dish — most images of roast chicken show it sitting breast up, but I put mine breast down to keep the breast meat tender. Pile the other 12 garlic cloves inside the chicken – make sure there’s no plastic inside! – and seal the chicken’s back end with half a lemon.
Then, chop up some root vegetables – potatoes, beetroot, whatever you have handy. Cut them into pieces about two to three centimetres across, and put them a few at a time into the bowl with the oil-butter-garlic mix, and knead them with your hands – you just want to coat their surface with the oil. Pile the root veg into the dish until the chicken is almost buried. Finally, lay a few strips of rashers over the whole thing, and put in the oven.
My bird took about an hour to cook, but check yours starting at about 45 minutes and every 10 or 15 minutes thereafter to make sure it’s done. To test it poke a knife into it, a few centimetres deep, between the wing and body – if any of the fluid that comes out has a red tinge to it, it needs to go back in.
Put 300g of cranberries, in a pan with 50g of brown sugar, 50 ml of white wine in a pan, and simmer it for five minutes, stirring until the sugar is dissolved and the cranberries start to soften and burst. You can try to mix it into a finer consistency, or serve as is.
Sautee one onion in a pan until yellow, finely grate some garlic and stir it in right before you turn off the stove. Cut up a butternut squash — just the flesh, not the skin or innards — into cubes about 1 cm across. Take about 100 ml of stock – or perhaps hot water mixed with stock powder – and mix in 10 ml each of finely-chopped herbs like oregano, sage, parsley and basil, along with 3 – 5 ml of spices like cumin and coriander, 5 ml of salt, and a pinch of cayenne. Add a few dashes of lemon juice.
Line a baking dish with butter, and put in the squash. Pour the mixture over it, cover it with foil and place in the oven. Bake at 200 degrees for about 60 minutes, or until the squash is … well, squashable. Finally, take it out of the oven and take the foil off. Grate some cheese — gruyere works well — and sprinkle it over the top of the squash. Put it back in, uncovered, for a few more minutes until the cheese is melted.
