Festive Roast Chicken with sage stuffing, roast potatoes and sautéed green beans

Monday night was always a night for roasts in our household. Being a family that placed a lot of store by food, I think it came from the school of thought that if you started the week off with a good , sturdy roast, then you were more or less set, what ever events would unfold themselves later on in the week.

This Monday proved to be rather a different reason than the fact that the frivolities of the weekend had  passed and that we were now firmly ensconced in the working week. Truth be told there seems to be very little work to do and since it is the festive season, but more so this Monday was a day to celebrate because my sister had arrived from Oz and one of my best friends had arrived from London.

So there we are, when we celebrate, we eat and this Monday called for more than just an ordinary roast chicken, but a festive one.

A note on roast chicken: It is the easiest thing in the world to cook. Once it is in the oven, your work is done. 

One of the flavours that rings true of festivities and the Christmas season has to be a sage stuffing. I love sage, I have to say and have been planning a blog on the herb for some time – oh, how evert-day life gets in the way! -– because it can be used in so many dishes to impart its somewhat fresh but earthy flavour. And where better to start than in a sage stuffing?

So for the stuffing:

2 thick slices of seed bread.

1 celery stalk

¼ onion

2 rahsers of bacon

1 T lemon zest

1 T dried sage

salt and pepper

This is easy, easy easy:

Make breadcrumbs out of the two slices of bread in a blender and pour them into a bowl

Zap up the onion and celery and add that to the breadcrumbs. Do the same with the bacon.

Season with salt and pepper and add the sage and lemon zest. Mix the whole lot up and then put ¾ of the stuffing into the cavity of the chicken and then place the last quarter carefully under the skin that covers the chicken breasts. Be careful not to break the skin as you pack the stuffing. Putting the stuffing here not only creates additional basting for the white meat that can dry out, it also provides extra flavouring.

Place the bird in a roasting dish. Roughly chop up the rest of the onion and place around the chicken. Cook at 180 degrees for about ½ hour.

For the rest: As many carrots and potatoes as you need

In the mean-time, peel as many potatoes that you may need and then proportionately same amount of carrots. After the ½ hour, throw these into the same baking pan, adding a few glugs of olive oil and a generous grinding of salt and black pepper and some sprigs of rosemary. Return to the oven and allow to cook for another hour at 180 degrees.

For the beans:

1 pkt green beans

1 truss vine baby tomatoes

5 T sunflower seeds or flaked almonds

1 t mustard seeds

2 T butter

1 T olive oil

In a pan, toast the sunflower and mustard seeds. Add the tomatoes, and then the butter and the olive oil.  Add the beans and toss. Season with salt and pepper and toss again. Remove from the heat.

To check that the chicken is cooked make a small incision between the thigh and the body and if the juices run clear then the chicken is done.

Lay the beans on a platter. Then put the chicken in the center and surround with the veggies that you've just roasted.

I always make the gravy in the roasting pan that I made the chicken and the veg in. For one thing there are all the spices and the drippings and the flavour of those now wonderfully caramalised onions!

Carve the chicken and voilá!

Oh, a note on the wine:  we started on a nice bottle of bubbly with a little bit of finger food. There must be Mediterranean blood in me because we ended up eating at 9:30 pm - but that is no matter because we were chatting and there were hors d'ouvres. We opened a bottle of merlot to have with the dish and it went down extremely well even though we were eating white meat. Sage is quite a strong flavour and so it compliments reds quite well.  You don't always have to follow the white wine / white meat rule!

Flaked Salmon with green beans and faux hollandaise sauce

It is an odd phenomenon that in exciting, but slightly stressful situations, that people in our family will turn to cooking or at least eating, gourmet.

Before I was to get on a plane back to SA after a wonderful holiday in the States and then in London for two weeks, that a certain resident of a house in Putney will remember a rich lunch meal of smashed baby potatoes, grilled salmon with an apricot glaze with asparagus and hollandaise sauce. Did we manage a glass of Bordeaux white with it? I can't quite remember, but I do remember the meal precisely because I made it as I was keeping one eye on the clock to make sure that this culinary delight was served and eaten before I had to take that tiresome trek out to Heathrow.

I'm not entirely sure what this is about, a kind of combination between being set on using the best ingredients in the fridge if we are not going to be present to eat them (which shows an unexplained possessiveness over our food) and a last meal, if you will. Whatever stressful situation may arise out of travelling at least we will be secure in the knowledge that we dined like kings before we left the house for the airport.

My sister left to go to Australia for, ostensibly forever, but for the meantime just six weeks to be with her boyfriend on Friday.  And sure enough, at 8 am she was (if you'll excuse the pun) fishing the salmon steaks that she had bought earlier in the week out of the freezer. "Shall I make us some salmon for breakfast?" she yelled from the kitchen. Followed, a few short seconds and some scrambling sounds of freezer drawers opening and closing, with "Don't you want to make us something delicious with this chorizo sausage? " and " I definitely should make these pies, they'll just go off!"

Bearing in mind that I am not a morning person at all and that at 8 am I was in all likelyhood not awake until I could not ignore the repartee emerging from the kitchen, with some instinctual knowledge that on the occasion that one's sister is leaving the country, one should invariably cook up a feast, I managed to yell back: "If you're going to make the salmon then you should probably use the rest of the fresh green beans in the fridge."

"Here's your tea!" trilled my sister. Knowing that this was the only lever that had enough leverage to extricate me from my bed.

As I came into the kitchen, I pointed out that she should have rather used milk instead of a whole egg to put on the pies so that they'd turn brown.

"How should I do the salmon?" she asked.
"Steam it," I said while swallowing the first sips of warm tea, "over the green beans."

"Here," and I was passed two thirds of a beaten egg in a cup. "Can't you do something with this?"

"Well do we have lemon?" I asked peering into the fridge.

We did and so the remaining egg mixture went into a stainless steel bowl and was whisked briskly with a quarter lemon's juice.

Hmmm, I could not quite remember how to make a hollandaise sauce but it seemed like a good idea to cook the egg and the salmon and beans having been removed from the pot, I whipped the stainless steal bowl over and carried on whisking.

Ah, that was better, the sauce was thickening. And not a lump in sight! A crack of black pepper and coarse salt, and a lug of olive oil (just because that seemed like the right thing to do) and I was done.

A not exactly, but a rather lovely lemon-tasting and lower-fat version of hollandaise sauce completed the salmon that had been flaked over the beans.

Tea was done: now it was time for breakfast and an hour till we had to leave to go to the airport.