Roast duck

A friend of mine, Daisy (in the middle), is currently living in Madrid and popped over this week to celebrate her 21st with a rather wonderful party. To say thank you and hasta luego I decided to do some sort of duck dish. Unfortunately I didn’t plan it very well at all and ended up doing a roast lunch on the warmest weekend 2010 has seen so far.

After rejecting a neat little oven-ready duck (it felt too much like cheating) I ended up with a giant, free-range bird that looked quite daunting. Especially scary were the little stumps of feathers left poking out of its wings… or whatever those bits were. I’m still not quite sure.

When I shoved the squidgy carcase onto a chopping board to prepare it I got a bit of a shock. The duck had TROUSERS on. I imagine these used to be it’s legs but it’s wings were so massive I freaked out slightly and started to get a bit hysterical, imagining that these extra bits of skin were bum flaps or something.


My little friend also came with giblets. As these are usually in a bag shoved inside I grabbed a trouser leg in each hand and had a look. There was just a big lump of red flesh with the spine in it (I’m not really selling this, am I?) and I realised I was going to have to get its insides out myself. After jumping around manically laughing for five nervous minutes I whipped out some latex gloves and prepared to get my hands metaphorically dirty. Thankfully as I tentatively poked my fingers where no fingers should go I felt plastic. I thanked whatever higher power was looking down on me that day and pulled out a little bag of ducky innards.

With the oven preheated to 200°c I plonked Daffy (see what I did there?) onto a roasting rack in a roasting tin and with the tip of a knife pricked the skin all over.

Obviously the times change with the weight of the bird but my duck needed to be roasted for about two hours. An hour in I took it out of the oven to drain the fat. There wasn’t too much in the tray but this was because it had all collected in the cavity. With the help of an oven glove, some tongs and my mum this ended up in a measuring jug, ready to be sloshed over the roast potatoes with a bit of olive oil.

Sixty minutes later a gorgeous, golden duck came out of the oven and after letting the meat rest for ten minutes I set about carving. And then gave up. In the end I just sort of tore it apart with a knife and fork. I had been unsure what to do gravy-wise and ended up buying a Waitrose shallot and red wine sauce which was lovely.


While this whole post makes it sound rather horrid it was one of the nicest things I’ve ever cooked. The nicest thing if you ask Charlotte. I would go as far as saying delicious. But as a complete novice in the kitchen I still get nervous around uncooked meat so it’s nice to know what you’re up against.

Rosemary and thyme roast chicken - and why I always buy free-range

Confession: I have never roasted a chicken.

I understand that absolutely everyone everywhere has roasted a chicken but I am a complete rookie. I don’t really understand how it works. Pretty much whenever I cook meat I make sure it has the texture of Clark’s boot leather in case I poison someone. This includes meats that are meant to be pink such as lamb and beef. If I see the slightest rosy tint they go back in the oven for another half hour. It’s dreadful I know but I’d rather chew roast beef for forty minutes than get botchulism. I don’t help myself by reading Daily Mail articles about men who ate a steak and very quickly became paralysed until their hearts stopped. So roasting a chicken - a meat that can absolutely not be pink - terrifies me. But tonight I overcame this hurdle by, you know… putting a chicken in the oven…

I am a little bit obsessed with Waitrose rotisserie chickens. Especially the rosemary and thyme ones. They stopped doing them in the Ealing Waitrose for a while and when I asked why the answer was “health and safety reasons”. I have absolutely no idea what this means but no matter: they’re back now. So when planning my first roast chicken this was obviously something that I had to try.

Grub (who I realise I’ve cooked for quite a bit recently – I think I’m starting to know his kitchen better than my own) summoned me round on Saturday evening to celebrate his lady’s football team’s 9 - 2 win. We made a deal that he would buy the ingredients and I would cook us dinner. After texting him a shopping list that included ‘a free-range happy chicken that never even LOOKED at a shed’ he panicked and bought two. One was a standard Waitrose chicken and the other a Tesco’s free range chicken.

Having spent an awful lot of time recently reading the Channel Four Food website I’ve gathered that even a standard chicken in Waitrose has had at least a vaguely good life; once in a while seeing the sun and pecking at the odd worm. I’m sort of (read: not brilliantly) boycotting Tesco as they refuse to get rid of their standard, awful, battery-farmed chicken rubbish because lots of horrible people like them.

My mum is basically a pescetarian (having started eating fish when she was pregnant with me) who stopped eating meat because she found it cruel. To her that’s just a personal choice but she doesn’t have a problem with anyone else eating it. She’s always cooked meat for me and does a fantastic roast. But I’ve been brought up always eating organic and free-range meat. She thinks – and I strongly agree – that if you are going to eat an animal it should have had a good life before it goes to slaughter. And I honestly think that free-range meat tastes a lot nicer than an animal that has been cooped up for the whole of its life.

I think the big argument against free-range food is the price and that’s fair enough (I’d hate to meet to sort of person who would eat battery hens if they all cost the same) but when you eat factory farmed chicken for instance, what are you letting yourself in for? How good can a bird that has been reared in a shed packed to the rafters, some of them dead, fed until it could burst and rarely being given darkness in which to sleep, be for you? In my mind it can’t be healthy. I would rather eat a meat once week than twice and pay the same amount for it and know that I wasn’t putting money towards giving something a terrible quality of life as well as putting lower quality food on my plate.

I don’t want to sound like some middle class hippy – as I’m really, really not – but I think things taste better when you know that the meat you’re eating has had a good life or that the vegetables you’re munching on haven’t been sprayed in a load of chemicals. Maybe it’s just me but I would never buy battery chicken or eggs (or anything but British pork) because I believe it’s not worth how ever much money you save – in all honesty I think that if you really look at what you’re eating you’re not saving anything at all.

But ANYWAY: roast chicken.

The packaging on your obviously free-range chicken will tell you how long it should be cooked or the butcher will give you an idea. I always thought you could just stick chicken in the oven but I’ve found this isn’t the case. You should rinse your chicken out. Please don’t take this as kosher but I basically stuck mine under the tap and filled the cavity up with warm water. Then, while shuddering massively, I stuck my fingers in and did disgusting things for a bit. Some red bits came out with the water – I didn’t look too closely – and I did this a couple of times.

I stuck the (Waitrose) chicken on a roasting tray - I’d heated the oven to around 200°c - and stuck half a lemon up its bum (just to keep it moist – promise.) and some rosemary and thyme stalks. I chopped up a few handfuls of both these herbs and then attempted to get my hands under the skin. You have to be a bit rough to do this but gentle enough not to rip the skin. Stuff the chopped herbs between this and the breasts and try and even them out. Rub a tiny bit of olive oil over the chicken with a bit of salt to crisp the skin up and sprinkle over the rest of your chopped herbs.

Roast this in the middle of the oven for as long as you’ve been told to and you should end up with a lovely succulent, flavoured chicken. And the moral high ground.

Roast lamb for idiots.

The weekend before Christmas I was invited to an early, not very festive lunch - which I cooked. I was supposed to only be doing a pudding (which I’m clearly an old hand at) but our elected chef cancelled a few days before. I stood up and decided to take the main-course bullet. “I’ll get the take-away menus out then” joked our host and oh! how we laughed. Until I threatened to lynch his pug. Which surprisingly wasn’t a euphemism.

I decided to cook slow roasted lamb, roast potatoes and veg with pigs in blankets. I know they’re supposed to go with chicken but they really are my favourite bit of Christmas. I spend weeks desperately waiting for December to start so I can start wrapping pigs in pigs. They just don’t taste as good at any other time of year.

I popped to the meat counter in Waitrose because I couldn’t make it to the butchers and got a shoulder of lamb as I really can’t stand fatty meat. My old flat mate used to love having a fry up with me as I’d spend five minutes carefully cutting all the fat off my bacon which I then dunked on his plate.

I’ll admit I bought ready-made pigs in blankets but they’re very easy to make. I think small, plain sausages are best, with smoked streaky bacon. If you wrap a sprig of rosemary with the sausage it gives them quite a nice flavour. The Waitrose website has quite a good recipe for a honey, Tabasco and bourbon glaze. You mix two tablespoons of bourbon, 10 drops of Tabasco and four tablespoons of clear honey together and you’re done. And a bit drunk.

Maris Piper potatoes are one of the best for roasting as they’re waxy. There’s a very good reason this is good but I can’t for the life of me remember it. Par boil the potatoes for ten minutes in slightly salty water (science bit: salt makes the cells break up quicker which helps the crunch factor). If you swish them around in a colander it roughens the surface giving you more crunchy bits. Some people dust potatoes in flour to help them stay crisp when they’re out of the oven. I’ve never bothered with anything like that as mine are usually in my tummy before they have a chance to soften.

While I pre-heated an oven at 150°c, though it might have been 180°c as all the numbers had worn off the dial, I used a knife to poke some holes through the lamb – while gleefully pretending to stab a tiny little person - which I then stuffed with quarter of a clove of garlic and a lot of rosemary. I did this after having a little cry about the blood that was in the packaging with the lamb. God, I really am suited to this cooking lark.

I then wrapped the lamb in some tin foil and stuck it in the oven for an hour. After a few very limey cosmos I unwrapped the meat and stuck the potatoes in for another hour and a half. If you turn them half way through this stops the bottom sticking to the baking tray and gives you more crispy bits.

Anyway in the words of someone doing a really rubbish Jamie Oliver impression: bish bash bosh, all done, pukka me old china. Laaaahvly!