Читать книгу The Vicar’s Wife’s Cook Book - Elisa Beynon - Страница 37

NOTE: You will require a big, cauldron-like pan to make this. You may think you don’t need one but, believe me, you do; especially if you really like cooking but hate all the sloshing about that occurs when you haven’t got a big enough pan. I have two such cauldrons: one medium and one massive, which seems to be designed for a tall witch with really strong arms. I used the medium-sized one for this chicken recipe.

1 small organic or free-range chicken (mine was 1.5kg)

2 medium onions, peeled and quartered

4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

3 medium carrots, peeled and chopped into 2cm chunks

2 leeks, cleaned and chopped into 2cm chunks

1 litre water

3 bay leaves

½ lemon

4 teaspoons sweet white miso paste

salt and pepper

Put all the ingredients, bar the miso paste, in your ‘witching’ pan. Without the option of a lie-in – it being a church day – I put my brew on the lowest setting on the top of the stove. It went on at 9.30am and then I dashed out of the door, worrying I would spend the whole of the sermon praying against a house fire. Anyway, all was well. I got home at 12 and the chicken was still not fully cooked. So I turned up the heat for 30 minutes, adding the miso at this point and testing for seasoning. I had to turn it down to its lowest heat again when the phone rang, but nothing spoilt. We ate at about one o’clock.

Basically, this is a dish that could never, in a million years, be accused of being sophisticated (it’s about as sophisticated as drinking warm milk at Grandma’s kitchen table), but sometimes that’s exactly where you want to be. Anyway, I removed the bird from the cauldron, chopped off the legs and served them on a base of half of the stocky slush (made during the cooking of the chicken, water and vegetables), with some pak choi on the side. For the Vicar, this last bit was a healthy step too far.

Here are some thrifty ideas for using up the leftovers:

Chicken Soup

Pull the rest of the meat off the carcass and add to the remainder of the vegetables and liquid left in the pan. Reheat and blitz in a food processor or liquidiser, or use a hand-held number until it is soupy. If the result is too thick, add some boiling water to thin it down a bit. What you’ll get is a softly spoken soup that serves two, with seconds.

Light and Lazy Stock

I nearly didn’t bother making a stock from the bones of this bird; after all, it had already been sitting in liquid, bubbling away, for 3 hours. But I did decide to do it after all, but to make it simple. So I half heartedly chucked the carcass in the pan, didn’t bother with vegetables, nor bay leaves, filled up the big pan it was in with 2 litres of water and let it come to the boil and then simmer for a few hours. It was worth it: it wasn’t the richest of stocks, but it was still good enough to use in another light broth or a risotto. I was left feeling like a virtuously thrifty wartime housewife. My grandmother would have been proud.