Recipe No. 3 – Italian Style Roast Chicken with Roast Potatoes with Sage.

 

As you may have gathered, I’m a little bit of a traditionalist when it comes to food and on a Sunday that means a roast dinner. This roast chicken recipe has no added fat and in theory the stock mixes with the meat juices when cooking to form a sauce. The roast potatoes are made with extra virgin olive oil, a monounsaturated fat , which reduces LDL [‘bad’ cholesterol] and increases HDL [‘good’ cholesterol].

 

Ingredients

• 1 large chicken[I prefer ‘corn-fed’]
• 4 low-salt stock cubes
• 4 cloves of garlic, cut into halves but not peeled
• 2 lemons cut into quarters
• 2 sprigs of rosemary.

 

 

1. Rinse the chicken and remove any surplus fat from the cavity.
2. Break each of the stock cubes into 4, and place 2 inside the cavity, followed by a few halves of the garlic. Then add a lemon quarter squeezing it as you place it in. Repeat until all the stock cubes, garlic and lemon are inside. Finally add the rosemary.
3. Place in a roasting tin and cover with foil and place in a pre-heated oven [gas mark 7/220 C].
4. Cook for about 2 hours, removing the foil for the last 20-25 minutes.

Roast Potatoes

1. Peel around 5-6 potatoes and quarter.
2. Add to a pan of boiling water and cook for around 5 minutes, drain and place in a baking tray.
3. Add 4 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and a handful of finely chopped sage leaves. Mix together well and season with a generous amount of black pepper.
4. Place in the oven with the chicken and cook for around 50 minutes, turning every 15 minutes or so.

 

We served the chicken and potatoes with some boiled sweetheart cabbage.

 

Although I said that the dish should produce it’s own sauce I was a little disappointed as this sauce seemed very fatty, I actually made up some chicken oxo as a substitute. In fairness if you drained the fat off and spooned a little of the sauce on the meat it tasted very good. The chicken itself was wonderfully moist with a lovely lemon flavour, although there was a hint of garlic this was not at all overwhelming. The roast potatoes were superb, crisp on the outside with the inside soft and fluffy and a gentle taste of sage.

This is certainly a dish that I would cook again , a good substitute for the traditional British Sunday roast.