Roasted Chicken Wrapped with Streaky Bacon and Stuffed with Potatoes and Sage

Cookbook Challenge Week 42 Bird

Book: The Return of the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver Theme: Bird Recipe: Roasted Hamilton poussin wrapped with streaky bacon and stuffed with potatoes and sage

Wow that’s a mouthful of a name. I have to say I miss poetic names in food. There’s no fun naming food after its actual description. That’s just plain boring. Here’s something we could learn from the Chinese. Think about it ‘ants climbing a tree‘ and ‘Buddha jumped over the wall‘ are much better names than ‘roasted chicken wrapped with streaky bacon and stuffed with potatoes and sage.’ What do you think?

Anyway, since I barely keep up with the Cookbook Challenge, I might as well just do what I can.

We had a couple of people over for dinner one night and me being a lazy person that I am, I decided to do a roast. Let’s face it, roast is really the easiest way to feed lots of people at once. I flipped through the earlier Jamie Oliver books because it seemed like he had a thing for roast chicken – each book would have about 3-4 different roast chicken recipes. So I picked out this one. Jamie used poussins (which are small chickens) but I used a full-sized roast chicken.

One Scrumptious Roast Chicken (fed four people with sides) – recipe adapted from Jamie’s

1. 1 large chicken (about 1.8kg)
2. 12 rashers of streaky bacon (I only had pancetta)
3. 5 medium potatoes, peeled, slice in to thin pieces lengthwise
4. a big handful of fresh sage leaves (Jamie said fresh thyme and rosemary are also good)
5. 12 cloves of garlic, crushed
6. 1 glass of white wine
7. Olive oil
8. Salt & pepper

Preheat oven to 220’c. Place potatoes in a saucepan of cold water and bring to boil. Simmer for about 5-10 minutes until the potatoes are tender (if you sliced the potatoes quite thinly, they won’t take long to cook). Drain the potatoes.

Make sure chicken is brought up to the room temperature before you start. This saves you a lot of cooking time. Clean the chicken and trim off excess fat around the cavity. Season the potatoes with salt and pepper, add torn up sage leaves. Stuff the chicken cavity with half  of the potatoes.

Place the stuffed chicken, breast side up, on a tray with the rest of the potatoes and garlic in the preheated oven for about 30-40 minutes until the skin starts to look nice and brown. Lay the streaky bacon (or in my case, pancetta) over the breast and tuck them in. Roast for further 15 minutes and check if the chicken juice runs clear by inserting a skewer. Unfortunately, my pancetta didn’t really want to stay on the chicken (see the photo) but that’s okay.

Serve with the roast potatoes and garlic. You can make gravy using the roasting juices, if you like. I also served it with green beans with almonds and shallots and spinach with porcini, rosemary and lemon (recipe also from the same book but I won’t put it here).

This time last year I made:Som Tum Thai (Green Papaya Salad, Thai Style)