Eating Albion

*delete as appropriate, depending on perceived class status. For me it’s tea.

I’d never boiled a chicken until yesterday. I’d fried, sautéed, wrapped in parma ham and made soups from leftovers, but why boil a whole bird when you can roast it, right? Wrong. I’d got a chicken in for the weekend, but as you found out in yesterday’s post, I ended up having a Christmas Sunday lunch. So, having got home at around 8ish on Monday night with the chicken still in the fridge, I was hungry and wanted something fast. Boiling rather than roasting is quicker due to the direct contact of the hot water. It also gives you a ready-made stock, and that means soup.

Here’s what I did. Kettle on, and whole chicken into my largest stockpot with chunkily chopped-up carrot, celery, and parsnip. To that I added a bay leaf, four cloves of garlic, one segment of star anise, and a few sprigs of parsley, plus a peppercorn. The chicken was cooked in about 30 mins. Just like with roasting, use the juices from around the thigh as a guide to whether it’s cooked through. A word of warning here, though - take great care when lifting it out of the boiling water as it can drop back into the pot easily and splash hot stock everywhere. You might be better chopping it up raw and cooking in sections (this improves speed, too). You can go anywhere from this basic recipe. Add fresh chopped chillies and udon noodles and you’re in the Orient, a handful of pasta takes you to Italy, and the addition of leeks sets you on the high road to Cock-a-leekie.

I added cubed potato chunks to thicken the base, and after the chicken was cooked I let it cool before shredding the breast meat and straining off the root veg. I ate this too, but you can chuck it if you like. Into the still-hot broth I threw the shredded chicken meat and some very finely shredded pointed cabbage and put it back on the boil. Mmmm.

So that was yesterday, and today was the left-over soup. I also had an English Camembert that needed eating up (I ‘ve spoken about the joy that is hot cheese before). So far, so naughty, but the addition of half a head of raw broccoli ought to bump up the goodness value…

This is good for me… honest.