I love Nigella's "My Mother's Praised Chicken" http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/my-mothers-praised-chicken-5155. I cooked a Greek Lemon Chicken from a Clarissa Dicskon Wright recipe from her Sunday Roast book (highly recommended).
This recipe is my next Sunday lunch, a amalgamation of two great Chicken pot roasts.
- A large free-range chicken, about 1.7kg
- 2 lemons
- about 100ml of white wine
- a sprig of rosemary
- 2-3 carrots, dpending on their size, sliced
- a small bulb of fennel
- 2 sitcks of celery, finely sliced
- 1 tsp of red peppercorns
- 1 leek, cut into batons
- 2 table spoons of olive oil, or garlic infused olive oil if you have it
Get a large casserole dish ready, it needs to be wide and deep, my le Crueset is xx x xx. Put it on a medium flame and add the oil.
Prepare the chicken, push down hard on the top of the chicken so that you hear the breastbone crack. You want the chicken to flatten slightly so that it fits in the pot and is covered by the all the water.
Throw the chicken into the casserole dish, breast-side down and let it brown for a few minutes.
Turn up the heat and turn the chicken over so that it is breast-side up. Cut off the eds of the drumsticks with kitchen scissors and throw them in the pot. Add the wine and let it come to the boil, then add all the sliced vegetables.
With a very sharp vegetable peeler, peel off all the lemon rind off the lemons, carefully so that you don't get any of the pith. Slice all the peel lengthways as thin as you can, so you have lots of very thin strips of lemon peel. Add this to the pot with the juice of the lemons.
Pour in about 500ml of water, it should come nearly to the top of the pot. It doesn't need to cover the bird completely.
Bring slowly to the boil, and then put on the lowest heat with about 2 hours. Make sure the lid is on as tightly as possible. For the last 30 minutes you can switch off the heat and just leave to stand for 30 minutes while you put together the accompaniments.
I like to serve this with a huge dish of freshly steamed green vegeta