The Cooking for Health and Wealth group started a new ten week course last Friday.
You all know how we like to get people involved here, so the group got to choose the theme for their sessions.
The choices were:
Basic ingredients
Homemade takeaways
Feed us all for under a fiver
The group unanimously went with feed us all for under a fiver so we will be letting you know the dishes we make each week and giving you a few money saving tips......lucky you!
So Fridays dish was spatchcock chicken with roasted vegetables, Here's how we did it.
Spatchcock chicken and roasted root vegetables
Grab your dictionary and you’ll find that spatchcock is a method of splitting (butterflying) a chicken. It’s a fun word, which you can use to impress your friends or win at Scrabble. If time is crunching, but you want to make a crispy, tasty roast chicken, butterflying is a great option.
You can do this yourself by removing the backbone and pressing down on the breast till flat. Root vegetables are the ones that grow below ground (i'm sure you already know that!)
Ingredients
1 small chicken
Carrots
Potatoes
Beetroot/turnip/celeriac or other root vegetables
Salt and pepper
Mixed herbs
2/3 stock cubes
2 tbsp flour.
1 pint of water
How to do it
1. Preheat your oven to 200
2. Spatchcock the chicken ( Fran will show you how/watch a video on youtube)
3. Scrub or peel your root vegetables
4. Pop them all in a roomy baking tray. Drizzle with oil, season with salt and pepper and sprinkle over your herbs then give it all a good mix, if your feeling exotic you could fling in some garlic too.
5. Roast in the oven for 45 mins to 1 hour. Basting (spooning the juices over) every 20 minutes or so. You will know it is cooked when you pierce the fattest part of the chicken with a knife and the juices run clear.
6. Take the chicken and vegetables out of the baking tray, put on a platter/large plate to keep warm.
7. To make the gravy: Put the baking tray on the hob, add flour to the chicken juices left in the tray and stir until all the lumps have gone, add 1 pint of water and the stock cubes and stir until it has thickened, simmer for 5 minutes.
