Roast Chicken with herb butter

There is nothing more classic and somehow comforting to me than a roast chicken, I love how the meat is tender and falls part, the texture of it when I eat it - everything is good to me where roast chicken is concerned.

I usually rub herb butter under the skin of the breast and the outside of the drumsticks so the skin is crispy and the meat is SO tender as it's been cooked with the butter and there's also a lemon inside it to flavour the meat from within.

For this I used a free range corn fed chicken from my local major supermarket chain, I don't normally buy meat there but this was on special offer and looked lovely and fresh so I thought hey I'll give it a try.

This was delicious, moist, juicy, tasty and everything a roast chicken should be in my opinion. I served it with roast potatoes, butter carrots and sprouts. I also made gravy from the chicken juice by adding a stock cube and some soy sauce to it and reducing it in a pan.

A very easy Sunday dinner, throw it all in the oven at Gas Mark 5/190 for about an hour and 15 or until the juices run clear and serve with whatever takes your fancy. I sometimes do roast veg so it's all done in the oven aswell.

Koli Ishtew - Indian Chicken Stew

I am an avid viewer of Saturday Kitchen, apart from the fact that I love James Martin (especially his gorgeous arms and hands) the recipes are always fantastic and there's plenty of banter, bad jokes and gorgeous recipes.

So a few weeks ago Atul Kocchar (and Donna Hay) was on and made a delicious looking Indian Stew. Atul has a new book out called Simple Indian which is on my christmas list and if the stew was anything to go by it's set to be a much loved and used book in my kitchen.

It sounds like you need a lot of ingredients but let me tell you it's definitely worth it, this was one of the nicest stew's I've had in AGES, warming and fragrant and creamy, I couldn't recommend it enough!!

So here's what you need and the original recipe is here:

Ingredients:

• 3 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 boneless chicken breast, cut into four pieces, dusted with little flour, salt, freshly ground black pepper and ground cinnamon
• 2 star anise
• 2.5cm/1in cinnamon stick
• 2-3 green cardamom pods, lightly crushed
• 4 cloves
• 4-6 black peppercorns
• 1 blade mace
• 1 green chilli, slit open
• 20g/¾oz fresh ginger, peeled, sliced into matchsticks
• 2 medium onions, thinly sliced
• 8-10 fresh curry leaves
• 1 tsp ground turmeric
• 2 tsp ground coriander
• ½ tsp ground black pepper
• ¼ tsp ground cinnamon
• 400ml/14fl oz coconut milk
• 10-12 baby plum or cherry tomatoes

I cut my chicken breasts up a little smaller as I don't like them too big, I also used reduced fat coconut milk but other than that I stuck to the recipe as it is on the BBC site

• Heat 1 tbsp of the vegetable oil over a low heat add the chicken fry gentlybut don't let it go brown. When the chicken is almost cooked take it off the heat and put it aside.
  
• Heat the rest of the vegetable oil and add the cinnamon stick, cardamom pods, cloves, peppercorns and mace. Fry until the spices start to crackle, then add the chilli, ginger, onions and curry leaves. Now I couldn't hear mine crackle so I left them 3 or 4 minutes and then added the onions and fried them until they were translucent.
• Add the turmeric, coriander, black pepper and cinnamon powder and fry for another couple of minutes.
• Add the coconut milk and simmer.
• Add the chicken and the tomatoes and simmer again, now the recipe says 3-4 mins or until the chicken is cooked though but mine was maybe 10 mins I think and the sauce thickened nicely in this time.

I served mine with basmati rice and I have to say it was SO fragrant and delicious, I will definitely be making this again.