Delia's roast chicken

As I write this post we're letting a roast chicken rest before carving. We normally like to do whole chickens on the grill but I'm a bit low on propane so we opted to roast the fowl instead. We usually follow the Delia Smith recipe for this, hence it's Delia's chicken.

Fellow Brits will have a love/hate relationship with Delia Smith (dubbed "The Sainted Delia" by 'er Indoors) just like we do. She's an enormously popular chef back in Blighty, where she's been making TV shows and writing books since well before God was a teenager. Her recipes work well but she can be very annoying and a bit self important (one of her books is called "How to Cook"). As you can see our copy of her culinary bible has seen some use. 'er Indoors thinks I'm being unkind - she says that Delia taught her how to cook a roast dinner - but she definitely gets on my wick (Delia that is).

catalan beef stew

My most recent encounter with short ribs was last Sunday. It had pissed with rain all weekend and 'er Indoors decided we needed a decent dinner. She was looking through the latest edition of Cooks Illustrated at the time and liked the look of their catalan beef stew recipe. I did too when she mentioned it used short ribs instead of stewing beef. Our experience with Cooks Illustrated recipes is that they are incredibly involved and precise - but if you follow them to the letter, they turn out beautifully. In this case you had to make a sauce base called a "sofrito" - deeply caramelized onions with tomato pulp and spices. After about three hours of cooking the gravy was thickened with "picata", toasted breadcrumbs and almonds, flavoured with garlic. Some mashed potatoes and broccoli and Robert's your Father's brother. We drank our Chateauneuf-du-Pape from French Country Wines - just fab. Let it rain as much as it wants.

hors d'oeuvres

Seems like a good title for the first post on this blog. Short ribs are a very economical cut of beef with a wonderful hearty flavour, but they are not at all tender and have to be cooked for some time to be edible, usually by braising. When you embark on the short ribs adventure you can expect to have your home scented beautifully with wine, beef and onion aromas for hours on end - and then you get to eat them. Trust me, they're fab.