Fortnightly meal challenge #1: Sage and Clementine Roast Chicken

23 September, 2012 by Skuggs 4 Comments

So my first new meal challenge is done and dusted, hooray! Judging by the scraping of plates towards the end of the meal, it was a success. Baby K was so excited by her first taste of roast chicken that she nearly bounced out of her chair. And our toddler has morphed into Oliver, with not one, not two, but THREE requests for, “More please!” It was really tasty. The flavours weren’t phenomenally strong, but subtly different from an ordinary roast chicken. The sage and clementine work really well together. I would definitely make this again.

As with most roast chicken dishes, this one was fairly easy, going straight into the oven once prepared with no maintenance necessary allowing me to get on with other things.

Inspired by the original recipe made with chicken pieces here, this version, using a whole chicken was pretty easy.

You will need:

1 chicken. I can really recommend getting a good organic, corn fed, free range chook. Cheap chooks aren’t great except maybe as stock.

A couple of clementines

A bunch of fresh sage leaves

olive oil (or butter if you prefer), salt and pepper.

Gently pull the breast skin away from the meat. You should be able to form a pocket between the skin and the breast meat on either side by pushing a finger under the skin and gently breaking the connective tissue. Shove a sage leaf and a clementine slice into each pocket you’ve made. If you’re using butter you can wedge a good knob of it under the skin too.

Put some more sage leaves and a few clementine halves inside the chicken.

I made a dressing of around 6 tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of one clementine, a tablespoon of chopped sage and salt and pepper to taste which I used to coat the chicken before it went into the oven.

Roast at 220 degrees Celsius (430F for the western hemisphere readers) for roughly an hour until the thigh juices run clear. The timing will vary wildly depending on the size of your bird.

Once done, cover will foil and leave to rest for 10 minutes while you plate up your veg.

We had this with roasted peppers, courgettes, onions and cherry tomatoes with a mash made from parsnip, sweet potato and swede. My favourite autumnal mash.