Roast chicken with lemon and tarragon recipe
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This tender chicken stuffed with garlic and herb butter is an excellent option for Sunday lunchÂ
Credit:
Laura Edwards
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A roast chicken is a universal joy. The transformation from humble bird to gloriously golden feast is wonderful to watch. Buy the best free-range chicken available as you can easily make three meals from the one purchase, so the cost is spread out and the flavour of the resulting roast is incomparable.
Prep time: 20 minutes |
Cooking time: 1 hour, plus 15 minutes restingÂ
SERVES
INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 small bunch tarragon
Leah Evans has always loved growing edibles. Even while living in a small house in town, her patio was crowded with pots and hanging baskets filled with tomatoes. When she and husband Darryl managed to buy the rural block they always dreamed of, Evans took things to the next level. Three years on, she is growing enough food to be self-sufficient, plus gives away bag-loads of surplus fruit and vegetables to friends, family members and her wider community. When her two hungry teenaged sons leave home, Evans is not quite sure what she will do, but it seems unlikely that she will slow production. “This will end up being a lot of food,” she says, surveying her abundant patch. “I can’t imagine how much of an overflow we’re going to have.”
It will be a Valentine s Day like no other, when loved up couples will be wined and dined - at home.
This time last year it was still possible to treat your beloved to the traditional romantic dinner in a popular, hard-to-book - and packed - restaurant.
But that was then and this is now. Welcome to Valentine romance in lockdown.
What should be the date night of the year, however, can still be special.
You may not get the attentive waiter, soft lighting, fancy cutlery, posh glasses and romantic knick-knacks on the table that go with the restaurant experience.
How to grow early variety potatoes that will provide a crop until Christmas Now is the time to be buying your seed potatoes – allow me to recommend a few. I was buttonholed by a gardening neighbour recently. He had read my recommendation of the old potato variety Sharpe’s Express. His first query related to my having referred to it as an “early variety”. I suppose it is fairly late as early varieties go, but what puzzled my friend even more was that I said it will remain in the ground, or in storage after lifting, something he imagined was only true of a maincrop variety.
SO, how many different types of potato do you reckon are grown around this world of ours? And just what proportion of them can you buy in the shops? The answer to the former is more than 500. And to the latter? About 15. That is one of the powerful arguments for growing your own. The others, of course, are taste and efficacy knowing that those fresh potatoes came from your own hand, grown in your own, good, earth. I can’t believe that nearly a year has spun by since I wrote my last piece extolling the virtues of growing your own spuds, just a couple of months before we were trapped by Lockdown 1 in Nepal. With increasing age, time spins ever faster but certain imperatives will remain until I am too old to raise a spade.