Pot-roasted Chicken "Stewp" with Herbs, Garlic and Bacon; and the food blogger's lament

First the chicken, then the lament. I love stews, and I adore soups, so why not a "stewp", I thought? Why not pot-roast whole chickens and vegetables with a lot of liquid, so you end up with fall-apart chicken pieces in a lake of rich aromatic gravy?

Pot-roasted Chicken "Stewp" with Herbs, Garlic and Bacon

Flavoured with wine, garlic and good smoked bacon cubes, this makes an excellent one-dish family meal. There are a couple of steps in this recipe that require a bit of effort: One, pushing some fragrant herby stuffing under the breast skin and, two, browning the chickens on all sides before they go into the oven. After that, all you need do is kick the dish into the oven and forget about it.

Now the moan. (I called it a 'lament' in the title of this post only because I'm trying to cover my dainty behind: recently, in a presentation at the South African Food Bloggers' Conference, I advised bloggers never, ever to complain or whinge in a blog post.)

Anyway: many food bloggers will agree that having to take photographs of food can be  pain in the neck. It's not that styling and photographing your own food isn't fun - it can be hugely rewarding, especially when you've learned a few basic tricks (necessary if you have an elderly camera, as I do), and the winning picture looks just beautiful.

The problem is finding the time - and getting the time of day right.

Here's why: food needs to be photographed in natural light (a flash is the kiss-of-death to a plate of food), and that usually means taking the picture in cool morning light, or at the very least before noon. If you're going to photograph really freshly cooked food, you have to get up early in the morning to cook it. And who has time to do that? Not I, said the little red hen. This blog isn't my job, and my early mornings are gobbled up by school lifts and making of lunch boxes. It's only once I've done a morning's work, and all the afternoon's school lifts and child-admin stuff, that I can hit the kitchen, and by that time the light is too yellow and low-slanting to take a good photograph (the photograph on this page is a good example). So, a few choices: keep some of the food aside to reheat and photograph the next morning, or cook-and-snap on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Neither approach is ideal: the former results in sulky-looking food, and the latter in sulky-looking family members.

And, having said that, I'm actually one of the lucky ones, living as I do in the southern hemisphere where the light is clear and brilliant for most months of the year. At the Food Bloggers' Conference, my pal Jeanne Horak-Druiff of Cooksister! (a South African living in London) had us in stitches as she described her frustration at having to take photographs of her beautiful food on dismal winter evenings. Jeanne set up a special mini-light-box-cum-studio in her conservatory, but was repeatedly defeated by air so arctic that the hot food steamed up her lens.

Why, you may ask, bother to post a photograph at all? Well, the truth is that a food blog without photographs is like a cartoon without illustrations. No matter how original and mouth-watering your recipes, and how brilliant your writing, no one will pay your blog much attention unless it is lavishly illustrated with food photographs. Okay, they don't need to be as perfect as food-magazine pictures (the food-blogging community, competitive as it is, can be very forgiving), but they do, at the very least, need to be sharp, bright and good-looking.

So what's the point of my moan? Nothing, really, except to commiserate with all those other food bloggers who labour in their kitchens to produce excellent recipes, and then decline to post them because they haven't had a chance to take a photograph, or because they took a pic that looks like something the cat sicked up.

If it's any consolation: none of the world's most esteemed food writers take publishable pictures of their own food. I've never seen Gordon, Nigella, Jamie or Nigel with a camera in their hands. They have professional photographers to do this, expert cooks to make the actual dish, and stylists to scatter the parsley and toast the pine nuts. They have home economists to work out the measurements, and editors to tweak the grammar. You, my dears, do this all on your own, and that's what makes your blogs amazing.

On the subject of food photography, please take a look at the work of Nina Timm of My Easy Cooking, who is the reigning queen among South African food bloggers when it comes to photography and food styling. This is the standard of food photography that I aspire to.

But back to the stewp.

This recipe uses two chickens, but you can easily halve the recipe. Do take the trouble to drain off excess fat, as instructed in the recipe, or you will end up with a greasy gravy. You need nice, thick, smoked pork rashers for this dish - watery supermarket bacon will not do. Ask your butcher.

Pot-roasted Chicken "Stewp" with Herbs, Garlic and Bacon

2 large free-range chickens
salt and milled black pepper
a small bunch of mixed fresh herbs of your choice: sage, oregano, basil, parsley and thyme
8 cloves fresh garlic, peeled and finely chopped
the zest and juice of 2 small lemons
6 Tbsp (90 ml) olive oil
6 smoked pork rashers (about 180 g; each about 7 mm thick), cubed
3 onions, peeled and cut vertically into eighths
2 sticks  celery, sliced
24 peeled baby carrots (or 10 medium carrots, peeled and cut in half crossways)
3 Tbsp (45 ml) cake flour
2 cups (500 ml) dry white wine
2 thumb-length sprigs fresh rosemary
8 large potatoes, peeled and halved crossways

Heat the oven to 150°C.  Using the flat of your hand, press down firmly on the breasts of the chickens until you hear the breast bones snap. Season inside and out with salt and black pepper.

Strip the herb leaves from their stalks and chop the leaves fairly finely. Place in a bowl and add the chopped garlic, the lemon zest and 2 Tbsp (30 ml) of the olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and mix well. Now make a 'pocket' at the top of the chickens by very gently separating the breast skin from the flesh: slide your fingertips under the skin on top of the breasts, breaking the fine membrane as you go to create a pouch. Take half of the herb paste and spread it evenly under the breast skin of both chickens (reserve the remaining mixture). Pull the breast skin back into place.

Heat another 2 Tbsp (30 ml) of olive oil over a brisk flame flame in a large ovenproof dish (a big cast-iron pot is ideal; a sturdy roasting pan will also do). Brown the chickens all over in the hot oil, turning frequently: this should take between 12 and 15 minutes. Don't worry if they're not evenly golden brown: what's important is that there's a sticky honey-coloured residue on the bottom of the pan.

Remove the chickens from the pan and set aside. Add the cubed pork rashers to the pan and fry for 3 minutes, or until just crisp and golden brown. Remove from the pan using a slotted spoon and set aside.  Drain all the chicken and bacon fat from the pan, but don't wipe it out.

Put the remaining 2 Tbsp (30 ml) olive oil into the pan, add the onions, celery and carrots and fry over  a medium-high heat for 4-5 minutes, or until the onions begin to colour. Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables and cook for two minutes, stirring. Add the wine and lemon juice to the bowl containing the left-over herb paste, stir well, then pour the mixture over the vegetables, stirring briskly to release any sediment and to prevent lumps forming.  Cook the sauce gently for a two minutes, or until thickened.

Place a sprig of rosemary inside the cavity of each chicken. Rest the chickens, breast-side up, on top of the vegetables in the pan, and arrange the potato halves around them. Using a large spoon, baste the chickens and potatoes with the winy liquid. Cover with a lid, or a tight layer of tin foil, and cook at 150°C for an hour and 45 minutes, or until the potatoes are very tender, and the chicken is falling off the bone. Give the pan a shake now and then, and baste the chicken with the juices. Pull the chicken to joints, and serve immediately, in deep bowls, with hunks of bread.

Serves 8.

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Roast Pork Belly with Pomegranate-Glazed Cape Quinces

Roasted to a melting softness with fennel, orange zest and bay leaves, this pork belly is served with sweet-sharp quinces that have been oven-stewed in a syrup of sugar, water and pomegranate concentrate. Every flavour and ingredient in this recipe makes me jump for joy - I love pork belly cooked with punchy aromatics - but it's the quinces that really make my tastebuds sing.

A few years ago, a quince was rarely to be seen on a supermarket shelf in South Africa, but these days you can find them, during the autumn months, piled in fuzzy yellow pyramids, in selected greengrocers, and in bigger retailers such as Checkers and Pick 'n Pay.

I've mentioned quinces often on this blog (see Quince Jelly, Moulded Quince Jelly, and Old-Fashioned Quince Paste) not only because I love them, but also because I think they're one of those old-fashioned fruits that are in danger fading away into history, along with all those gnarled staples that have become too troublesome to grow, peel or eat on the hoof:  among them prickly pears, celeriac, turnips, loquats and mulberries. Quinces might take a while to prepare, but, like sharp apples, are lovely with roast pork.

And slow-cooked, inexpensive pork cuts have become very popular in the last year or so, as the recession has bitten deep into consumers' pockets: you might be interested to know that the most-searched-for recipes on this blog are ones for pork neck.

Pork belly is a dish for devoted carnivores:  it's fatty, unctuous, and utterly delicious, with its melting fork-tender flesh and crispy layer of crackling.  Look, this artery-blocker isn't something you could - or should - eat every day, but as an occasional treat, for a Sunday roast perhaps, it cannot be matched.  It's also dead-easy to make, unlike lamb or beef roasts, which demand split-second timing to reach perfect pinkness.

If you can't find pork belly in your local supermarket, ask the in-house butcher to cut a piece for you. If he  won't, phone your local butcher and order a piece. You can ask for your pork belly to be boned, but I find that it has a better flavour if the rib bones are left in.  Do ask the butcher to score the fat for you, because this is really difficult to do with even the sharpest kitchen knife (but a sharp craft blade or Stanley knife will do the trick).

In this recipe, I've glazed the quinces with delicious pomegranate concentrate, which is available, under the Verlaque brand, from Woolworths and selected food shops  in South Africa.  If you can't find pomegranate concentrate, use the equivalent amount of cranberry jelly,  plus two tablespoons of fresh lemon juice.  You can add  warming spices -  such as cinnamon, cloves and star anise - to the cooking syrup, but I like the quince flavour just as it is.






Roast Pork Belly with Pomegranate-Glazed Cape Quinces

For the quinces:
1 cup (250 ml) white sugar
3 cups (750 ml) water
a slice of fresh lemon
3 large quinces
3 T (45 ml) pomegranate concentrate (or 3 T redcurrant jelly, plus 2 T - 30ml - lemon juice)

For the pork belly:
1.5 kg pork belly, fat scored
boiling water
1 onion, unpeeled, roughly sliced
6 stalks of fresh fennel
4 thick slices of a fresh orange
2 tsp (10 ml) cumin seeds
2 tsp (10 ml) fennel seeds
1 tsp (5 ml) whole black peppercorns
1 tsp (5 ml) flaky sea salt
2 bay leaves, fresh or dried
finely grated zest of a large orange

Pre-heat the oven to 160°C. Put the sugar and water into a medium-size saucepan, and add the lemon slice.  Bring gently to the boil, stirring occasionally to help the sugar dissolve. Wipe the quinces with a clean cloth to remove any fuzz. Quarter the quinces, using a sharp knife, and then cut each quarter in half again.  (Quinces are rock-hard, and the best way to do this is as follows: place the fruit, stalk-side up, on a chopping board. Slam the knife down hard on the top of the quince, and hammer the blunt upper surface of the knife with your fist a few times. Alternatively, a heavy cleaver will do the trick, as will a potato-wedging device.)   Using a small, sharp knife, carve out the hard pith of each wedge. Drop the quince pieces into the sugar syrup, turn down the heat and simmer for 25-30 minutes, or until the quince wedges are just tender when poked with a knife-point. Set aside.

In the meantime, prepare the pork belly.  Fill a kettle with water and bring to the boil. Pour the boiling water, in a continuous stream, over the fatty side of the belly: this will help create good crackling.  Set the belly aside. aside. Cover a deep roasting pan with a long length of greaseproof/parchment paper or tin foil - at least long enough to wrap the belly entirely.  Make a little bed - the same size as the pork belly - of sliced onions, fennel stalks, orange slices and garlic. Put the pork belly, fat side up, on its bed.

Heat a frying pan over a moderate heat and tip in the cumin and fennel seeds.  Toss, for a minute, until the seeds are hot and lightly toasted.  Tip them into a mortar (or similar) along with the peppercorns, bay leaves and salt, and grind, using a pestle, to a rough powder. Stir in the grated orange zest.  Rub this mixture over the top and sides of the pork belly, working it deep into the scorings in the fat.  Pull up the sides of the baking paper or tin foil and pleat together make a loose parcel.  Bake at 160°C for one hour.

In the meantime, remove the cooled quinces from their cooking syrup, using a slotted spoon, and place in an ovenproof dish just big enough to hold the wedges in a single layer .  Measure out 150 ml of the cooking syrup, place in a small bowl and stir in the pomegranate concentrate.  Drizzle this mixture over the quinces, and turn them over a few times so that they are well coated.  Cover loosely with a piece of paper or tin foil.

Turn the the oven up to 200°C. Remove the pork belly from the oven and open up the parcel just wide enough to expose the fat, but not so wide that the juices escape. Put the belly back in the oven, on the top shelf, and place the quinces on the bottom shelf.  Cook the pork and the quinces for an hour or so, basting the quinces every now and then with their syrup juices.  When the pork crackling is golden and very crunchy, and the syrup around the quinces has reduced to a sticky glaze, dinner is ready!

Carve the belly into thick slices and serve with the quinces and some stir-fried greens.

Serves 4.  Print Friendly

Elizabeth Moxon's Lemon Posset, but with Hanepoot & Glitter

A generous glug of South African Hanepoot adds sweetness and sunshine to this delicate lemony cream. Hanepoot (pronouned 'ha-nah-poort') is a much-loved sweet wine made from the ancient Muscat d'Alexandrie grape, believed by wine experts to be the one of the oldest genetically unmodified vines still in existence.  You can, of course, use any sweet dessert wine in its place, as long as it's not so old and noble that its perfume overpowers the lemon.

Elizabeth Moxon's Lemon Posset, but with Hanepoot and edible glitter.

I came across this recipe while browsing a cookbook that's become one of my favourites in recent years: Robert Carrier's Entertaining, published in 1977. It's not really old enough to be called a vintage cookbook, but enough years have gone by to make the book seem rather quaint, at least in comparison to the lavishly illustrated, self-congratulatory extravaganzas of the Nigella-Nigel-Jamie era (I'm not knocking these icons, but don't you loathe the way they drool, in print, over their own recipes?).

Still, this is a book worth hunting down, as are all of Carrier's books: it's packed with excellent recipes that deserve to be revisited.

'He was as influential as Elizabeth David or Delia Smith, and some argued that he was the link between them,' was what The Times had to say in his obituary. 'He became the leading populariser of the appeal of good cooking and helped to bring about a domestic revolution in imaginative, adventurous cooking.'

Until I saw this recipe, I hadn't heard of  Elizabeth Moxon - and found no trace online of a biography of this English cookery writer.  I was very pleased, then, to find that her 1764 cookbook, English Housewifry: Exemplified in Above Four Hundred and Fifty Receipts, has been digitised and is available in plain text format at Project Gutenberg, or in its original form at Google Books.

From English Housewifry by Elizabeth Moxen.

Elizabeth's Georgian recipe (which is not, strictly speaking, a posset; it's more like a syllabub) calls for 'a jack' of white wine, and advises that you sweeten the cream with sugar, 'to your taste'.  Robert Carrier calls for dry white wine, and an unspecified amount of icing sugar. I compromised by using half a cup each of hanepoot and  icing sugar. Feel free to adjust these quantities, but take care not to add too much wine - your dessert will become too runny and won't set to a perfect, fluffy cream.

I have frivolously decorated the tops of these creams with edible pink cake glitter, in keeping with the Elizabethan taste for bedecking food with comfits, fruit-paste shapes, spun sugar and all manner of fancies.

Serve this dessert within an hour of making it, or it will separate.

Please note that this recipe contains raw egg white.

Elizabeth Moxon's Lemon Posset, but with Hanepoot & Glitter

300 ml cream
the finely grated zest of a lemon
the juice of a lemon
½ cup (125 ml) icing sugar
½ cup (125 ml) Hanepoot, or any similar sweet white dessert wine
the white of a large egg
finely grated orange zest
edible glitter

Put the cream and lemon zest into a bowl and, using a whisk or an electric beater, whip until the cream is thick and fluffy. Sift the icing sugar over the top of the cream, and then pour in the dessert wine and lemon juice.

Using a spatula or wooden spoon, gently fold the mixture until well combined.  In a separate bowl, whisk the egg white to a soft peak and fold into the lemon cream.

Pile the posset into stemmed glasses (a piping bag is the only way to do this without messing the edges) and top with a little orange zest.  Place in the fridge. Just before serving, sprinkle with glitter. Serve within an hour.

Serves 4


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Leaf-Wrapped Wine-Soused Camembert, over the coals

Soaked in wine overnight, then flavoured with herbs and garlic, these little cheeses are wrapped in green leaves, tied with string and grilled over hot coals until the cheese has liquefied. This is a great warm-up snack for a braai [barbeque]: put them on at the same time as the meat (they take only a few minutes to cook) and then pass them around with a pile of crisps or salty crackers while you finish cooking the steaks.

You can flavour these cheeses with anything you like - I used thyme and garlic - and any large, fresh, flexible leaf will do as a wrapping: fig leaves, spinach leaves, banana leaves, beetroot greens, or even a robust lettuce leaf. (Here I used mustard greens, which grow like weeds in containers in my garden). Don't worry about the leaves catching fire: their moisture prevents them from charring too quickly.  By the time they've blackened at the edges, the cheese will have collapsed into a herby goo.

 

This, I might add, is the only dish that I've so far managed to cook successfully on my brand-new, super-duper, Taj Mahal of a braai-and-pizza oven.  I fired up the new braai on Sunday for the first time, partly because I'd laid my hands on a beautiful slab of fresh tuna, straight off a fishing boat, but also because I wanted to road-test my new grid. This grid, which I asked a local ironsmith to make, has a cunning feature: a third of the total space is covered by a removable double-decker section. This is designed, first, to keep food hot, and second to allow slow-cooking meat (such as chicken) to finish off at its own pace. The grid and its upper storey worked very well; the tuna steaks, on the other hand, were... um.... well,  they were deliciously, spankingly fresh, but they overcooked in a matter of minutes, welding themselves so resolutely to the new and shining grid that I started hunting for a crowbar.

Clearly, there is a long way to go before I get this outdoor cooking arena working perfectly.  (And the pizza oven?  Oh, please don't mention the bloody pizza oven.  I fired it up once, and the results were dismal.  The wood burned out too quickly, the oven didn't get hot enough, and the pizzas were floppy, stodgy and riddled with concrete dust. Certain members of my family were so disgusted with their 'pizzas' that they dumped them in the bin. Some gave scornful snorts at my bourgeois efforts to own a pizza oven. But that's another story.)

Thank goodness for the cheese.

Leaf-Wrapped Wine-Soused Camembert, Cooked over the Coals
4 small, just-ripe Camembert cheeses
250 ml (1 cup) white wine
2 T (30 ml) olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
12 large, fresh green leaves (see notes above)
a few sprigs of fresh thyme, or herbs of your choice
salt and milled black pepper

The day before you want to braai the cheeses (or at least six hours in advance), use a sharp knife to slice off the top layer of rind, removing about 2mm.  Put the cheeses, and the sliced-off rinds, into a shallow dish. Prick holes, using a fork, all over the soft upper surfaces of the cheeses. Mix together the wine, olive oil and crushed garlic, and pour the mixture over the cheeses.  Cover with cling film and set aside in a cool place.  Turn the cheeses once or twice while they marinate.

Soak 1.5 metres of string in cold water ten minutes.  Remove any large, stiff stalks from the leaves.  Place two leaves, crosswise, on your counter top.  Place a wheel of cheese on top.  Drizzle some of the marinade over the cheese, top with a few sprigs of thyme, season with salt and pepper, and cover with the sliced-off 'lid' of rind.

 

Place another leaf on top. Cut off a 40-cm length of wet string and slide it under the bottom-most leaf.  Gather the edges of the leaves up into a parcel, pleating and tucking as you go, and secure it by knotting the string around it in six 'spokes'  (see picture, left.) Don't worry if the parcel is scruffy: as long as there are no gaping holes, your cheese is safe. Repeat the process with the remaining cheeses.

Place the parcels over hot coals, face down, for about three minutes, or until the top of the parcel is browned. Before the cheese melts completely, flip over the parcel, using a spatula, and allow the underside to cook for another three to five minutes  (depending on the heat of your coals). The very instant you see cheese seeping from the parcel, it's ready. Serve immediately.

Serves 8. http://whatsforsupper-juno.blogspot.com/2009/08/spring-salad-of-edamane-beans-fennel.html

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