Chicken dinner

Sunday roasts are no longer a regular feature of life here at Epsom, but they do come out from time to time, most recently a couple of weeks ago, when we opted for roast chicken with trimmings.

First off, the Portuguese greens, noticed at reference 1.

Next boil up some stock. Various vegetables, probably including some left-overs, plus a chicken leg from Waitrose. I had inspected the chicken from M&S, which looked OK, but did not include whole leg and did not come in the sort of quantity I wanted. Strained the evening before, all ready to go the next day.

Next the stuffing. A small, round white loaf from Sainsbury's for the crumbs (and the gravy dipping). Dried sage from Turkey, hazel nuts from Turkey, onions, a few sticks of celery and a couple of eggs. No oil, this having been discontinued for a while, having been deemed, when combined with the fat from the bacon, to make the stuffing too oily and too firm.

The next phase was delegated to BH, while I went off to capture the Procter poster noticed at reference 2. Which has been face-to-wall in the study since, so I have got it out this afternoon to see if I can make up my mind about what to do with it. A pendant to Manet's Olympia?

First job on return was to crack out a bottle of Waitrose Fleurie - having recently had to change brand, the one we started with having gone missing. But this one did well enough. 

Fleurie seems to suit us, having first discovered it in the Bugle at Brading - of all the unlikely places.

Second job was to prepare the green vegetables. First the beans from England, rather than from Kenya, where they have been coming from of late. I thought that they were rather better, perhaps because they were probably a few days fresher, fewer days in cold store. 

Then the Portuguese greens: surprisingly clean for such a large head and there was virtually no waste - my practise being to cut out the central veins and to cut them up separately. Cut into chunks of around a centimetre, they cook in much the same time as the blades.

A leaf. Tops and tails of beans visible top right.

The solid part of gravy dipping. That is to say, after the full roux, using the fat from the stock. Crusts a little dry by now, but that is fine for dipping.

The wet part: no salt, pepper or anything of that sort. But I did use a dash of Sarson's gravy browning to bring up the colour, and I dare say that had plenty of salt in it. Which is confirmed at reference 3: ammonia caramel, glucose syrup and salt. I had not thought of sugar and I had not known that the stuff is also used to colour cakes, icing and beer. But it did very well: my best gravy for a while. A vote in favour of e-numbers?

The story about ammonia caramel from Bing: maybe it is just as well that I don't use the stuff very often and then not very much of it. Don't we complain about all the chlorine they put in chickens in the US?

With BH participating for the first time that I can remember. We had opted for a late lunch so perhaps she was hungry.

She also tells me today that she remembers her mother talking about putting gravy browning into Christmas cakes and Christmas puddings, perhaps a hangover from the war when things like carrots had to be substituted for the dried fruit.

The fowl from Sainsbury's - on our trusty Beryl Ware serving dish (small), possibly actually bought from the late lamented Cutluck's of Mill Road in Cambridge, one of the last places we knew to stock the stuff. The mainstay of institutional cafeterias until well into the 1970s. Lots of it to be had from car boot sales for years after that. Now almost collectors' items.

The stuffing. I dare say a lot of the shrinkage of the bacon is down to the water boiling off, but some of it will be melted fat soaking down into the stuffing.

Doesn't need very long. Less than an hour I should think - so don't put it into the oven at the same time as the chicken.

On the plate. Slightly untidy carving, but the fine condition of the greens more than made up for that. I took my gravy later on in the meal.

Dessert in the form of neighbourly cooking apples, stewed with a few cloves, which I have been finding a pleasant change from blackberries.

All very satisfactory; all of which resulted in a long snooze late afternoon, only waking at around 18:30.

After which I took a little more of the gravy, on brown.

Day two was more or less a repeat of day one. The form being that I take the two legs, while BH takes breast and wings. But I was a bit too full after the chicken dinner to take any more of Baker's Victoria plums, very reasonable though they were.

Day three - actually day four as there was an interval for child minding - was a sort of light chicken stew.

The soup that followed did two days, with the second day being snapped above. The usual red lentils, plus a bit of pork tenderloin which happened to be in the freezer for fortification, the odds and ends of chicken which might have gone into the soup, having gone into the stew.

I wonder how our consumption of red lentils compares with the average? Would there be both an ethnic dimension and a lentil colour dimension to consumption? At DIBA, for example, to be found at reference 4, they do a very good line in green lentils. Not something I imagine it would be very easy to find out about. Would Gemini decline to play on the grounds that I was getting either political or racial or both?

All very economical though. Adding a bit of tenderloin to the last knockings of the chicken, we got five day's meals.

PS 1: after posting this, gmail brings me reference 5, which points to reference 6, paywalled but available in a rather unsightly pre-print format. An attack on the old problem of whether my experience of, for example, red, is the same as yours. With the relevant result being that the authors could train their computer to read colours from brain waves and could then, up to a point anyway, use that computer to say what colour a person not involved in the training was seeing. Suggestive, at the least, that colour processing was much the same in everybody. But I shall try to take a bit of time later on to have a go at the unsightly pre-print. I don't suppose I shall go so far as to stump up the $50 or £50 it costs to get over the paywall.

PS 2: a bit later still, I came across reference 7. The first piece I recall seeing in either the Guardian or the Financial Times which comes out against the assisted dying bill presently with the House of Lords. Democracy at work - and with Debbonaire being a lady with an interesting CV. Maybe there will be a balancing piece before the debate scheduled for the Lords for Friday. I remind readers that while I do not appear in the columns of the Financial Times, I did appear in support of the bill on Parliament Square last Friday, as noticed at reference 9. And I now wear the pink button that I was issued with on that occasion.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/tapas.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/trolley-967.html.

Reference 3: https://www.sarsons.co.uk/products/browning-sauce/. 'Sarson’s Browning Sauce adds a rich colour to soups and gravies, microwave-cooked meats, cakes and icings and home brewed beer'.

Reference 4: https://www.dibarestaurant.co.uk/.

Reference 5: Do You Really See What I See? - F. Perry Wilson, Medscape - 2025.

Reference 6: Large-scale color biases in the retinotopic functional architecture are region specific and shared across human brains - Michael M. Bannert, Andreas Bartels - 2025.

Reference 7: There are still too many concerns about the UK’s assisted dying bill: In spite of its title, the legislation does not offer the terminally ill a genuine choice - Thangam Debbonaire, Financial Times - 2025..

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thangam_Debbonaire. As of February, Baroness Debbonaire, of De Beauvoir Town in the London Borough of Hackney.

Reference 9: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/fame-by-foot.html.