Chicken Licken
I decided yesterday that I might see how I get on with cooking a roast chicken. While this may not seem the greatest culinary adventure in the world, it is really surprisingly difficult in Shanghai.
I searched in Carrefour for anything vaguely resembling a chicken suitable for roasting. There are plenty of chicken bits available, feet, wings, breast fillets, but apparently no whole birds. I finally found something that looked likely, it was squashed up inside its little tray and covered in clingfilm, it did seem quite small, but I decided that it was probably half a chicken, which was good enough to experiment with. By way of accompaniment, I bought a packet of McCormick Chicken Gravy Mix (no Bisto here, no gravy granules, no gravy browning – there are Oxo Cubes but that's it).
Imagine my surprise when I unwrapped the chicken today to find its head was still attached. I checked in my Nigella How To Eat book to see if there was anything in there about How To Behead Chickens, but alas there wasn’t. I got my big meat cleaver out (I knew it would come in handy one day) and started hacking away, trying to keep my mind blank. I managed to chop its little head off and get it in the bin without really registering what I was actually doing.
You would have expected it by now to resemble the sort of chicken that we are so used to seeing in Morrisons. But it didn’t – it looked scrawnier, and emptier. I came to the conclusion that this must be a very natural chicken, without having been plumped up with water and goodness knows what else. Not having sage, or even a packet of that awful dried stuffing mix, I stuck a whole onion in it to hold its chest up, covered it in salt and pepper and butter and put it in the oven.
An hour later, I got out the Gravy Mix and made it up. It was sadly disappointing – it was white for one thing, and tasted more like soup than gravy. I would have done better just dissolving an Oxo cube in water. I put the gravy in the bin and took the chicken out the oven.
It was certainly quite a nice golden brown, but it smelt very strange. It didn’t really smell like chicken – it smelt too ‘gamey’ somehow...and when I started to cut it up, I knew for sure it wasn’t chicken. I have no idea what it was – maybe a duck (though I’m positive it wasn’t), or possibly a pheasant. One thing is for sure though - roast chicken, roast potatoes and gravy is now not only a distant memory, it will be staying that way.
I searched in Carrefour for anything vaguely resembling a chicken suitable for roasting. There are plenty of chicken bits available, feet, wings, breast fillets, but apparently no whole birds. I finally found something that looked likely, it was squashed up inside its little tray and covered in clingfilm, it did seem quite small, but I decided that it was probably half a chicken, which was good enough to experiment with. By way of accompaniment, I bought a packet of McCormick Chicken Gravy Mix (no Bisto here, no gravy granules, no gravy browning – there are Oxo Cubes but that's it).
Imagine my surprise when I unwrapped the chicken today to find its head was still attached. I checked in my Nigella How To Eat book to see if there was anything in there about How To Behead Chickens, but alas there wasn’t. I got my big meat cleaver out (I knew it would come in handy one day) and started hacking away, trying to keep my mind blank. I managed to chop its little head off and get it in the bin without really registering what I was actually doing.
You would have expected it by now to resemble the sort of chicken that we are so used to seeing in Morrisons. But it didn’t – it looked scrawnier, and emptier. I came to the conclusion that this must be a very natural chicken, without having been plumped up with water and goodness knows what else. Not having sage, or even a packet of that awful dried stuffing mix, I stuck a whole onion in it to hold its chest up, covered it in salt and pepper and butter and put it in the oven.
An hour later, I got out the Gravy Mix and made it up. It was sadly disappointing – it was white for one thing, and tasted more like soup than gravy. I would have done better just dissolving an Oxo cube in water. I put the gravy in the bin and took the chicken out the oven.
It was certainly quite a nice golden brown, but it smelt very strange. It didn’t really smell like chicken – it smelt too ‘gamey’ somehow...and when I started to cut it up, I knew for sure it wasn’t chicken. I have no idea what it was – maybe a duck (though I’m positive it wasn’t), or possibly a pheasant. One thing is for sure though - roast chicken, roast potatoes and gravy is now not only a distant memory, it will be staying that way.
posted by Linda at 11:50 PM
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