Sundays at our house

I just love Sundays! it's the one day of the week that we all get to spend pure quality time together as a family and a day when I get to really indulge my love of cooking. As I mentioned in a previous post about Sundays, we tend to linger over breakfast, then I do some baking and prepare the dinner and put it on low in the oven. Well this week breakfast looked like this:


And then me and the children made double choc chip cookies with hazelnuts:

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I consume 3 before they were even cool!

Then I decided to experiment with the chicken this week. We eat a lot of chicken as it is just so versatile, relatively cheap and, if you buy a whole one, goes a long way. However, it can get boring if you don't make the effort to try out new things. So, inspired by a Lebanese menu for a restaurant that me and Nick will be visiting soon, I decided to try something a little different. I noticed that a lot of the dishes included lemon juice, garlic, olive oil and tomatoes with spices such as cumin and paprika. So my creation went a little something like this (I have tried to give approximate amounts):

1. I made a paste out of tbsp olive oil, 4 large cloves of organic garlic, 1 tbsp of paprika, 1 tbsp of cumin, 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp black pepper corns, juice of 2 lemons, 1 tsp ginger powder t tbsp tomato puree.
2. Put everything into a small blender, or, as I did, pound the garlic in the pestle and mortar then add in the rest of the ingredients and gently pound into a paste.
3. Then I deicded to have a go at preparing the chicken in a spatchcock style by removing the backbone and flattening it out on a board.
4. Wash the chicken, pat dry, then rub the paste all over both the skin and the cavity which is now flat.
5. Lay some halved onions on the bottome of a large tray and place the chicken on top. Drizzle with a little more olive oil and place in the oven on a very low heat (100 degrees c) for 2 1/2 (for chicken of approx 1.8kg)


Well, what can I say, the chicken was divine. The skin was crispy and tangy and the flesh fell from the bones. We had it with a brown rice,aduki bean and roast onion (from the chicken) pilaff, some savoy cabbage that had been blanched, then refreshed in ice cold water and dressed with a lemon juice, olive oil and garlic dressing and some left over fresh bread from the morning's breakfast. We were all ravenous after our 2 1/2 hr long trek through the Cotswolds so needless to say it more than hit the spot!

As you can see, I was so hungry I couldn't wait to get started - the left thigh was the first to fall victim!

Desert was yet more cookies - yum and double yum!