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Sunday dinner

What is better on a Sunday than a nice Sunday roast, at home we often had roastbeef, but I find roastbeef too much for two people, so I usually go for a roast chicken, not quite the same, I know! Here, I tried a combination of what chefs like Jamie Oliver suggest and what my Mum does, and the flavours are all from the Mediterranean area, so I called it :

Roast chicken Mediterranean style
1,5 kg free-range chicken
a head of garlic
pitted green olives
a few twigs of rosemary
1 organic lemon
2 tomatoes
olive oil
salt, pepper

1) Preheat the oven to 200-220°C. Wash and pat dry the chicken. Rub it with salt and freshly ground black pepper.
2) Insert slices of the lemon, along with rosemary leaves, a handful of olives and a few garlic cloves into the cavity.
3) Rub the bottom of a roasting tray with olive oil, then rub the bird with oil as well. Put two slices of the lemon on a roasting tray and lay the bird on them.
4) Put in the oven and let it roast for an hour or so.
5) Cut up two tomatoes, half an onion and lay them along with another handful of olives and one of garlic cloves into the tray, lower the oven temperature to 170°-200°C. Let it roast for another hour, turning the bird around if necessary.


I had to get my boyfriend from the train station and come back so turned the oven off and left both the chicken and the pancakes (the latter covered in tin foil) for 45 minutes longer, a bit of the outer meat was slightly dry, but the effect on thigh meat was one of slow-roasting, not bad at all!
I decided to try something new with it so went for these potato pancakes flavoured with some grated cheese. The result was satisfying, but perhaps I should have used a cheese with a more powerful aroma or put more in the batter, as the cheese taste didn’t come through very much. I also suggest to add a bit of chopped fresh parsley.

Potato pancakes

400g boiled, peeled and mashed potatoes
100g grated cheese (emmental, cheddar...)
75g flour
4 eggs
10 cl fluid cream
salt and pepper

Mix all the ingredients together, season to taste and leave to rest for half an hour or longer. Then drop the batter and spread it in an oiled hot pan to obtain lmittle pancakes (a 30cm pan should hold 4 to 5 pancakes. Fry them until golden brown on both sides and keep them warm in the oven.


For dessert, I didn’t make the strawberry tart as planned, thought it might be too much and that was a good thing because he had brought home a batch of Seattle Top Pot doughnuts and giant cookies, and of course, we had to try them! The chocolate ones with whocolate icing went down particularly well...
My other culinary pressies incledud many sorts of Hershey’s chocolate and Tom Douglas’s Seattle Kitchen cookbook, which was sweet from my man and a nice read.

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