LYDIA GERRATT

Can you imagine what big chunks of crusty white bread taste like after they have been roasted under a chicken for 50 minutes while soaking up all the flavoursome chicken juices and becoming crisp in the fat? Then add those unbelievably tasty pieces of bread to a tarragon, lettuce, spring onion salad covered in roast chicken portions – heaven on a plate. This is one of those brilliant dishes that doesn’t take too much effort to make and when done, it goes in the centre of the

I have to stop myself making this recipe all the time as it’s so good that I would happily eat it every night for dinner. Frying the chicken to make the skin super crispy and then roasting in cream to finish off the cooking makes the chicken incredibly tender. No dry chicken breast here. I’ve used chestnut mushrooms because you can get them all year round in the supermarket, but if, by some miracle, you find beautiful wild mushrooms, fresh porcini, girolles or chanterelles

To bash or not to bash the hell out of the chicken? I’ve tried both ways and I think that a very light bashing works the best with chicken to get the perfect schnitzel. If the chicken is too thin then it makes for a dry schnitzel, too thick and it’s lost the point of being a schnitzel! Some boiled new potatoes with lots of melted butter goes perfectly with the schnitzel and salad and that’s all you need for a lovely dinner. Miraculous ingredients: panko breadcrumbs, soft rou

Want to know how to grill a whole chicken so it’s ridiculously juicy with super crispy skin in 30 minutes? I’ve been inspired by a recipe from Cooks’ Illustrated, a brilliant American food magazine. They used a couple of techniques that I haven’t tried before to grill the best chicken ever. The first technique (which is completely genius) is to place the raw spatchcocked chicken on a very hot smoking cast iron pan just before you put it under the grill. This means that the un

I love roast chicken. When it’s made well, it’s brilliant. The base of this recipe, the fragrant rice stuffing, seems to cross quite a few countries in the Middle East, Greece and the Balkans – I suspect it originates from those culinary masters, The Ottomans, who colonised all of these countries in their time. My mum uses the same rice stuffing for roast duck and she was given her recipe by a Greek friend in the 1960’s. Don’t be put off by the walnuts and sultanas. Once th

THIS is the best meal to devour on a cold January weekend with the added benefits of; everything goes into one pan (less washing up!), chicken thighs (I’m trying to do more recipes with this delicious but cheap cut of meat), huge flavour from olives, peppers, tomatoes and chicken stock, plus pasta…..little tiny orzo (so much easier to get a lot onto one forkful). The chicken thighs are first browned and then finished by cooking in the chicken stock. The poaching makes them i

I love nothing better than cooking a ridiculously simple meal with a handful of ingredients and then getting that seriously happy ‘OMG my food is lush’ feeling when I clear my plate. This dish of chicken thighs with soy sauce, honey, some garlic and ginger is the one. As there are so few ingredients used to make the chicken, it’s really all about the cooking technique: the chicken thighs are semi- steamed/boiled in the soy sauce and honey. This cooking method makes the chi

The first time I went to Seville was for the olive harvest. The weather was balmy warm even though it was already October and I was feeling super lucky to be here, in Seville, on such a lovely work trip – one of the perks of being a food buyer for Waitrose. Standing under the olive trees watching the pickers literarily pick each olive by hand, I had no idea that the black olives are the ripe fruit and the green ones are unripe, who knew?! For years I had assumed that they w

Italian butchers are brilliant. I love going into these pristine, marble emporiums while on holiday and seeing what delicious morsels they are selling for me to, hopefully, grill to perfection on the barbecue for dinner. One summer’s holiday in Sicily was no different; a roaring fire with hunks of meat marinated in olive oil, garlic and rosemary scorching on the barbecue. But, this time we tried something completely new to me, the butcher filleted the chicken breasts into p

Have you ever wondered how to cook these baby chickens called, poussin, when you wander past them neatly stacked on the supermarket shelves? I love cooking poussin as they are the perfect size for a quick lunch for two adults or a mouth-watering meal for your children. Chicken cooked on the bone always has more flavour. Using a poussin makes this the easiest dish to prepare without having to buy a whole chicken and they are relatively cheap! Poussins are young birds and the