Roast Chicken for Two in One Pan & Fudgy Chocolate Brownies

It’s funny how food goes in cycles, I haven’t roasted a chicken for so long, and now I’ve done two in two weeks, must be comfort food in the cold weather or something!

From Jo Pratt’s In the Mood for Food. I wanted to make this one as soon as I saw it, but felt a bit put off by the fact that the potatoes, shallots a and garlic were roasted in with the chicken. I was worried about the fat. Not that I’m a low fat bod by any stretch of the imagination, but I was thinking it might be a bit greasy. After reading in Kathryn’s blog that hers turned out really well I thought - going to have to do it. So I did.

The chicken was rubbed with garlic and lemon, new potatoes par boiled and put in the tin with shallots and garlic, lemon plus a bit of rosemary, seasoning and olive oil. Baked for an hour the chicken was really moist and juicy, and the vegetables were good. Next time I’m going to do them in a separate pan for 40 minutes instead of the 1 hour that the chicken needed because in my furnace 40 mins was just right for the vegetables. I covered the vegetable half of the tin up with foil or else they would have been way too dark by the time the chicken had cooked.

Then at the end there is the gravy - pan juices, sherry, honey, stock, cream and peas. Oh it was so good! There was a bit of gravy left which we spooned up as a kind of after supper pea soup! It would easily make any roast dinner. I think it would also be good with pork too.

So onto something sweet in the form of Brownies.

These are from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. After much trial and error and trying many recipes these are the ones that my family likes best. They are chocolate-y, moist, melting delicious!

They are also not too strong on the chocolate front because they are made with bittersweet chocolate. I use half 70% cocoa solids dark chocolate and half 30% milk chocolate. So this brings it down to an average of 50% cocoa solids which is both dark and sweet enough for me. It actually took me many months a few years ago of trial and error to find the right balance.

Although saying I have found the recipe for my family I’d still like to try Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa ones too!