Sea salt flakes 2 tsp, or 1 tsp pouring salt Leeks 2-3, cleaned, trimmed and cut into approx 7cm logsįresh parsley stalks or few sprigs, tied or banded together Serves 4-8 (cooked this way it seems to go much further than roast chicken, so you can feed more first time or have plenty for the rest of the week)

And, as I am presenting this in its role as a family favourite, my kitchen perennial, in fact, I feel I can allow myself to be bossier than normal, even telling you how you should eat it: by this I mean the Lawsonian familial practice of adding fresh fronds of dill and some English mustard – just a pinprick or great, sinus-clearing teaspoonfuls – as we greedily, gratefully eat. And if you can steam them above the chicken, so much the better. Obviously, if you want, you can ditch the rice and think of serving steamed potatoes, instead. On the whole, I tend to go for the higher rather than lower number – no huge surprise, I’m sure – not because I think it’s all needed, but because one of my favourite uses of leftover meat is a variation of a salad I make with leftover turkey at Christmas: chunks or shreds of cold chicken stirred into cold brown basmati rice, with pomegranate seeds, sunflower seeds or any mixture of similar seeds, fresh dill, lemon juice, salt and 1-2 drops of gorgeously flavoured oil (a rich, mustardy yellow cold-pressed rapeseed being my favourite). I like brown basmati here, and work on 75-100g per head before cooking, depending on the ages and appetites of the eaters. So, let me reassure you that really all you need to know is that you simply brown the chicken before adding vegetables and just enough liquid to cover, and cook them slowly before eating on top of rice. īy its very nature, this symbolises the very free-style form of cooking that a recipe seems to argue against. And very often, when all is heaped into the pan at the beginning, just before it is left to cook itself into aromatic succulence, I grate in the zest of 1 lemon, then squeeze in the juice and maybe add a sprinkling of dried mint, too.

At all times, you can play with the vegetables. For example, you could toss in some pancetta cubes before you add the chicken and maybe use cider as your flavour-giving alcoholic beverage of choice or you could add some ginger, freshly grated or sliced, along with the oil and use Chinese cooking wine or sake in place of the white wine or vermouth and put coriander stalks in, along with the parsley or instead, and add fresh, de-seeded red chilli, cut into fine almost-rings, as well as chopped coriander, at the end. Relax: obviously, it’s not the reliability from a practical perspective that’s in question rather, I cook this so often I know that one written-down version of it can’t take into account or begin to convey all its possible permutations.

Nigella lawson bites