Chicken with White Wine, Saffron, Pine Nuts and Raisins

We don't eat much chicken in our house, unless it's a whole roast that gets slowly worked down into left-over pieces and soup stock. Chicken parts just seem so expensive compared to buying the whole thing, and when the cost is taken into account we just gravitate to other meats like lamb or pork. A good chicken recipe does turn the head, though, and this one from the Borough Market Cookbook was the equivalent of a lithe, buxom blonde in a bikini (or, more to my liking, George Clooney taking one of his pot bellied pigs for a walk).

This was also perfect for having guests around - fairly simple to prepare and it could just bubble away in the background without you worrying how your level of drinking might impair the final outcome. I wasn't entirely convinced by the dish as it did cook away; the saffron with the wine gave off a slightly acidic smell that I didn't think promised good things. Everyone, though, loved it, with the chicken coming out tender and the raisins adding a nice touch of sweet to the dry wine and the exotic saffron. A bit of cous cous on the side helped lap up the sauces and went with the vaguely North African aura of the dish. And, ideally for my thrifty mind, you can make it by jointing the chicken into 8 pieces, leaving the chance for you to make stock from the carcass. It's firmly entered the Must Make Again list, and fairly near the top, too.

For the one-pot-wonder that this is, I'm submitting this to Lis at La Mia Cucina for this month's Weekend Cookbok Challenge.
Chicken with White Wine, Saffron and Raisins, From Borough Market Cookbook (Meat and Fish)
serves 4

• 1 medium chicken, jointed into 8
• 1 Tbs flour
• 3 Tbs olive oil
• 2 large onions, cut into half-moon slivers
• 6 garlic cloves
• 2 bay leaves
• sea salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 600ml dry white wine
• 1 pinch saffron threads
• 75 g raisins (the original recipe calls for currants)
• 60g pine nuts
• 10g fresh parsely

1. Dust the chicken pieces with flour
2. Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed casserole dish and begin browning the chicken on all sides. Make sure there's enough room for the pieces (you may need to do it in batches) since you want the chicken to brown nicely and not be crowded in to the pot. Remove chicken as it crisps and set aside, and keep the oil in the casserole.
3. Crush the garlic with a pinch of sea salt in a mortar and pestle.
4. Saute the onion in the casserole dish that cooked the chicken, stirring and loosening any brown bits left behind from the chicken.
5. When the onion is turning lightly golden, add the garlic paste and stir, cooking for about 30 seconds.
6. Put the chicken back in the dish, placed together snugly and with the skin side up.
7. Stick in the 2 bay leaves, tucked underneath the chicken pieces.
8. Season with salt and pepper, and add in the wine and saffron. Make sure the saffron is submerged in the liquid.
9. Bring to a simmer and cook for 40-45 minutes, or transfer to an oven at 180C / 350 F and cook for the same amount of time in there
10. After 20 minutes of the cooking, sprinkly the rasisns (or currants) and pine nuts over the chicken.
11. Check the level of the liquid - there should be at least 240ml / 1 C of liquid in the dish so top up with water or chicken stock if needed.
12. Serve with parsely scattered over the top.

Chicken, Leek, and Barley Soup

Winter is still a handful of days away, technically, but I've quite settled into my darkened-day hibernation mode without the need of calendars to confirm how I feel. To whit:

• It's cold outside, it's cold inside: our famed kitchen extension - which might or might not be done in time for Christmas dinner - is also a few days short of the important moment when we can turn the heating on in it. Making everything in the house c-o-l-d as this large, open room sucks in all the other heating into it.
• Climbing into bed results in too-close communication with icy sheets. My alluring orange fleece vest, woolen socks, and extra-thick pajamas don't help stave off the cold. Last night I called for the season's first use of the hot water bottle, fondly known as 'The Warmth Pig' for the way the heated rubber gives off a sausagey smell (I was tired when the name came out, but it's sensibly stuck).
• It's too dark to ride my bicycle home at night, I'm nibbling all the time, and my extra winter coat (of fat) is piling on. Oh yes it is.
• My lovely new Mac laptop is truly dead. It would cost about as much to fix it as it would be to get a new one. I've spent 2 days this week feeling utterly crushed about it and having on some dark days/nights of the soul over the waste of money and my careless stupidity. At least, in this case, the cold, dark, shortened days are an appropriate mirror of my mood.

This all adds up to me craving warm, hearty, comfort food. Large bowls of spaghetti bolognese. Great big mugs of hot cocoa with oatmeal cookies to dunk into it. Or a hearty chicken soup. I'm sure I'll tackle them all before the month is over, but the soup won out this time.

The leek and barley was a nice twist from a traditional leek and potato soup. I like using barley to thicken soups in place of cream or potatoes. After an hour or so of cooking, all the starch that the barley gives off helps create a soup that has the umami of something cooked with cup-fulls of cream, but which has been made in a healthier fashion.

I also quite luxuriously used a whole chicken to make the stock, which I then shredded the meat from and put back into the stock. With generous amounts of pepper, it all worked together to be a creamy, warming, filling and hearty dish which will definitely feature heavily on this winter's soup menu. I might be tempted to experiment in the future with some gentle curry spices to take the soup in a mulligatawny direction, but that's only if I can be tempted away from my new Winter 2007/2008 Comfort Food.

In the meantime, don't forget the Menu For Hope campaign going on at Chez Pim - there are many tempting prizes, including a paella starter kit from yours truly.


Chicken, Leek, and Barley Soup

• 1 medium sized chicken (1 1/2 kilos / 3 lbs)
• 2 liters of water
• 1 large onion, peeled and cut into quarters
• 2 bay leaves
• 200 g barley, rinsed
• 1/2 liter water
• 4 medium leeks, washed
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Place the chicken in a large pot with the 2 liters of water and the onion, and bring to a boil. If the chicken doesn't look like it will be submerged under the water, you may need to quarter it.
2. Gently boil this stock for about an hour.
3. At the same time in another pot, bring the barley and 1/2 liter of water to a gentle boil. Also boil this for about an hour, checking in on it every 20 minutes or so to make sure the water hasn't boiled away.
4. Chop the leeks into approximately 1 cm / 1.2 inch disks. Set aside until ready to use.
5. After the hour, remove all the chicken and onion pieces from the stock pot. Set the chicken aside to cool down enough until you can handle it.
6. Also after the hour and once the stock pot contains only liquid, add the barley and the leeks to the stock pot. Bring to a gentle boil and cook for around 30-40 minutes.
7. Shred the chicken - remove the skin and throw it out, and pull the meat apart so that it's in bite-sized chunks.
8. After 30 minutes, check the soup mixture for consistency. It should be nicely thick rather than watery. If it needs to thicken up, turn up the heat to boil away some of the water.
9. Add salt to taste, and enough pepper to make the entire soup warmingly peppery.
10. Add the chicken back into the soup when it is otherwise ready, and cook for a further 3 minutes to warm through.