I follow a few interesting food publishers on Twitter. Munchies is one and Epicurious do good stuff. Their only failing is falling into the modern media of announcing headlines like "15 reasons Taylor Swift is a better feminist than Joan of Arc" or "This girl walked down a dark alley, you won't believe what Jack the Ripper did next". Anyway, despite the post declaring "once you've roasted chicken on bread, you'll never do it any other way!!!!!!" I clicked on the article. It was pretty much what it said on the box, you roast the chicken on thick slices of bread. But it's what you do after that is the interesting part.
I love a good roast, but for a while I've been steering clear of the whole nine yards. For those that know me, the thought of me deliberately turning down a chance to eat potatoes might seem a bit strange, but I've been eating a lot more salad. A little bed of lettuce leaves growing outside the back door, some nice tomatoes and some feta cheese and an avocado and a simple dressing is nice base to start with. Which brings us back to the bread.
When I read the recipe I had a leg of lamb in the fridge, so we went with that. Some rosemary tucked in and around and a bit of chopped garlic rubbed into the meat. The salad got some olives thrown in, and yoghurt in the dressing, then that glorious crispy bread, flavoured from all the fat and the juices that came out from the roast, got cut up and tossed through. Oh my god. A pretty good salad got elevated to the next level. Roasting meat on bread had just begun.
Next up up was some pork belly. My idea this time was to use even less meat and dice it up once roasted and make it a warm crunchy salad. To my standard base salad I added, mung bean shoots, peanuts, diced green apple and used apple cider vinegar in the dressing. Some fennel seeds rubbed into the pork, plus the beautiful crunchy pork fat soaked bread made the lamb roast salad look tired and sad.
Finally tonight, I got to the original. The salad had some artichokes, grilled peaches and the now mandatory bread. Lemon zest over the bird and the lemons roasted in the bum went to the salad dressing. After the pork belly salad it was a bit of a letdown. Still, better than eating a full plate of roast veg in the QLD heat.
I miss my potatoes though.