The cat’s bollocks and other tales…..

The woolly hat pulled down around my ears efficiently protected them from the chill of the biting wind but failed miserably in filtering out the piercing cries of an enraged cat in a cage being carted off for castration. Molly, the cat in question, might appear to be an unlikely candidate for castration which only goes to confirm the foolhardiness of judging anything by appearances, names or, indeed, covers. When he was a tiny kitten, some 6 months ago, we had pored over diagrams of cats’ genitals whilst holding him up by his tail in order to make a clear decision as to his Molly or Manliness. The diagrams were simple and seemingly foolproof. A male was designated by two black dots, one above each other, in the form of a colon whilst the female was symbolised by an inverted exclamation mark. Following this foolproof system we, clearly far beyond fooldom, named him Molly. At the moment of writing, Molly, should be groggily awakening from a drug induced slumber filled with dreams of pussies which is where they will remain henceforth. I on the other hand, desperately clinging onto the equivocal mantra of things hurting me far more than they’re hurting you, came home and cooked Cock Robin: fooled again by the punctuation, Robin is no cock.

Exhausted from innuendo, all that remains is to tell you how good is a simple roast chicken. “Roast Chicken and other stories” by Simon Hopkinson has a place on my shelf of most used cook books. His view that a good cook will produce a good dish from even the scrawniest chicken whilst a bad cook will produce a bad dish, even if using a chicken from Bresse, is one to which I subscribe. The chicken in the picture is a Label Rouge chicken, not from a smart poulterer, but from our local Lidls. To prepare it I carefully slid wedges of butter under the skin of the breast and filled the cavity of the bird with a quartered onion and a bunch of snow covered sage branches from the garden. Once trussed, I poured some olive oil over the breast and thighs and liberally sprinkled the bird with sea salt and ground black pepper and placed the bird on a rack which sits in roasting tray, in which I poured a couple of glasses of water. The bird goes into a pre heated oven at 21oC  which is turned down to 190C after 20 minutes. A further 40 – 45 minutes of cooking, with occasional basting, will produce a well cooked bird. I also take the time to place pieces of cooking foil over areas that I feel are browned enough. The cooked chicken should be left to rest for a good 30 minutes which gives one the time to reduce the delicious juices in the pan. This with a green salad, some good bread and glass of wine is the dog’s …….which reminds me, I must go and pick up Molly.