Grilled chicken with roast vegetables and salsa verde

Chickens are not hardy birds. If it's too cold, too hot, too wet etc. they won't lay. This causes problems when you not just rear your own chickens but also incubate the eggs like Elizabeth Buckingham at the Small holiding in Chadbury rather than buying in live chicks like most poultry farms. When the birds don't lay for a week or two, ten weeks on you get a break in the amount the amount of chickens you have available. One example of this is Christmas 2007 when we had freezing fog every day & night for a good week - a week and a half. Their chickens stopped laying during that period, so by the middle of February (the end of the natural life cycle) there were three weeks when they didn't have chickens available.

When this happens I turn to Madgetts farm instead - such as the above - which also produce fine quality free range chicken - far beyond the quality you can get from supermarkets, and, indeed many butchers.

The chicken bones I turned into stock, which I then used as a base for the champagne sauce to accompany scallops on Valentine's Day.

Vegetables were aubergines, courgettes, peppers and parsnips (hiding under peppers), sprinkled with thyme and maldon salt.

While the aubergines and courgettes taste wonderful on the grill pan (left), the peppers and parnsips require a longer cooking time, so these were roasted in the oven.



Salsa verde - parsley, onion, garlic, capers, chilli, olive oil & salt.

As the oil settles, the colour deepens from that below.














This was a special request as part of a 3 day wedding event at Wellacres near Moreton in Marsh.


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