A fridge too far?

My challenge: I had one chicken, and half an hour – 40 minutes at the most – to make something from it for dinner. I refuse to buy chicken breasts for many reasons: because joints of chicken in supermarkets are never from free-range birds; because I don’t do chicken-breasty things, stuffed with parma ham and ricotta, asparagus or even garlic butter; because I think the kids should learn that a chicken has legs and because, in the end, I don’t especially like chicken breasts. Thus I always buy whole chicken, such as the one I had to cook in a hurry last week.

No time to soak some dried ceps. No cream in the house, it being under a temporary ban. Not much of anything except a good store cupboard, onions and some excellent garlic. It defines one’s state of mind, this moment of deciding what to cook: we are all fridge half-full or fridge half-empty types when we search for inspiration. Simon Hopkinson is a fridge half-full sort of cook, as evinced by his latest cookbook The Vegetarian Option (Quadrille), based on the inspiration derived from a couple of old courgettes and a packet of frozen runner beans.

There are moments, dear reader, when I wear the opposite of this sunny disposition. After a day at work, I occasionally come home, kick the cat, rummage through the fridge and complain there is nothing to eat. The Leigh fridges – we need two for all the food we don’t have – are never truly empty, nor are they marvels of organisation. There are no labelled Tupperware boxes, no cubes of frozen home-made stock. There will be five cucumbers or none, three old Jerusalem artichokes (I think they’ve gone now) and some mince creeping past its sell-by date because sometimes I cannot lower myself to cooking mince.

Happily, there are also days when a morning spent disposing of the artichokes and finally cooking the red cabbage, or trying a new steam-and-roast technique with a little duck, are very satisfying. Sometimes the satisfaction comes in the eating: such was the case with this chicken.

Rowley Leigh is the chef at Le Café Anglais

rowley.leigh@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/leigh

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Chicken ‘en pissaladière’

The pissaladière is the Niçoise pizza, a bread dough coated with slow-cooked onions and criss-crossed with anchovy fillets and olives. Once the chicken is jointed, this is a very easy dish indeed. Serves four.

Ingredients
1 small roasting chicken
Olive oil
3 medium onions
4 cloves garlic
Thyme
9 anchovy fillets
1 glass dry white wine (optional)
A generous pinch of chilli flakes
2 tbs black olives
1 tbs chopped parsley

Method
● Joint the chicken. Cut down between the legs and the breast, turn the bird over and remove the legs, taking care to take the “oyster” (the little muscle at the top of the leg that buries itself in the backbone). Cut the legs in half. Remove the wishbone, scraping it clean and then prising it out. Placing the bird breast-side down, separate the crown (the two breasts on the bone) from the backbone by cutting between the neck and the breasts. Place the crown breast side up and push down to break the breastbone. Cut off the two wings, taking a fat piece of breast with each piece, and cut off a triangular piece at the top of the crown. Cut the remaining piece of breast in half. You should now have nine joints, all with bone attached and of approximately equal size.
● Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a wide sauté pan and put in the seasoned chicken pieces, skin side down. Adjust the gas to a medium flame and let the chicken brown gently while you peel and thinly slice the onions and garlic. Turn the chicken and colour briefly the flesh side and then remove from the pan. Add another tablespoon of oil and add the onions and garlic and sauté these on a lively heat for three or four minutes before placing the chicken pieces, skin side up on top. Strew some thyme around the chicken, place an anchovy fillet on top of each piece, pour in the wine (or a cup of water), sprinkle with chilli flakes and cover. After 20 minutes add the olives. Five minutes later, remove from the heat and sprinkle with parsley. Serve, if you are in as big a hurry as I was, with some boiled rice.