Risbridger - Midnight Chicken

For my grandparents, and for JMU: the Tall Man.

A note before you begin:

These recipes were first made in a fan oven (mine!). If youre using a conventional oven, just raise the temperature by about 15C but all ovens are different, and with most roasting and baking youll learn as you go along what your own particular oven is doing.

Things to Remember

This book has three main morals, and I urge you to remember them and apply them liberally.

1. Salt your pasta water.

2. If in doubt, butter.

3. Keep going.

T here are lots of ways to start a story, but this one begins with a chicken. It was the first story I ever wrote about food, and it begins with a chicken in a cloth bag hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. It was dark outside, and I was lying on the hall floor, looking at the chicken through the door, and looking at the rust in the door hinges, and wondering if I was ever going to get up.

Perhaps, I thought, lying on the hall floor, I will just stay on the hall floor forever, and sink through the laminate, and into the concrete, and down into the earth.

But this is a hopeful story. Its the story of how I got up off the floor.

Its also the story of how to roast a chicken, and how to eat it. This is a story of eating things, which is, if you think about it, the story of being alive. More importantly, this is a story about wanting to be alive.

Eventually, the Tall Man came home, and he helped me up. Come on, he said, and we went into the kitchen together, and I made this, late at night, and we ate it at midnight, with wine, and bread, and our fingers, sopping up the garlicky juices from the baking tray, sucking the bones.

So this story begins with a chicken. This is the best roast chicken youll ever have, and I think it might just be perfect.

Midnight Chicken

For 2, with leftovers (for soup and salad and stock and sandwiches)

Chicken, mine was 1.6kg

Garlic, about 8 cloves, or as many as you can muster

Fresh chillies, 2 (or 3 if you dont have chilli salt)

Rosemary

Thyme

Mustard, the grainy sort

Pepper

Chilli salt (or sea salt)

Olive oil (perhaps)

Ginger, a nub about the size of your thumb

Honey, about a spoonful

Lemon, 1

Take your chicken out of its packaging. Sit it in a baking tray; let it breathe. Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Take half of your garlic and chop it finely, then put it in a cup. Using the kitchen scissors, chop the chillies and a few sprigs of rosemary and thyme. Put those in your cup, too. Add a hefty teaspoon of mustard, some pepper and chilli salt (just ordinary sea salt will do, if you havent got chilli salt). You can add a little splash of olive oil too, if you like. I dont always, but sometimes I do, and then it is gold.

Peel and grate the ginger, if you have a little grater, or you can just chop it if not. Itll be okay. Add most of it to your cup with the garlic and herbs. Put the last pinch into a mug with the honey. Boil a kettle.

Take the lemon and cut it in half. Juice one half very briskly, and the other half a little less briskly. Pour most of the lemon juice into your cup of stuff. Stir.

Pour the rest of the lemon juice into the mug with the ginger and honey. Add hot water from the kettle. Stir. Drink. Steady yourself.

Go back to the chicken. Unloop the elastic string holding its little legs together, and shove four of the garlic cloves and the less-squeezed lemon half up its little bottom. Loop it up again, if you can, then rub the garlic-chilli-herbs-ginger-lemon mixture into the chicken skin; into the legs, the thighs, the wings.

Slide the chicken into the oven. Set the chicken timer (your timer might be different, but mine is shaped like a little red hen) for about 1 hour and 20 minutes, if your chicken weighs the same as mine, and your oven is temperamental in the same ways as mine. If your chicken is bigger or smaller than mine, give it about 30 minutes per 500g (there are very accurate roasting-time calculators online: I use the BBC Good Food one).

Have a glass of wine.

When the timer rings, check the chicken. I am very bad at testing when a chicken is done, but I know in theory something about sticking a skewer into the meatiest bit of the leg and the juices running clear. If its still pink, send it back to the oven. If not, turn the oven off and let the chicken sit for 5 minutes. Dip some bread in the juices.

Carve the chicken. Tear the meat from the bones. Drink. Eat. Feel glad.

Ive begun this book with a chicken, but who knows where a story really begins? To understand the chicken, youd have to understand what came before. It was like this: one summer, I woke and discovered that the world had become different. Or rather, I had become different. Between the world and me, something had changed. I had fallen out of love with the world. This was not the first time, but it was the worst, and I recognised it with the dull, sinking feeling of a person on a picnic looking at a cloudy horizon. A storm was coming.

I tried my best to head it off at the pass, before it could break (or before I could break). I took up yoga and Zen meditation. I gave up caffeine and bright screens. I went to work every day. But still it kept on, and I knew it was coming: the big It, the Something, the Storm.

Everything about the world was becoming overwhelming, and it was terrifying. Sounds were too loud, colours too bright, every decision a choose-your-own-adventure of potential catastrophe. Peoples faces moved too quickly, and their minds the same. I was dizzy and sick on crowded trains. I couldnt follow a conversation. I couldnt breathe. It was as if the whole world had been turned up, and I had been turned down: I was thinner through, like tracing paper, or wet newsprint. I was a ghost. I clung to things, hoping for some shape, for some pattern in me to emerge triumphant. But there was nothing, and so every day I came home from work and cried.

Summer became September. I quit my job, and cried more instead. Mostly I stayed in bed. And then, one wet day just after my twenty-first birthday, a Monday, I tried to step into the path of a number 25 bus, destination Oxford Circus.

A lot of people, cleverer and more learned than me, have written books about why people try to kill themselves. I prefer to think of the reasons I didnt.

An ambulance came and took me to the hospital, and I sat in the waiting room of the duty psychiatrist, and suddenly, for the first time in a long time, I thought of baking: of a pie. I dont remember very much about the hospital itself (the brain is clever about forgetting things it would hurt you to remember), but I remember the pie, and I remember the way I worked through each ingredient, step by step, and how, when the duty psychiatrist asked me why, I could only think of