The ultimate comfort of roast chicken - my top tips to help your chicken become great

Roast chicken needs no fancy write up or explanation, it is what it is: quite possibly the most comforting meal we can cook and eat. Imagine those first few moments when it comes out of the oven, all glistening and golden brown, the crisp skin encrusted with a few specks of salt, almost crackling as you tear it from the breast or leg. Roast chicken has that deeply savoury aroma, enough to make your mouth water and the few moments you have to let it rest can be torture, best to busy yourself with making the gravy while the promise of the succulent flesh is tantalizing. I imagine that anyone who roasts a chicken on a regular basis has they own idea of what works and so do I. An accumulation of different ideas tried and tested has resulted in my own little routine when preparing the bird: Here are some things I think help roast chicken become fabulous:

Left over chicken pasta bake with asparagus

A short post today. The tolls of having a full time teaching position coupled with all the lesson planning that inevitably accompanies it has rendered me pretty exhausted both on the cooking and blogging fronts. I do have one thing to talk about though;  left over chicken. I have to admit that no amount of waxing lyrical by even my food hero, Nigel Slater can induce me to embrace the pleasures of left over chicken. Like itself after sitting in the fridge for a day, it leaves me cold. Mr Slater claims you can feast of such a bird for days, but I usually cannot even bear to think about it. What is there to like about cold, stringy meat? That's another of my foodie fears, being served a chicken curry or stew where the left over chicken has been cooked so much it resembles miniature worms. Ugh. Despite all this rambling hatred, I am still always tempted by the tantalizing smell of the chicken roasting in shops and the promise of the treasured chicken prize; the crispy skin. I usually devour this as soon as possible, nibble a few pieces from the dense, tasteless flesh and then sigh and wonder what I'm going to do with the rest.