Roasted Garlic Chicken with Bean Stew

Prep time: 40 minutes once garlic roasted
Cooking time: 50 minutes
Serves: 4–6

Good-quality Label Rouge chickens came at a price but were delicious. These birds, with their golden skin and grapefruit coloured flesh – gained from eating locally grown maize – cooked beautifully to have succulent well-flavoured flesh and crispy skin. Rose garlic, roasted in oil until the flesh of each clove melted to a velvety, honey-coloured paste, mixed with the salt-crystal-flecked butter, made a sensational paste with which to season the chicken.

1 bulb garlic
125 grams butter (non-dairy-lovers could use ¼ cup olive oil)
4–6 chicken leg and thigh portions a few fresh sage leaves
4–6 thick cut slices pancetta or bacon

 Preheat the oven to 190°C. Drizzle the garlic bulb with a little oil and wrap in foil.  Bake in the preheated oven for 35–45 minutes until soft. Cool, halve, squeeze out the cooked fl esh and mix with the butter (or oil).

 Lift the skin from each chicken portion and spread a generous amount of garlic paste between the skin and the meat. Spread the remainder on top. Place a sage leaf and a slice of bacon on top of each portion and season with pepper.

 Bake in the preheated 190°C oven for 40 minutes or until cooked. Serve with Tarbais Bean Stew (recipe below) or potatoes, cooked to your choosing, and a green vegetable.

Tarbais Bean Stew

Prep time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 15–20 minutes
Serves: 4–6

2–3 stalks celery, finely sliced
1 leek, white part only, finely sliced
1 green chilli, deseeded and sliced
¼ cup olive oil
3 cups cooked haricot beans (I used Tarbais beans)
3–4 cups chicken stock (1–2 stock cubes and water is fine)

Cook the celery, leek and chilli in the olive oil until softened. Add the beans and chicken stock and simmer for around 15 minutes until the beans are well flavoured.

 Season with salt and pepper and add herbs of your choice; sage is good with beans and helps with the flatulence that beans are notorious for creating!

Recipe From ‘My French Kitchen’ by Allyson Gofton reproduced with permission from Penguin. Originally published in issue 110 of FrenchEntrée Magazine