The unspeakable paired with the unobtainable: a recipe

This week, I make a one-dish lunch for a friend and dice with death while combating Vitamin D deficiency.

Our friend Tareef is coming from Paris next week to spend a few days in the South and I’m looking forward to giving him lunch. I was noodling about trying to think of something to make for him and I remembered a recipe I’d stuck a Post-It on in CMQCB (C’est Meilleur Quand C’est Bon – it’s better when it’s good) a few weeks ago. CMQCB is a fat, quarterly magazine of restaurants, food trends, travel and shopping and I highly recommend it if you live in France, travel around France, are greedy, or – like me – a combination of all those things. The winter issue had a great section of seasonal recipes by French chef and food photographer, Jean-François Mallet, including one for roast chicken stuffed with apples, geziers and chestnuts with a watercress dressing made by combining chopped watercress with the cooking juices from the chicken. It’s been cold and grey and decidedly un-Spring-y here this week, so that’s probably why this cosy recipe jumped up from the recipe filing cabinet that is my brain.

Mallet’s recipe is great, but of course I tinkered with it quite a bit to come up with the recipe I’m sharing with you this week. As they say in the acknowledgments of any book that requires research, any mistakes are my own. But honestly, I think it’s pretty delicious and has the advantage of being a whole dinner you can make in one roasting tin. The dream.

Let’s talk for a moment about gésiers, those short cuts to flavour, the pride of the South West. I’m not using their French name to be pretentious. I’m using it because in case you don’t already know what they are, their English name might put you off before I get the chance to win you over. Down here in duck central, in the spirit of never allowing anything to go to waste, they use every bit of the bird. Gésiers are gizzards. They preserve them in duck fat, just like legs of confit de canard, and they’re a great thing to have on your shelf for those moments when you want to create a good dinner from almost nothing. Use them in a salad of bitter leaves with walnuts, goat’s cheese and a walnut oil dressing, or sauté them with some potatoes and finish it with lots of parsley and you have un régale, un délice. If you ever see tins of them where you are, grab them. They’re so good. But of course, I never want to give you a recipe where the ingredients may be impossible to get hold of, so I tested this using lardons too and it was great. Do use bacon, smoked or unsmoked, in place of gizzards, if that’s what you have. It’ll be great, I promise.

I meant to take a nice, clean picture of these, but I only remembered my good intentions when I had messily opened the tin. To get them out, immerse the tin in some hot water to melt the fat before opening, just as you do with tins of confit de canard, and then scoop them out with a fork. Save the fat for frying and roasting.

One of the things I love about this recipe is the combination of the chicken with its substantial stuffing of potatoes, apples, chestnuts and gizzards or bacon, and sharp, peppery watercress mixed with the cooking juices as a dressing. You could use watercress like this with even the simplest roast chicken and no one would be sad.

But, DISASTER, when I went to our local shop, there was no watercress to be had. Unfortunately, the greengrocer explained, it only comes in once a week from Provence, and that was on a Thursday. There was none left. Neither was there any in the village’s other two greengrocers’. So I grabbed my Big Girl Wallet and went to Fresh, a sort of debutante’s ball of fine produce on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Agde. Of course, on the shelves along with the other greens and brassicas enjoying a spritzing spa treatment, was the watercress. Lunch was saved. If you can’t find watercress, you could always use young rocket leaves. Though I know some of you can’t abide rocket, its essential peppery-ness would work well here, I promise

The vegetable spa treatment in Fresh.

What in the Harry Potter is this?

I went for my annual checkup the other day and at the end, my lovely doctor asked if I would like some Vitamin D? It’s not something I’ve ever given any thought to, but I said that as we live in a place with 300 days of sunshine a year, I’d imagined I’d be fine. “But you wear sunscreen I think?” “Yes, I do, every single day, summer and winter”. I hadn’t even finished the sentence before she was writing out the script. Off I go to the pharmacy, purveyor of the excellent La Roche Posay sunscreen that’s clearly giving me a Vitamin D deficiency. Later, at home, I open the little box. Inside, is not a tablet, a powder, or – thank God – a suppository, or in fact any form of medication recognisable to me, but a tiny amber glass vial with a pointed top, rather beautiful really, the sort of thing you might wear in an amulet around your neck to protect you from the evil eye. But how to use it? The instructions tell me to snap off the top and drink the oil within, being careful not to ingest shards of broken glass. It seems this rickets-avoidance strategy is not without perils of its own.

Roast chicken with celeriac, sweet potatoes and watercress

Serves 4-6