Don't Sweat the Aubergine

turn down the oven to gas mark 3/160°C. 2 Cook the chicken for a total of 20 minutes for each 500g it weighs, plus a further 30 minutes. (A 1.5kg chicken, therefore, will take one hour and 30 minutes. 3 )
    Take the chicken out of the oven, and pour the liquid into a saucepan. Leave the chicken to rest in its pan for at least 15 minutes. 4 Just before you are ready to serve, heat up the sauce, and check for seasoning. The chicken will have exuded some more juices; pour them into the rest of the sauce. Either pour the sauce over the chicken or serve it in a separate jug. 5
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VARIATIONS
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    I got the above method from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s
River Cottage Meat Book
, and I love it. I think that it’s the recipe that best conforms to the ideal of eating a good chicken: simple, because you don’t have to do any fiddling with the sauce, yet also luxurious, because of all that butter. It wants only the simplest of accompaniments: some boiled potatoes or rice, with a salad to follow. The chicken and its sauce are, quite properly, the centre of attention.
    You could put the giblets (but not the liver, which, as I said when discussing stocks, makes sauces bitter) into the roasting pan at the start, as well as a chopped onion and carrot, some unpeeled garlic cloves, and perhaps a few extra chicken wings – all to add flavour to the sauce.
    Stuff the chicken with unpeeled garlic cloves, and eat the meat with the pulp, squeezed from their husks. Be aware, though, that it’s quite hard to predict how much cooking a garlic clove will need before the garlic achieves that soft, sweet quality. You could put a whole head of garlic, cut in half, with the chicken, and at the end push out the pulp into the sauce with a wooden spoon.
    Lemon goes very well with chicken. Put a whole lemon inside the cavity, or lemon halves or quarters; or do that, but squeeze the juice over the chicken first.
    Or: don’t pour the wine into the pan while the chicken is cooking. (But check that the buttery juices aren’t in danger of burning on your roasting pan; if they are, add just enough wine, stock or water to keep them liquid.) Wait until the end, remove the chicken from the pan, tip the juices into a saucepan, put the pan on to a medium heat on the hob, and throw in your wine. The advantage of this method is that there will be tasty, caramelized residues in the pan to incorporate into your sauce. Stir them in, bubble the wine to evaporate its alcohol and to lose some of its acidity, and add this sauce to the other juices in the saucepan.
    This is a gravy – one with a high fat content. But gravies are more commonly prepared as below.
    I am not convinced that pot-roasting – cooking the chicken, either browned first or at the end, and served with the sauce that it and the vegetables in the pot produce – is worthwhile. If you want to cook your chicken in a pot, in my view, you might as well joint it first, add the breast portions just 25 minutes or so before the end, and call it a stew. But pot-roasted, fatty cuts of pork or lamb can be good. See below.
GRAVY
    Of course, there are many other ways of preparing a chicken. You might want to accompany it with a proper gravy. Rub a walnut-sized knob of butter, or the equivalent quantity of olive oil, over the chicken before you cook it, and season the bird. At the end of cooking, remove the chicken to a warm plate. Pour the juices in the pan into a bowl. Put the pan on to a ring of your hob, turn the heat to medium, and add some liquid – it might be water, or chicken stock, or a small glass of white wine, or a small glass of cider, or a tablespoon of vinegar. Bubble the liquid, stirring and scraping any residues from the pan into it. (This process is ‘deglazing’ – see here .) Pour this sauce into another bowl.
    Do you want to thicken your gravy? If you do, take a dessertspoon of the fat that will have risen to the top of the first bowl (the one into which you poured the first lot of pan juices), and put it in a small saucepan. 6 Carefully spoon the rest of the fat into the bin, or into a saucer for scraping into the bin later. 7 Add a dessertspoon of flour – or enough to make a roux the consistency of wet sand – to the fat in the saucepan, and heat gently until the mixture browns a little. Then turn up the heat to medium. You have two bowls, one with the degreased pan juices, the second with the liquid you produced by deglazing the roasting pan. Pour their contents, little