Roast chicken with fennel, marmalade and mustard

Last night I had Figgy over for our usual Tuesday evening bout of wine drinking and Who Watching. It was a bit of a Dalek-y evening as we’d started the William Hartnell 6-parter The Dalek Invasion of Earth last week and so we finished that off… and then decided to watch the Peter Cushing movie version to compare and contrast. Fun fun! 😀 (Fig loves Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD as his home town appears on screen, albeit only on Doctor Who’s map.)

Anyway, with Fig coming over I decided to cook this, once again from the new Domini Kemp book, Dinner. I’d been a little wary of it as I’m not that keen on the aniseed-y flavour of fennel but I figured (hoped) that the flavours of the mustard and marmalade would take the edge off it. The resulting dish was, in fact, delicious. In fact Fig said that it was, and I quote, ‘One of the nicest things I’ve ever tasted.’ So there you go – praise indeed! 😀

The recipe says that it serves 4-6 but as you can easily add, or subtract, chicken pieces, you can easily scale it up, or down, as required.

10-12 pieces of chicken – drumsticks or thighs. I opted for two thighs per person
100ml of white wine
4 table4spoons of olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons of wholegrain mustard
3 fennel bulbs cut into half-inch slices (It doesn’t say whether the bulbs should be sliced lengthways or crosswise – so I opted for one each. (I only used two fennel bulbs.))
1 red onion, peeled and sliced
1 head of garlic, left whole
1 orange, cut into rounds and then those round sliced into half-moons
1 tablespoon of thyme leaves
2 tablespoons of fennel seeds
2 teaspoons of coriander seeds
2 tablespoons of marmalade
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons of freshly chopped flat leaf parsley.

Pre-heat the oven to 190. (The recipe says 170 and I normally cook chicken at 200, so I compromised…)

Place all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix really well so that everything is coated in the sauce.

You can cover this with cling film and leave to refrigerate until you’re ready to start cooking.

Place the ingredients in a single layer of a gratin dish (or two gratin dishes, if there’s too much stuff for just one.)

Season well, loosely cover with foil and roast in the oven for 45-50 minutes until the chicken is well cooked. Take the foil off for the last 20 minutes of cooking time so that the orange can caramelise a bit.

I served this with new potatoes and steamed spring greens. Very nice and much tastier than I was expecting.