Last weekend I wanted to cook for Nicole’s parents (Hanne and Rudi) who are currently providing our hotel like accommodation for the two months that we are in Germany.
I decided to do a nice Sunday roast and choose chicken as I really like my mum’s bread sauce in addition to the roast potatoes etc.
Well knowing that it was going to be hard to find any mixes to help me make the stuffing I was already resigned to having to make everything from scratch - thinking this would be the biggest problem with the meal.
This was not to be the case though - the Chicken was the biggest problem!! When I mentioned cooking a roast to Nicole she said yes sounds good but I don’t know where we will get a chicken from. I just did not think that a chicken would not be easy to get. Supermarkets and butchers here do not sell whole chickens (if they do they are frozen - but I wanted a fresh chicken).
Luckily in the village there is a farm / sheltered accommodation for mentally disabled people called Hofgut and this has s large farm shop - then sell their chickens for three weekends a month - you have to book in your request for a chicken. For the first weekend they sell 1Kg chickens, those that survive that weekend make it to the next one where 1.5 Kg chickens are done in, and the lucky few who get to weekend 3 are in a healthy 2.0 Kg state before they go to the great chicken coop in the sky.
We were in the 1Kg chicken weekend though so had to settle for what turned out to be quite a small bird, which I worried about feeding 4 people. As the chicken was so small I wanted to also cook some sausages wrapped in bacon and cover the top of the chicken in bacon - again the challenge was in the simplest of things.
Sausages - not a problem in Germany! Bacon - apparently they don’t have the technology to cut slices of raw pig here (that is what we were told at the supermarket) so I was going to try replacing bacon with cured parma ham. When we got home though it turned out Hanne had something that resembled bacon which worked a charm.
The meal was lovely though - the great thing about a 1Kg chicken is cooks in an hour - the whole experience has only reinforced how I assume that things in the UK will be simple in another country and then find they are not. This gives me nerves about life in Spain but I still am looking forward to the challenge.