autumn roast chicken that will last for at least four meals

I admit, I may be harping on and on about the season, but for good reason. Nothing feels – or tastes – better than cooking seasonally. There must be some synapses in the brain which fire when seasonal produce hits the tongue or when the eye spies the colours of the season.

Sunday evening’s menu, on the face of it, may seem uninspired: roast chicken with vegetables. But seasonal cooking takes a seemingly ordinary dinner and completely enlivens it. Roast chicken with vegetables becomes apple-stuffed roast chicken with butternut squash and kale. I also added a few spices – some dried thyme and a bit of ground ginger.

The chopped Bramley apple serves as a humidifier from within the chicken’s cavity, keeping the breast meat ever so moist. The butternut squash, once chopped and loaded into the pan with the chicken along with a few red onions, soaks up some of the lovely juices from the bird without becoming completely drenched. And the kale – needing only four minutes in the steamer – provides a fresh, textured, and importantly, green, counterpart to the chicken and squash.

As for the chicken, although £7.50 may seem like quite a lot for a 2 kg free-range corn-fed chicken, remember that there will be enough breast meat for another meal (either another round of this meal – or, as I’m doing, putting the shredded breast meat into an Italian chicken salad). Furthermore, there’s enough dark meat for some excellent chicken and cucumber sandwiches to take to lunch, and the carcass will boil up wonderfully with all the odds and ends of your veggie basket (i.e. the hearts of celery, carrot peelings, the dark green part of leeks, the skin of onions…)

Luckily, you don’t have to take my word for it – try it for yourself. There are ten weeks of autumn left, before my mind converts to winter and I begin espousing the credentials of pears, cabbage and swede. (And you know I’ll do it.)

Apple-stuffed roast chicken with butternut squash and kale
(serves 2-4, with leftover chicken for another night’s dinner, lunchmeat for sandwiches, and a rather beautiful stock for a carrot soup I’m making later this week)

2 kg free-range chicken
1 large Bramley apple, cored and chopped
1 medium butternut squash, peeled, scooped, and chopped
1 medium red onion, sliced
1 bag of curly leaf kale
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Spray olive oil
Dried thyme (or fresh, if you have it)
Ground ginger

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Prepare the chicken by rinsing out the chicken and coating the inside with salt and pepper. Place in a foil-lined roasting tin. If using fresh thyme, stick the herbs between the skin and the breast meat and season. Spray a few squirts of olive oil.

Surround the chicken with the chopped butternut squash and a few slices of onion. Sprinkle with a bit of thyme and ginger. Roast for 2 hours – 30 minutes plus 45 minutes for each kilogram – checking on the chicken every 20 minutes or so. Use a basting brush to redistribute the juices over the chicken.

Once the chicken is done (meaning the juices run clear), remove it from the oven and transfer to a carving plate. Allow it to sit for 10 minutes before carving. Move the butternut squash and onion to another dish and pat with a paper towel to remove excess fat.

Place the kale in a steamer over medium-high heat and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Steam for about five minutes.

Carve the chicken, and serve the desired cuts with a bit of the apple from the inside of the chicken, a helping of butternut squash and onion and a healthy serving of kale.