I found ‘A Tale of 12 Kitchens’ in Peckham Library. It was on my radar because the man who wrote it, artist Jake Tilson, is local, and the book has a section on Peckham. One of the recipes was this ‘mummified chicken’ – apparently so named by the author’s wife but Middle Eastern in origin and properly called ‘firakh mashwiya bi-al-summa’. You get your chook, smother it with a paste of blended onions and tart, lemony sumac and then stuff it inside a load of flatbread.

In the book, Jake suggests using Lebanese lavash flatbread, but when I went down to Persepolis in search of something suitable, Sally told me that Jake also buys his bread there and always uses this circular khobez, so I followed suit (we’re all tight in Peckham, you see). The bread splits apart very easily and has just enough room, handily, to hold a chicken. I stuffed it inside a double layer and then put a further two on in the opposite direction to make sure the bird was nice and cosy.

The whole thing is baked for 3-4 hours (depending on size) and although you are left with very crisp, inedible bread on top, the underneath is gooey with roasted chicken juices. We actually squabbled over the last few pieces of super savoury, unctuous, saturated khobez. The bird itself was incredibly succulent and flavoursome, having steamed and sizzled in its little enclosure. Jake suggests serving it with rice but a green salad worked perfectly well for us.

This dish would make excellent dinner party fodder. It’s really easy, you can leave it in the oven for ages and it has a ‘big reveal’ when you crack open the shell and the fragrant meaty steam puffs out. Just make sure you’ve got good mates round, because you will be fighting over those bread scraps, trust me.

Mummified Chicken or Firakh Mashwiya Bi-al-summa

(from ‘A Tale of 12 Kitchens’ by Jake Tilson)

2 large onions, grated
2 tablespoons sumac
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper
4 khobez breads or other suitable flatbreads
1 large chicken

Preheat your oven to 175C/Gas 4

Make a coarse paste with the onions, sumac, oil, salt and pepper and cover the chicken with it, inside and out. Grease a baking dish. Stuff your chicken inside your bread and put it in the dish, adding more bread as necessary until it is completely enclosed. You just have to do your best here. Cover it loosely with foil and bake for 3-4 hours, depending on the size of your chicken. You need to brush the top of the bread with water every now and then to stop it burning. It does go very crisp on top. Serve with pilau rice and/or salad.

…FACT.

I was more excited about this sandwich than I was about the dish that made it happen – chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. That’s the kind of tunnel vision you find yourself dealing with when you’re a sandwich obsessive; always focused on where the next fix is coming from. It wasn’t just the leftover chicken that got me thinking so much as all that remaining oil – 200ml of the stuff. It struck me that this precious garlic, herb and chicken infused oil would make possibly the best garlicky mayonnaise I’d ever tasted. It did.

I’ve never mixed mayonnaise so carefully, such was the strength of my opinion that this oil was the most exquisite leftover to pass my way in a very long time. The result was a wobbly pot of  yellow goo which had ‘stick me in your face or stick your face in me right now’ written all over it. I mixed it with chunks of the leftover white and dark chicken meat and of course, lots of crispy skin bits.

It was time for The Build. This starts with the best bread you can find – I chose a classic white bloomer from the German bakery Luca’s in East Dulwich. It ain’t cheap but the bread is worth it; dense crumb, real flavour, perfect crust. Chicken-mayo mix heaps generously on one side of the sandwich and I smeared a few of those sweet roasted cloves onto the other.

With richness of course must come balance and the bitter leaves of a curly endive mixed with lemon juice and generous amounts of salt and pepper did the job perfectly.

All that could be heard for a full five minutes was chewing, interspersed by me spluttering, “best…chomp chomp…chicken…chomp…sandwich” – pieces of stray endive dropping on to my top and blobs of mayonnaise on my chin. It wasn’t pretty; I was out of control. Such is the power of a good sandwich.

My Ultimate Chicken Sandwich

First, you need to improve your quality of life considerably by treating yourself to this dish. Then you’re set to take the highway straight to leftover heaven central.

First, make your mayo. Put two large egg yolks in a clean bowl and whisk them together. Begin adding the oil a few drops at a time, whisking as you do so and making sure each bit of oil is fully incorporated before adding the next. As you whisk more oil in and the mayo starts to thicken, you can start adding the oil in slightly larger quantities until you are steadily adding it in a thin stream. The key with mayo is to be cautious with the oil until you get a feel for making it. If you add too much at once, it will split. If this happens, don’t despair. Take a fresh egg yolk in a clean bowl and begin adding the split mixture into it, very slowly, just as if it were the oil. This should bring it back.

Stop when the mayo reaches the desired thickness. Add lemon juice and seasoning to taste.

(This, by the way, is why I didn’t use extra fruity olive oil when I made my chicken, as the flavour would have been too strong for the mayo. The leftover oil is also great for roasting vegetables – particularly broccoli, and in salad dressings).

Mix the mayo with your leftover meat and heap onto one piece of bread. Spread some leftover garlic cloves on the other piece. Add some curly endive or other bitter salad leaves mixed with a generous amount of lemon juice and seasoning. Sandwich together. Eat and forget your troubles ever existed.

I’ll admit from the off that I was slightly scared. Not by the quantity of garlic you understand – it mellows considerably with roasting – but by the oil; 250ml of olive oil settled into a deep golden pool in the bottom of my battle-scarred roasting dish.

This dish comes from Provence, land of olive oil and garlic. A full forty cloves stew gently in the fruity elixir, and by the time the chicken is cooked, they are transformed to a soft savoury paste which can be squidged from its papery home and smeared onto the chicken, or good bread, or into mashed potato. A sprig or two of thyme and a couple of bay leaves add their own perfume and the whole heady medley gets right into that chicken – and your soft furnishings – beautifully. Febreeze, eat your heart out.

If you are thinking of making this dish – and I cannot encourage you enough to do so – then this article and this one, are definitely worth a read. There are a few controversial points to consider, such as whether to peel or not to peel when it comes to the garlic (don’t) and whether or not one should brown the chicken before roasting. I just turn the heat up at the end of cooking to crisp up the skin.

When it comes to resting, I recommend positioning her with her legs (mine spectacularly yellow, from corn feeding) sticking up in the air. This means that all the juices seep down towards the breast, leaving you with juicy meat. To serve, most recommend mashed potato but I just didn’t fancy it in the face of all that richness and made a salad of bitter curly endive dressed liberally with a lemony dressing. Juices were mopped with hunks of good bread.

The leftover oil has been a source of much excitement over the past couple of days. I can’t wait to tell you what I did with the leftovers. The carcass went into the stock pot too so that one decent chicken has been the base for three meals each for two people. It’s the gift that just keeps on giving.

Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic

1 chicken (mine was 1.5kg)
250ml olive oil
40 cloves of garlic or thereabouts (that’s four whole bulbs), papery bits removed but not peeled
A sprig of thyme (plus a bit extra for the cavity)
A sprig of rosemary (I didn’t use this, but it can’t be a bad thing)
2 bay leaves
Half a lemon
Salt and pepper and lots of it

Preheat the oven to 180C

Un-truss the chicken drizzle a little oil over the skin, rubbing it in. Surround it with the garlic cloves, herbs and bay, then stick the other herbs and lemon inside the cavity. Pour the oil around. Season the chicken very generously, then cover with foil and seal tightly.

Roast it for 1 hour then remove from the oven and turn the oven up to 220C.  Carefully pour out the oil into a dish (along with the garlic) then set aside and return the chicken to the tray. Roast for a further 10 minutes then rest in a bowl with legs in the air for 15.

Use this time to make a sharply dressed salad and cut some fresh bread for spreading those garlic cloves onto. Enjoy!

I have been asked many times to name the ingredient I cannot live without. The answer has always been the same: butter. Fat makes things taste good and we all know it. Crumpets oozing with butter that dribbles down your chin; a roast chicken smothered and crisped and dipped in the pan juices; a fresh hot paratha smeared generously with ghee. You get the idea.

I get approached a lot by people wanting me to help them promote things –  e-mails ping into the inbox with the opening line, “I think this may be of interest to your readers.” This one was different though. For a start they actually wanted me to go and cook something which, you know, I’m quite keen on doing and secondly, well, I really love butter don’t I. Would I come and make a pie for the new Lurpak ad campaign? Damn right I would.

And so I found myself at a studio in Shoreditch one sunny afternoon cooking up a chicken and fennel pie. There was also a home economist there who, thankfully, was very entertaining. I usually can’t stand sharing a kitchen with anyone. We made two pies, just to make sure that they could capture ‘the shot’. The idea was to make the pie look as ‘epic’ as possible. It had to be a beast – a tall, proud, epic beast. This was where the home economist came in, employed as she is to make food look ‘right’ for ads and mags and books etc.

The result was a shiny domed beauty; a steaming, puffy, bubbling pot of meat and pastry. I wanted to eat it but of course, couldn’t. It was whisked away to be lit and snapped and lit and snapped again. It was a whole new world to me, this advertising business. The main thing I learned is that there is a huge amount of hanging around. All in all though, a fun day and an experience I’d definitely repeat. They also asked me to come in for a casting for the TV ad, but sadly I couldn’t make the date, being as I was on my way to Lisbon.

In the end, that perfect shot was achieved and it was time for me to go home and for Jeanne to start baking her cupcakes. The ad campaign is featured on billboards around the country – I’ve already seen it in Old Street and last night spotted one on my own turf in Peckham! It’s rather nice to see my little pie all big and out there on its own in the city, doing its best to encourage people to cook and use more butter. Now that’s a message I can really get behind.

Chicken and Fennel Pie

(fills an 18-20cm pie dish)

1 free-range chicken, cooked (I used a roast chicken but you could use cooked chicken pieces if you don’t want to roast one).
2 bulbs fennel, tops, bottoms and core removed and finely sliced
1/2 large onion, sliced
4 rasher smoked bacon, diced
1 large leek, sliced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 small handful of chopped parsley
Splash of white wine
A dollop of wholegrain mustard (optional)
Oil, for cooking

350 – 400ml bechamel or white sauce (bought or home made)

For the pastry

The pastry is puff but I prefer shortcrust so here’s my recipe. Just use whichever you prefer.

100g Lurpak, at room temperature
220g plain flour (not strong white bread flour)
A large pinch of salt
1 egg, beaten

Prepare the pastry by sieving the flour and salt into a large bowl. Cut the softened butter into cubes and add it to the bowl. Using a knife, start cutting the butter into the flour until it is fairly well mixed. You can now use your hands to start rubbing the butter into the flour – do this as lightly as possible. If you try to squidge the butter between your fingers too much the pastry will become tough. When it resembles fine crumbs, get some cold water (the colder the better) and add a tablespoon at a time, cutting it in with the knife each time, until it starts to come together. When it starts to form large lumps, use your hands to bring it together into a ball. It should leave the bowl clean. Rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Heat a splash of olive oil in a pan and add the bacon to it. Once the bacon is cooked add the leeks, garlic, fennel and onion (plus the wine if using) and cook on a very low heat with the lid on for around 15 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 200C.

To assemble the pie divide the pastry into two portions – one portion should be two thirds of the total amount and this will be the base and sides of the pie. The remaining pastry will form the lid. Roll out the base pastry into a circle shape on a lightly floured surface. The shape will need to be larger than your dish as it needs to form the sides of the pie also. Carefully lower this into the dish. Roll out the lid and set aside.

Mix the chicken, fennel mixture, mustard (if using), parsley and bechamel together. Take care when adding the bechamel. Add a little at a time to get an idea of how much you will need. Season the mixture with salt and pepper then fill the pie and top with the lid. You want the lid to overlap the sides of the pie dish. Crimp it down to make sure it is sealed. Cut a cross in the top with a knife and brush with the beaten egg.

Bake for 20-30 minutes at 200C until golden brown.

The other bloggers involved were Jeanne, who made these cupcakes and Mary-Rose, who made a roast chicken.

The photos above are used with the kind permission of Wieden and Kennedy and thanks to the whole team who were nothing but a pleasure to work with.