Saturday, 26 September 2009

• Recipe: Baked Whole Chicken w/ Curried Broccoli Stuffing

  
  

  
  When I think broccoli, my first and most basic thought is to stir-fry it, which hardly does justice to the vegetable's versatility. For IRLF's "Ingredient of the Week" challenge, my only stipulation was that I leave the wok out of it.
  
  I ultimately came up with something that uses the broccoli not quite as a star, but also not as an accessory. Broccoli figures prominently into this healthy alternative to a traditional bird stuffing and serves to hold together the myriad of flavors and juices from the chicken.
  
  This experimental stuffing uses a base of brow rice seasoned with curry powder that hosts sizable chunks of broccoli along with raisins for a worthy sweet-and-savory combo. I also added bacon bits as a well-intentioned complement, but they were so overwhelmed by the other flavors that they were barely noticeable. I left them out of the recipe below.
  
  It's worth noting that this dish made for great leftovers. I chopped up the remaining chicken the next day and folded that with the stuffing into flatbread as a sandwich. It was almost as good as its source.
  
  Without further rambling, here's how it's done:
  
  Ingredients:
  

  • three to four heads of broccoli
  • one cup of brown rice, cooked with butter
  • 3/4 cups of raisins
  • one whole chicken, on the small side
    
  • salt
  • curry powder

  Directions:
  
  1) Cook rice with butter for the standard duration. During the last 10 minutes of cooking, stir in raisins and enough curry powder to satisfy your tastes. Remove from heat and let sit covered to allow the rice to soak up the flavors.
  
  
  
  2) Remove the stems from the broccoli and pull apart the heads to make florets about half an inch in diameter. Places in a bowl and pour in tea-temperature water. Leave for just about one minute, then pour into a strainer. This "flash steaming" method will soften the broccoli just enough for its second phase of cooking.
  
  
  
  3) Return broccoli to the bowl and add rice mixture. Mix together thoroughly.
  
  
  
  4) Clean the chicken well to prepare for stuffing. Fill the bird completely with the broccoli and rice mixture and tie securely. Lay the remaining stuffing (there should be a decent amount) along the bottom of a baking pan and place the stuffed chicken on top of it.
  
  
  
  5) Place the baking pan in the oven and cook at 350 degrees for one to one-and-a-half hours until the chicken is cooked through.
  
  This recipe came out of my head and I didn't actually measure any of it, so adjust any of the above measurements to your liking. I hope you all have as much luck with it as I did!
  
  

  • 11:39 PM
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