Baked chicken with garlic and sherry

This is the most delicious way of cooking chicken which basically creates sticky, sherry-flavoured chicken nuggets. It comes from my friend Charlotte and I’ve been cooking it for about 20 years

Serves 4

A medium-sized chicken or 1 kg chicken thighs

1 head of garlic

extra virgin olive oil

about 3 sprigs each fresh rosemary and/or thyme

100ml fino sherry or white wine

Salt and pepper

* Take a medium-sized chicken and chop/joint it into pieces - slightly bigger than bite-sized - leaving it on the bone or chop each thigh in half with a sharp knife or cleaver. DO NOT REMOVE THE SKIN!

* Sprinkle salt (and pepper) over the chicken pieces

* Take a head of garlic, separate the cloves and, leaving the skin on, smash with the flat side of a knife.

* In a large, thick-bottomed, shallow pan heat a good glug of decent olive oil and sauté/seal the chicken til golden brown (skin-side down first)

* Throw in the garlic and a couple of sprigs each of fresh rosemary and thyme and turn the heat up, whilst stirring

* Add a small glass of fino sherry or white wine, quickly bring to the boil and then put into a pre-heated oven (180°C/350°/gas 4) for 30-45 minutes until the chicken is cooked and sticky with the caramelised garlic and juices

* Serve with a bitter leaf salad and roasted new potatoes or crusty bread to mop up the juices in the base of the pan.

What to drink: Well, you could carry on drinking sherry but I think that might be overdoing it. I'd go for an oaked white rioja or a white Côtes du Rhône myself.

Want more ideas for pairing with sherry? Download my ebook 101 Great Ways to Enjoy Sherry here.

Oktoberfest Chicken

This recipe which I edited slightly from the version in the Oktoberfest Insider Guide by Sabine Kafer, comes from my beer and food book An Appetite for Ale. The secret is the lavish last minute slathering with butter.

Serves 2
1 small chicken (about 1.2kg or 2lb 10 oz. Geitl stresses the importance of this being dry-plucked)
Salt and pepper
A good handful of fresh parsley with the stalks
50g (2 oz) unsalted butter

An hour before roasting season the chicken generously with pepper and salt “so that even the preparation makes your mouth water” Wash the parsley, shake dry, chop roughly and stuff inside the chicken. If you have a rotisserie attachment in your oven preheat the oven to 220°C/425° F/Gas 7, skewer the chicken on the spit and roast for about an hour.

Alternatively preheat the oven to 200° C, and put the bird breast side downwards in a roasting tin. (Geitl recommends not using a fan oven or fan oven setting for this as it will dry the meat out. Not sure I agree about that.). Roast for about 30 minutes then turn the bird breast upwards and finish cooking (allow 25 minutes per pound in total - just over an hour for a bird of this size.)

Either way - and this is crucial - 15 minutes before the end of the cooking time the bird should be coated with fresh, soft but not runny butter. Repeat this process 4-5 times. To check if the chicken is ready stick a skewer or the point of a sharp knife into the thickest part of the leg. The juices should run clear. Cut the chicken in half down the breastbone and serve half a portion each.

Best beer matches: At the Oktoberfest it would be served with a light Helles beer but I prefer it with a classic Oktoberfest Märzen or a golden lager like Budweiser Budvar.

Do also make this delicious Oktoberfest potato salad

Photograph © Miredi at fotolia.com

Drowned tomatoes

Before summer finally disappears here's a brilliant way to make use of the last of the season's tomatoes from chef Florence Knight's lovely first book 'One'. Good tip about skinning garlic cloves too!

Serves four to six

550g mixed heritage tomatoes

4 garlic cloves

1 bunch of thyme

2 or 3 bay leaves

1 tsp sugar

a pinch of salt

about 250ml extra virgin olive oil

These tomatoes are swimming, or even drowned, in olive oil, which accentuates their sweetness and depth. Especially pleasing through crisp salad leaves, toppled over a soft poached egg on toast or even steamed with clams. You can use any variety of tomato to make this recipe, from golden cherry to sweet baby plum, but I find that heritage work particularly well.

Preheat the oven to 170ºC/gas 5.

Run the tomatoes under cold water and pick out any stalks.

Place the garlic cloves in warm water for a couple of minutes – this helps to loosen the skin. Pop them out of their skins.

Slice the tomatoes in half and gently lodge them cut-side down in a pan or casserole dish that can go in the oven. Thinly slice the garlic and scatter it over the tomatoes. Drop over the thyme and bay leaves, and sprinkle with the sugar and salt. Pour over the olive oil until the tomatoes are sitting in about half a centimetre of it.

Bake for about forty-five minutes until the tomatoes are soft, a little wrinkly and blistered and have absorbed most of the olive oil.

These will keep for a few days in a jar or airtight container stored in a cool place or, if cooled first and kept under a layer of olive oil, up to a week in the fridge.

What to drink: It's hard to recommend a match without knowing what way you're going to use these but you should be pretty safe drinking Italian - Chianti if you fancy a red or almost any kind of dry Italian white like a Verdicchio or Vermentino.

Recipe extracted from ONE: A Cook and her Cupboard by Florence Knight, out now published by Saltyard Books, £26. © Florence Knight 2013. Photography © Jason Lowe.

Roasted red pepper and anchovy salad on roasted garlic toasts

A great recipe for a simple tapa from José Pizarro's lovely book Spanish Flavours. José, as you may know if you're based in the UK, has a cracking tapas bar in Bermondsey called José and a slightly more formal restaurant in the same street called Pizarro.

Jose writes: "The red peppers in Spain are outstanding and there is almost nothing better than peppers roasted in a proper wood-fired oven, a service that during my childhood was provided by the village baker. I’ll always remember the aroma that filled the house when my mother returned from the baker’s bearing a large tray of these wonderful vegetables. The combination of sweet roasted red peppers and salty anchovies is always a winner. This can be served as a tapa, as the larger Basque-style pintxos or even as a light lunch with a dressed green salad and a poached egg.

If you’re in a hurry, instead of roasting the red peppers, use a jar/tin of Piquillo peppers, which are already roasted and skinned and have a great smoky flavour."

Serves 4

2 large heads of garlic, unpeeled, plus 1 fat clove, finely chopped

4 large thyme sprigs

1½ tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

4 large red peppers

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar

8 small slices of rustic white bread, about 1cm thick

16 good-quality anchovy fillets in olive oil, drained

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 200°C /gas mark 6. Remove the outer papery skin from each head of garlic and take a thin slice off the top of each one to expose the cloves. Tear off a large square of foil, place the heads of garlic in the centre, add 2 of the thyme sprigs, drizzle each head with 1 teaspoon of the olive oil and sprinkle with a little salt. Wrap securely in the foil, place in a small roasting tin along with the peppers and roast on the top shelf of the oven for 20–30 minutes, turning the peppers once or twice until the skins have blackened in places. Remove the peppers from the tin, drop them into a plastic bag and leave until cool enough to handle. Return the garlic parcels to the oven and roast for a further 35 minutes, or until the cloves feel very soft when pressed.

Meanwhile, slit open the peppers, working over a bowl so that you catch all the juices, and remove and discard the stalks, seeds and skin. Tear the flesh into 1cm-wide strips and add to the bowl of juices with the chopped garlic clove, vinegar, the remaining thyme leaves and the rest of the olive oil. Stir well together.

Remove the garlic from the oven and set the parcel aside. Toast the slices of bread. (I like to put mine on the bars of a preheated cast-iron ridged griddle long enough to give the bread a slightly smoky taste, then finish it off in the toaster.) Unwrap the roasted garlic, squeeze some of the purée from each clove and spread it onto the toast while both are still hot. Sprinkle with a few sea salt flakes and some black pepper.

Season the pepper strips with a little salt to taste and spoon onto the garlic toast. Garnish each slice with the anchovy fillets, drizzle over some of the pepper juices and serve while the toast is still crisp.

What to drink: I had a similar dish in Rioja with a rioja rosado and it went really well. It would also be great with a fino or manzanilla sherry or a crisp Rueda or Sauvignon Blanc.

This recipe comes from Spanish Flavours by José Pizarro published by Kyle Books. Image © Emma Lee.