Sunday best

The good thing about working late in the City on a Friday is that if you time it just right you can catch the fabulous Porterford Butchers as they're scrubbing down for the night and grab some meaty treats at bargain prices to enjoy over the weekend and/or to squirrel away in the freezer. This time they gave me a great deal on some sage and onion sausage meat stuffed chicken breasts and I thought this would a make prefect proper Sunday lunch with all the trimmings.

The only problem was that there was no indication on how long to cook it for so I had to rely on my probe thermometer. In fact it's probably the first time I've really used it and I even had to replace the battery before I could get it to respond properly, but it really saved the day on this occasion. I googled the ideal internal temperature for a chicken breast which turned out to be 77^oC and set this as an alert on my temperature gauge, inserted the probe into my plump stuffed chicken breast and closed the oven door on the probe cable. The chicken took exactly 50 minutes at 180^o C before the alarm started bleeping so I am guessing that is the optimum cooking time for my chicken.
I didn't have the traditional trimmings for a roast chicken but in the bottom of my fridge I had a couple of now somewhat old new potatoes, some ageing flat Portabellini mushrooms and one barely alive Organic leek. I didn't need to worry about a gravy as I don't really do gravy; possibly a certain other D's predilection for just the worse sprout-water, meat-free gravy coloured liquid ever bread was dipped into. But that's another story. Let's just say that gravy avoidance is probably in my genes!
At least I had a new tub of perky just-arrived-from-France mâche, and with that along with my geriatric vegetables I thought I could whip up some new Sunday lunch trimmings to accompany the chicken. And it all turned out pretty well. The chicken was moist and juicy and perfectly cooked with a pleasing little taste of sage in the sausage meat and its bacon topping crisp, the elderly sautéed vegetables and potatoes turned out surprisingly delicious and it was possibly the best Sunday best I've had for a long time.