Wales | Roast Chicken and Leeks

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED

I didn’t anticipate that Wales would be something of a challenge but it did present a couple of tiny difficulties, for me.

Roughly 98% of the recipes I found used beef or lamb. I do not like lamb and beef has gotten expensive to the point I’m trying to avoid beef recipes right now. It seems like the Welsh don’t really have a lot of chicken recipes that are uniquely Welsh. There are many many recipes for chicken and leek pie but I have found that meals that require a pie crust don’t reheat very well. I suppose I could have tried to make little pot pies that I could reheat in the air fryer but I don’t have a baking pan for little pot pies and I don’t want to buy more cookware. (That’s a lie, I always want to buy more cookware, I just don’t have the space for it.) Anyway, the crust is never as good as when it is fresh from the oven. So, I kept searching until I found this recipe that includes chicken and no crust, yay!

Wales also loves leeks. Leeks are in just about every dinner recipe, in one way or another. The local grocery store only carries them every now and then and I haven’t figured out when they are likely to have them. I was going to wait until I saw them again to make this meal but my husband had to make a trip to Vegas and, thoughtfully, picked up some leeks for me. Yay!

I couldn’t get my hands on fresh thyme or Welsh wine so I used some dried thyme flakes with a shallot pepper blend from Penzey’s and used the white wine I keep on hand for cooking in place of the Welsh wine.

There was some prep to do but nothing difficult. I chopped some vegetables and then sautéed them with bacon and butter. (Yes, both. I had concerns but did it anyway.) Everything went into a roasting pan and then into the oven for about an hour and a half to two hours. The recipe says to serve this with potatoes, so I just threw some potatoes in the pan with the chicken.

I used a disposable aluminum roasting pan because I was not interested in scrubbing my roasting pan later. Sometimes, that’s just the way it is and that’s okay.

How was it?

It was good. The chicken wasn’t super flavorful but did have some flavor. My husband tried it and picked up on more flavors than I did and he liked it. Maybe my sense of taste was a bit dulled due to inhaling the aroma of it roasting for a couple of hours? When I spooned the liquid from the pan over the chicken, it was better. I would have liked the skin a little crispier, it was just barely crispy but, if I’d cooked it any longer, the breasts would have dried out.

The veggies and potatoes that cooked in the liquid and chicken juices had more flavor and were enjoyable. They look like mush in the photo but they were the consistency of the veggies you'd find with a pot roast. I’m not usually a huge fan of cooked carrots but, apparently, if you cook them with bacon and butter and then in wine and chicken juices, they’re pretty good.

Would I make it again?

Probably not. This wasn’t bad, it just doesn’t fill a need or want that I have. Leeks and fresh thyme and Welsh wine are hard to come by here and I rarely roast entire chickens. I learned how to cook Cornish Hens in the air fryer and I’m more likely to do that. Cornish hens in the air fryer are quicker, easier, do not heat up the whole house, and result in lots of crispy skin.

I’ll eat the leftovers and appreciate the experience but I won’t revisit it.