I managed my first proper roast dinner this year!
When I’ve said this to others, they always tell me that a roast is easy. But with timings of potatoes and veg to add to the equation, I was never sure I would manage to make it work out at the right time. As a former vegetarian, I probably worry more about whether the meat is cooked, etc, quite apart from knowing how to carve it.
For the vegetarian readers, I also managed a nut roast this year, Dan’s mum’s speciality from a time when she cooked macrobiotic meals more. Nut roast is actually Dan’s favourite meal ever, a great reassurance to me when we started going out, and my cooking repertoire was mostly veggie.
2 factors that made doing the roast even better:
– handing cookbook to Dan for him to come up with an ambitious recipe for stuffing. Why roast a chicken if you can’t do it in style too?
– having a few recipes for leftovers, such as risotto, that I felt comfortable with. So not only do you enjoy the roast, you have a further feeling of smugness when you make use of the rest!
Having said that, my homemade stock has tended to sit in the freezer, as I forget I have it.  In a toss up between rapidly defrosting the stock, and grabbing a stock cube instead, the stock cube wins every time.
Perhaps next year, I’ll attempt some other kind of roast. On the other hand, I’m sure I can practice the chicken one for a while yet…