Give yourself the gift of an end-of-the-week treat: A Friday Night Roast!

Most people wait until Sunday to make a roast or some other type of more elaborate home-cooked meal. Also, most people who don't have a family don't really bother with roasts at all. But Mark and I think there's something almost sacred about taking the time to make yourselves such a grand treat - and even better, we made it on a FRIDAY NIGHT! Screw waiting til Sunday. It was so much more rewarding to get home from a week at our full-time jobs and feed ourselves something hearty.

The slide show of delicious pictures speaks for themselves but, in short, Yorkshire Valley Farms helped us out by giving us two delicious organic grain-fed free-range chickens - they are air-chilled, rather than water-chilled (which tends to add more water and salt to the finished product and in turn it may block the true taste of the chicken from coming all the way through).

We rubbed the chicken with some salt (from Spain, brought back by our two good friends!), freshly-ground black pepper and a bit of olive oil/canola oil (our olive oil we have now, while extra virgin, is not really the tastiest, I find it a bit too grassy so we neutralized the flavour with canola). Softest, juiciest, and most flavourful chicken we've ever had by far, no joke.

We put the other chicken in the freezer and we'll probably use different seasonings on it - something more elaborate. We just wanted to get the true, unadulterated taste of the chicken first time around.

We paired it with a wine Inniskillin gave us to try - they have an East West Series of blended wines that use grapes both from their winery in British Columbia and their winery in Ontario. Certainly an interesting concept. We had the Riesling / Gewurtztraminer blend. While I'm generally a fan of sweet German Gewurtztraminer's, it was probably a good thing this one wasn't too sweet because the flavour of the chicken was so simple that it needed something that would complement it, but not outshine it. It did pair very well with our simple roast chicken, mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus.

For dessert I whipped up a Dutch Chocolate Icecream Mix my Mom was given for free by a lady at a craft sale. I know, sounds sketchy. Trust me, I was scared. It was actually pretty tasty - we had to add two cups of whipping cream and 1/2 a cup water to it and beat it like crazy, being careful to not let the cream separate.

Mark was telling me they treat Dutch Chocolate with alkali or something to take the bitterness out of it, which is why it tastes different, but the process also kills the antioxidants naturally found in chocolate so that sucks but it was tasty nonetheless.

Later this week we're planning on making a soup broth with the carcass and all the bones we've saved, potato peelings, and asparagus stems - then we'll add fresh celery, carrots and potatoes to it - yum!

Update (Jan 29): Soup has been made, and I also forgot to tell you guys where you can buy Yorkshire Valley organic products: Loblaws, Zehrs and Superstore locations across Ontario, and in the GTA at Big Carrot, Bloor Meat Market, Organic Garage, McEwans, and Dufferin Meats.

Yours in food,
-Stacey

P.S. please note the AMAZING custom aprons Mark and I got for Christmas from my sister and brother-in-law! Love you guys - thanks for supporting us!