“Home cooked” denotes healthy, tasty and honest food, the kind of food that Mum or Granny used to make. No tricks, no risky flavours, no verve or culinary pirouettes. Simple meat and three veg kind of food, and when you are busy with other things an easy option to fall back on when you don’t have enough time to do something really interesting for the column.
This week I am offering up a simple, tasty, no-fuss chicken drumsticks in the oven dish, the sort of meal made back in the day, when cookbooks had no HD pornographic food pictures.
Chicken drumsticks, olive oil, wedges of lime, coarsely ground black pepper, coarse salt and fresh coriander. You can’t get more simple than that. There are a large number of drumstick recipes around, each reflecting different origins in their ingredient list. This one has the flavours of Mexico: FYI anything with the combination of coriander (cilantro) and lime is likely to come from Mexico.
This recipe calls for the drumsticks to be roasted on a bed of coarse sea salt, otherwise known as koshering salt. This ensures a crispier outside and a tender inside.
Ingredients:
- Chicken drumsticks x 8
- Fresh limes cut into eighths x 3
- Bunch of fresh coriander washed and chopped
- Fresh coarsely ground black pepper and salt
- Olive oil
- Coarse salt (500 gram) for the bed to cook the chicken on
Method:
Put a good shluk of olive oil in a large bowl, add coriander, good pinch of pepper and pinch of salt. Toss the drumsticks in the mixture ensuring they are all well coated. In an oven pan put down two lines of coarse salt and place the drumsticks in a line on or near the bed of salt. Preheat the oven to 200 °C and cook for around 45 minutes until the outside is crispy and, if you have a thermometer, until the meat inside the leg is 80-90 °C.
This can be enjoyed with either roast vegetables or rice.
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