Success at Last!

After six years of trying, I've finally come up with roast potatoes that flickgc admits are as good as her mother's, or possibly even better. She even left some of her chicken and her bacon-wrapped sausages so that she could have second and third helpings of the spuds.

(Desiree potatoes, cut into large pieces and parboiled for ten minutes with the peelings in the pan to add flavour, left to stand for half an hour, and then roast in lots of pre-heated groundnut oil with a little salt for 70 minutes at 190°C in a fan-assisted oven, turning once. It would have been better to turn them out onto kitchen roll as soon as they came out of the oven, to mop up the oil and stop the surplus ones from getting greasy. You could add a little lemon juice and/or a few garlic cloves, if you felt like it.)

We also had chicken cooked with tarragon, lemon and white wine, gravy made from the chicken juices, roast parsnips in maple syrup (thanks to feorag for the suggestion), chipolatas wrapped in bacon (Sillfield Farm now sells pre-wrapped chipolatas), and petits pois (just to pretend that it might not be entirely unhealthy).

Full now. We might have a little stroll round the dock to feed left-overs to the swans before having some Green & Black's white chocolate and raspberry ice cream with a bottle of tokaj.