Nothing vanilla about double-breasted spring chicken

As they say, time flies when you’re having fun. I have just celebrated another birthday and among the many greeting cards was one in particular that made me laugh.

“Kiss another year goodbye” it read, with a photo of a bespectacled woman on the front with grossly oversized lips pursed into a pucker.

And the prezzies! Nougat body butter – well, that took care of deciding what to have for dinner that night – and the gorgeous perfume I received, which has a very dominant note of vanilla, made me think about the fact that vanilla is such a wonderful ingredient to lift the mood of many dishes. I do hope you use vanilla extract when cooking, not the vanilla essence – you’ll be amazed at the depth of flavour.

Vanilla essence does have a use – and that is to wipe over the shelves of your refrigerator when you are doing your spring-cleaning!

If you are making custard, be a little extravagant and use the seeds scraped from a split vanilla bean to make true vanilla custard.

The vanilla bean is the cured fruit of a tropical orchid – no wonder, then, that its heady scent of soothing, smoky, caramelly-fruity aroma is indeed a prized aromatic for both cooks and perfume chemists alike!

Good vanilla beans are expensive, and with reason – the orchid is trained around trees and blooms just one day a year. On that day it must be hand pollinated so that it produces vanilla beans.

Each flower produces a cluster of beans that ripens at different times. The grower pulls off the ripe specimens daily and from there the beans are either dried in ovens or cured in a process involving dipping in boiling water and air-drying allowing the flavour to mellow.

But I digress – because I want to encourage you to cook my version of spring chicken.

This will be a handy stand-by to bulk out your hampers if you are off to the races.

I like to call it the double-breasted chicken.

It began with a recipe from Beverly Sutherland-Smith – a marvelous parsley stuffing for a weekend chicken. But we all know everyone loves the breast meat, and if you are going to roast a chicken why not maximise the odds and have double the amount of breast meat?

You must begin with a chicken that has been hatched from a free-range egg, and from there the chicken should preferably have spent its life pecking away among the weeds, free to sniff the breezes and socialise with roosters.

When making this dish, you will find the chicken is wearing a skin four times too big, hence there is plenty of room to hide the extra breasts and stuffing.