French-Inspired Roast Chicken with Lemon and Garlic Potatoes and My Ultimate Tuna, Fennel and Bean Salad
Two recipes straight from our caravan suppers in France that you'll want to make all summer long
Hello my friends, I hope you’re well and have had a good week so far. I’m writing to you from the desk of my room at The Woodward hotel overlooking Lake Léman in Geneva, getting distracted by the sight of people jumping into the water from the rocks, and sailing by on their polished wooden boats. My God the Swiss know how to live!
I’m here on a very exciting, and, it has to be said, spoiling culinary press trip – my first time away in a different country to my babies. It’s been quite the adjustment (cut me and I bleed viennoiseries), and I’ve even managed to get some solid sleep, which is utterly refreshing, as well as enjoying some really extraordinary food, Swiss wine and hospitality. It’s such a treat, and a very different kind of trip from my last one. But for now, I’m coming to you with a double bill of delicious, just in time for the weekend.
While family holidays might not leave me feeling quite so refreshed (our daughter was having night terrors, so not a lot of sleep was had), I always come back from a trip fired up to cook, and this week’s Something For the Weekend recipes are inspired by some of the best meals we ate in the caravan in France.
There’s a zesty, texture-packed salad that turns tinned tuna into something special, and a sticky, fragrant rotisserie-style roast chicken with garlicky lemon potatoes that cook underneath in all those gorgeous roasting juices. The chicken recipe is my ode to French rotisserie chickens, self-basting as they turn in their own delicious dripping and wafting their unmistakably tempting scent into the nostrils of anyone within the vicinity. We always make a beeline for the rotisserie stall in a French market to buy a whole chicken and a box of the potatoes that have roasted in the juice, leaving the bird in its bag to cool and then invariably tearing into it for an easy, delicious supper with a green salad and the warmed-up potatoes.
This recipe recreates those flavours for the home kitchen (no rotisserie machine required) and the marinade strikes all the right notes, seasoning the bird beautifully and emitting the most delicious smell as it roasts — close your eyes and you’re in a French market in summer. The magical marinade and gentle cooking results in a super succulent bird that’s plump and tender, and crispy, golden potatoes and sweet roast garlic soaked in roasting juices.
I’ve chosen these two things because they feel like perfect meals as we head into summer, and are particularly suited to being eaten as part of a picnic or relaxed garden gathering (perhaps along with the focaccia some of you are raving about), so I thought a really nice one for you guys.
The fennel and tuna bean salad is one of my all-time favourite salads, and while we were away and I was rustling it up in the caravan kitchen, it suddenly struck me that I should absolutely be sharing the recipe with you here, because it is such a go-to, and such a crowd pleaser. It’s a salad that stands up to being made ahead, packed into tupperware and kept in the fridge or lugged to a picnic, and it’s the sort of thing I can just eat straight from the mixing bowl with a spoon for a quick lunch or supper too.
I know ‘chopped salads’ are all the rage right now, but I’m more of a ‘shaved’ or ‘finely sliced’ salad person. I know it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, but the proof is in the eating, and this salad just gives so much more than its ingredients list implies. Plus, it’s full of beans. And you know how I feel about beans.
There’s something utterly joyous about the meeting of lemony fennel, oil-glossed beans, fresh parsley and chunks of tuna, and what I really love about this is that it’s highly adaptable and highly reliant on what you’ve got in your pantry and fridge.