Roast Chicken and Potato and Jerusalem Artichoke Dauphinoise

When I arrived home this evening, I was greeted by the wonderful aroma of dauphinoise cooking.  This wasn’t just any dauphinoise though; along with the potatoes it contained jerusalem artichokes.  Also there was a roast chicken.  Yum.  So that all made for the second really long title as many posts.

The jerusalem artichokes added a nutty, earthy note to the dauphinoise.  Due to their waxy texture they were fairly quite easily identifiable from the potatoes; I think it might have been more fun if it was more uniform.  Kerri kept saying that she didn’t think that she had put enough cream into it, but I found it rather good.

Also we had cabbage.  Which isn’t usually that interesting, but this one turned out rather well; it was a pointed “sweetheart” cabbage, which was steamed just the right amount of time so that the leaves had softened but still had some texture to them rather than just going completely floppy.

The chicken was a slight disappointment though in that it wasn’t as tasty as it should have been.  It was a Sainsbury’s “Taste the Difference” chicken which we have had some really good and flavourful examples of in the past, but this one wasn’t as good.  Also, they have started branding them “Woodland”.  Maybe the extra branding is to make up for a drop in quality?  I know their eggs have said “Woodland” on them for a while and 1p per dozen (wow) goes to the Woodland Trust, but it’s new to the chickens.

Being a Friday, we decided to open a bottle of interesting wine.  We have had a couple of bottles of Meursault on our wine rack for a while, so we opened the 1996 Meursault “Les Tessons”.  But the cork was looking a little green and the wine had a slight off odour to it.  For a while, we tried to convince ourselves that it was okay, but eventually gave up.  Disappointing.  So we opened the other, which was a 2001 and in better condition and developed nicely in the glass.  White Burgundy is my favourite accompaniment to roast chicken.