Who doesn't like a Sunday roast?

To be honest, until a few years ago I had gone off Sunday roasts altogether.  During my final few years living at my parents house we seemed to have roast chicken or beef with potatoes and vegetables all the time.  At least, that's what it felt like.  After I left home to go to university I stopped eating roast dinners, even managing to avoid eating them when I went home.  I had become sick of them!  Fast forward a (good) few years and I love having a roast dinner.  We don't have them every Sunday though - I don't want to get to the point where I am bored of eating them again - and I try to shake things up a bit by having different vegetables on the side or cooking the potatoes a different way.
Yesterday we had a roast chicken dinner.  I got the chicken from my local butcher on Saturday.  It cost €6.99 which is a bit more expensive than the whole chickens you can get in the supermarkets but I prefer to buy it from my butcher as I feel it tastes much better. 

With the chicken yesterday we had a little bit of mash potatoes, roast potatoes (made the same way that the roast potatoes were made last weekend), mashed carrots and parsnip and gravy with onions, some carrot and parsnip through it.  For dinner this evening, we had leftovers from yesterday.  The baby had the same dinner as us, minus the gravy. 

TIP - Having a whole chicken - then get as much out of it as possible.  After slicing the roast chicken for our dinner yesterday and today, I pulled the remaining meat from the wings and legs and put it in a bowl.  Then I made chicken stock by boiling the carcass in water in a stock pot on my cooker.  I used the chicken stock and the meat to make a soup (a version of the creamy chicken soup mentioned earlier in the blog) for lunches this week.

Cost - Sometimes paying for a whole chicken can seem a bit expensive, however you can get more out of a whole chicken than you can out of chicken breasts making it good value for money.  We had dinner for 2 nights - slicing a breast for each night - plus six portions of soup from our lunch during the week.  The chicken was € 4.66 (I've allowed two thirds of the cost for the roast dinners), the parsnips were 49 cent, the carrots were 99 cent per 1 kg bag (I used them all between the soup and dinners), the potatoes were about € 1.50 and the onion was 28cent.  The total for the roast dinner was €7.92, making it €3.96 per dinner. 

Looking at the cost of our roast dinner I can easily understand why my mum made so many of them.  It was good value for money and offered a well balanced meal of protein, carbs and veg.