The roast chicken recipe that means so much more to me than just dinner

Ask my dad what his favourite dinner is and he'll say roast chicken – well, specifically the roast chicken my mum used to make.

I don't have a lot of memories of that exact meal, I just know she always made it in one special pan. Looking at it now, I can't understand how it would feed the four of us because it's not that big, but it did.

But when my mum died, it meant Dad had to learn how to do all the cooking for my brother and I, aged 10 and seven at the time – including that chicken, which changed how he felt about it.

Dad will say it's his favourite dinner "when someone else cooks it" now, but the recipe is special to me because that's the one he taught me to cook.

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"A roast is just such an easy dinner, you really just put it all in the oven and it's done," he's told me so many times.

Over the years I've spent many cold wintery afternoons helping him prepare a roast chicken with plenty of veggies, and the recipe became one I don't have to even think about – I just do it by muscle memory.

Talking away as I help stir the stuffing for the chicken and peel the potatoes, or just stir the gravy as it all comes together, have become some of my favourite moments with my dad to look back on.

It's the dinner that still comes out for birthdays, or when Dad finishes work early and has time to make it, or when you just need a good proper dinner.

So when I met my husband and we first started dating, it was one of those good impressive meals I had up my sleeve. He's a big fan of chicken so he loved it from the first time I made it for him.

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Now we've got a daughter and it's a dinner that feels like home every time I put it on the table for the three of us.

In a lot of ways it's a recipe that feels like it's come full circle – my mum made it for my dad and he loved it, and now I make it for my husband, who loves it too.

Ingredients

1 x chicken (I use anything from 1.5-2kg and just adjust cooking time slightly for the weight)
1 cup of breadcrumbs
1 egg
2 rashers of bacon, diced
1/2 a brown onion, diced
3 x potatoes (I go with one for each person who's going to be eating with us) peeled and either halved or quartered depending on how big they are
2 x large carrots - peeled and cut into large chunks
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Gravy powder
Vegetable stock
Toothpicks

Directions

1. Get the chicken out of the packaging and pat it dry with paper towels.

2. Preheat the oven to 180°C fan forced.

3. Prepare the stuffing (if I can't be bothered I will just skip this step and drop the cooking time without the weight).

4. Mix breadcrumbs, diced bacon, diced onion, egg and a pinch of salt and pepper in a bowl. If the mix is too wet, add a touch more breadcrumbs to help dry it up.

5. Spoon the stuffing into the cavity of the chicken until it's full. You don't need to have it overloaded, just enough so it's filled up. Then secure it with toothpicks to keep it from exploding out in the oven.

6. Add a drizzle of olive oil to the bottom of your roasting pan then add the chicken. Rub a little bit of the oil on top of the chicken and place into the oven.

7. After the chicken has been in for 30 mins, add the potatoes and carrots to the tray. If you tray isn't big enough, just add the vegetables to another tray and place that in the oven.

8. After 30 minutes, turn the vegetables to make sure they're not sticking and browning on all sides.

9. The chicken will cook for around one hour and 30 minutes, depending on weight (give or take longer or shorter) and take it out to rest on a plate. Cover it with foil to keep it warm. If your vegetables are cooked through you can take them out, otherwise keep them cooking until they're tender.

10. To make the gravy, add around one cup of water to the pan you cooked the chicken in – with all the bits stuck to the bottom – and bring to a low simmer on the stovetop.

11. Add two tablespoons of gravy powder and a touch of vegetable stock and stir over a low to medium heat until it comes together to a gravy constancy that works for you.

12. Serve the chicken, stuffing and vegetables with whatever sides you like. In our house it's usually beans with a bread roll on the side, but there's enough in this to make it a full meal if you don't want to add anything else.

*Note: If you don't want to stuff the chicken, leave it empty, or just shove a lemon in there and use that to help flavour it.