Rapunzel's job's far more important than mine, WAV - she's a full time health professional & still manages to sing, do gigs, attend singarounds & run a myspace page! As a mere storyteller, thus might I add house-husband to my CV, and proudly so, no matter how crap I am at it. And please note: this is my only discussion forum since getting locked out of Harvest Home owing to a technical glitch since we switched to Fire-Fox.

Regarding the roast, it's all in the preparation of course, or rather the lack of it. Here's the method:

One nice fat hen: dead, plucked, beheaded & otherwise prepared, preferable local, free range, but often pre-packed from a supermarket (just so the life & death of these poor little bastards haven't been entirely in vain)

A variety of vegetables, seasonal or otherwise: which out of necessity must include ingans (onions), parsnips, carrots, courgettes, leeks, sweet-potato, mushrooms, et al

Herbes de Provence.

Basically, the whole thing is roasted in the one tray - hen, vegetables & all, in an inch or so of water. Preparation time - five minutes tops, if that; the time it takes to turn the oven on & wash and chop the veg basically, although most them go in whole. Of course I might attend on it during the cooking - basting, adding the mushrooms at a later stage - but basically it looks after itself for the ninety minutes or so it's in the oven leaving me free to attend to my other duties.

For gravy I use Bisto and for Yorkshire's Aunt Bessies; never got the hang of Yorkshire's, but with Aunt Bessies I get perfect results every time. Actually, I regard this as a personal failing, perhaps even deserving of another thread.

Yorkshire's notwithstanding, the results are sublime - a roast fit for those who appreciate solid rusticity albeit from a post-modern neo-rural perspective; for those who yearn for the wholesome & the authentic; for those who eschew slick professionalism for the robust misrule of the singaround; for those to whom tradition is a continuity of purposeful ceremony; for those who seek communion thus manifest in the most mundane of culinary ritual; for those for whom the over-boiled bland segrated shite served up by our parents is no longer enough somehow...