Poultry

Two of my all-time favourite dishes would have to be lemon-roast chicken with peas and spinach, and duck coconut curry. However, both birds lend themselves to a huge array of other dishes and both are very versatile, especially chicken. You can usually replace chicken in a recipe with guinea fowl, and duck can be replaced with goose (although much harder to get hold of and also much bigger). Ostrich and, less frequently, emu have made inroads into our poultry sections in food stores and these are also worth trying at home. I always choose to cook organic or ‘free-range and hormone-free’ birds – the flavour is better and the bird has had a happier life! A word of warning on chicken: it can become very dry if overcooked, so keep an eye on it.