This is the 2023 Christmas bird. It's a capon (a fattened chicken) and it weighed about eight pounds before we cooked it. I stuffed a big bouquet of celery leaves, an onion, and a few garlic cloves into the cavity before I roasted the bird for 3.5 hours at 150ºC (300ºF) in our convection oven. I read a lot of French web sites about cooking a capon, and they all recomended cooking the bird low and slow.
I made a pan of bread stuffing (or "dressing") to cook alongside the capon. We always had bread stuffing (or cornbread stuffing) with turkey when I was growing up in North Carolina. Some of the ingredients in yesterday's stuffing were onions, celery, bell peppers, prunes, dried cranberries, walnuts, pâté, the precooked capon liver, pork lardons, melted butter, capon (or chicken) broth, and a couple of beaten eggs.
This was my plate at dinnertime. I like the leg and thigh of the bird (dark meat), while Walt prefers the breast (white meat). He made his family's cranberry sauce as a kind of chutney to have with the bird. He makes it with re-hydrated dried cranberries and a whole orange, skin and all, ground up in the food processor. The other side dishes were Brussels sprouts and winter squash purée. Butternut, for example, or, in this case, the mashed flesh of a French sucrine du Berry that Walt grew in this year's vegetable garden.
Delightful!
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