“I never eat prunes myself. Well, there was one time when Hobb chopped them up with chestnuts and carrots and hid them in a hen. Never trust a cook, my lord. They’ll prune you when you least expect it.” (DwD)
Black Hen, carved, w/carrot-chestnut-prune stuffing
Our Thoughts
So, as soon as we learned about black chickens, we knew we had to try one. However, we didn’t realize that ours came with a head. Or with giant dinosaur feet. This made the preparation of the meal something of an adventure, and we mean the kind where it’s sort of unpleasant. We rolled up our sleeves, though, and soldiered on. The only solution was to cut that bird up until it looked like the sort of chicken we know and love, and so it stopped staring at us.
Eating this chicken is a strange experience. Your tastebuds say “chicken!”, while your brain can’t quite get over the color. The texture of the meat is somehow reminiscent of turkey, with a richer flavor than one gets with regular chicken. There isn’t a great deal of meat on one of these birds, but what you do find is tasty. Thankfully, the stuffing is absolutely YUM. Each flavor gets its own sort of showcase in your mouth, and each provides a nice, different texture from the others.
Bottom Line? A nice recipe, but next time we’ll put the stuffing in a normal chicken.
Hen on the Wall Recipe
Cooks Notes: We chose a black hen as sort of a culinary pun: black hen for black brothers. A regular chicken, or your choice of fowl, would also work equally well.
Ingredients:
- 1 whole chicken (we used a silkie, an Asian black chicken)
- 1/4 cup each prunes, chestnuts, carrots, diced
- 1 cup oats
- ~1 Tbs. butter
- 1/2 cup chicken stock
- breadcrumbs or a crunchy granola