Easy Side Dishes to Serve with Roast Chicken

     Pasta tossed with olive oil and parsley, steamed potatoes, couscous, polenta, a baguette...just about any starch you can think of goes with roast chicken. In my book, it's even better if you tart up the starch component so you get your vegetables at the same time. 

     You can take the parsley approach or mix chopped fresh tomatoes and torn basil leaves into pasta instead. Potatoes taste much better (and look far prettier) sprinkled with scissored chives. Couscous becomes tabbouleh when you add handfuls of red or green pepper, cucumber, tomato, mint, and cartloads of parsley, all chopped. Polenta is lovely when you throw in fine snippings of rosemary and/or shredded sun-dried tomatoes as you cook it.   

 All these additions work with rice too but what I've been making a lot over the past incredibly hot month is rice salad. I can't give you a firm recipe because it's never the same twice, depending on what I've got in the fridge.
    Once the rice was cooked, today's chicken-accompanying version began with the bird's juices, which I degreased first. Then I sloshed in some olive oil. As soon as the rice had cooled to room temp, in went chopped red pepper, red onion, parsley and--the secret ingredient--finely chopped preserved lemon, which adds a deliciously citric edge to the dish.

   Last Friday I bought a kilo of haricots verts at Lavelanet market for all of two euros. One handful per person, topped and tailed (scissors are the swiftest way to go about this), went into a pan of boiling water for five minutes. While they were cooking, I fried a finely chopped large clove of garlic in about three tablespoons of olive oil, just until it turned golden. Beans drained and put in a dish, garlic-y oil poured over. Done. Nice cold too and keeps for several days in the fridge, as does the rice salad, so make lots.
    Vinaigrette-d lettuce leaves. Tomatoes from the garden, still warm when we ate them. Bread (not a baguette but the rustic couronne with holes the size of centimes that we buy at the market). Cold rosé from Provence.
    And suddenly it was four in the afternoon.

Would you call this fusion food?

   You haven't lived till you've tasted my lardons fried rice, a cross-cultural dish that's hardly likely to find its way into any foodie magazine. But good, fast and cheap? Exceptionellement.
   First you need lardons, those invaluable little bacon-bit-like things that I pick up as regularly as I buy eggs, milk and bread....I was going to write this out in a classic recipe format but there's so much wiggle room in the recipe that I'll just tell you the ingredients and technique, and let you take it from there.
    Begin by browning your lardons (or chopped rashers of bacon) in a frying pan, about 50 grams per person should be enough although more doesn't hurt. Then add cold leftover rice, about a cupful for two maybe, although, to reiterate, more is fine too.
    Break up the rice with a fork as you heat it up in the bacon fat so that the grains are approaching separateness. Then beat two eggs and add those, stirring and stirring so that the eggs get cooked but don't coagulate into large eggy lumps. Almost there.
   Chop a couple of green onions, add those and heat them through. Add one or two sloshes of soy sauce.
   Stir everything together, and season with ground black pepper. Now, the French component...dish up your fried rice into a couple of bowls and strew with finely chopped chives from your potager.