By far the best personal card i've ever seen

My old roommate's sister, Kate, gave me one of these. Amazing!

Roast Chicken

I read an interview with Michael Pollen a few years ago when 'Food Rules' came out, his pocket-sized guide for healthy eating. He said that frequently doctors would ask him to write a list of easy-to-follow guidelines or rules for changing one's diet and reducing risk factors for healthy longevity. It's where his succinct driving mantra, "Eat food. Not too much, mostly plants" came from.

He also talked about hearing from doctors who, when talking to a patient whose elevated levels of cholesterol made them candidates for cholesterol medication, would, instead of writing a prescription, give them a recipe for making roast chicken along with 4 or 5 other meals that you could make with the subsequent leftovers.

I know how easy it is to get into a food rut. Of having a rotation of the same 10 ingredients or meals, especially 3 months into a 4 month season (there's something about changing seasons that gets me obsessively back into cooking). However, there will never be a time when I get sick of pulling out a perfectly juicy roast chicken from the oven. And, I'd argue, if you serve seasonal vegetables as a side, a roast chicken dinner can be as nutritious as it is comforting. Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home, a comprehensive 'how to' cookbook provides a recipe for roast chicken and 3 or 4 pages of how to change its flavor profile and serve sides for all 4 seasons. Perfect.

Knowing how to roast a chicken to consistent perfection will change your life. I'm not kidding!

I'd say there are weeks where 3 out of every 10 meals we have contain some part of a roast chicken. I've been known to roast 2 or 3 in a weekend in order to break down, shred and freeze for later meals. If i had to guess, I've probably roasted 30 just this year. The bones destined for stock, one chicken can feed the two of us for 5-6 meals, all told. And since 4-5 pound bird can run you as little as $3.00 if you catch it at a good price and have the luxury of a freezer to store a few extra, this is good on all sorts of levels.

 First, some tips, then the recipe:

* There are about 350,000 different recipes on roasting chicken. My method ('recipe' seems a bit of a stretch) is a combination of two of my favorite recipes (different sources, both derived from everyday French techniques). The result will be juicy like a rotisserie chicken. I'll be hopefully posting more recipes for different kinds of chicken (very crispy skin, glazed, etc), but this is a workhorse kind of technique that requires very little fuss, making it a go-to for both a lazy Sunday or a just-got-home-haven't-taken-shoes-off-yet kind of frenzied Thursday night dinner.

* I always buy chickens that weigh around 4 1/2 lbs. This is a perfect size for 4 people and (to my eye) is a little bigger than a typical rotisserie chicken you pick up at the store.
The singular reason for the consistency is to make you a better cook, and to minimize time calculations at the end of a busy day. If I only ever cook chicken that weighs 4 1/2 lbs, then through experience I can tell down to the minute when the chicken will be perfectly done. This also helps improve cooking skills in general, since you can teach your other senses how to tell when a chicken is ready to pull out of the oven instead of just relying on the internal temperature.

* Pull your chicken out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature for an hour before cooking. After an hour or whenever I work my way back into the kitchen, I take out the neck and organs that they usually throw in there, pat dry with paper towels, then let it sit, surrounded by more paper towels, in a bowl in the sink for another 10 or 15 minutes. This is about half of the total energy that you will expend making the chicken.

* A good rule of thumb is to season the chicken, then turn on the oven. The amount of time it takes the oven to heat up is about equal to the time your chicken should spend with seasoning before cooking.

 * If you're using rosemary, put it in after you flip the bird (or after 45 minutes if you're using a different method than below). Rosemary tends to taste medicinal after 45 minutes or an hour and that 'denatured woodsy' note is really overpowering.

* Always always always temp the chicken. Maybe I'm just paranoid or I'm scared of being too cavalier so as to invite tragedy (if movies have taught me anything it is that being boastful will immediately result in a gypsy curse that threatens to take away that which i hold most dear), but you'll truly never learn how to cook food properly if you don't take the temperature of your protein every single time you take it out of the oven to check for doneness.

* Let rest for 20 mins, and, if possible, tilt it breast side down with the neck slightly elevated on an overturned bowl or something. This helps encourage the juices from the breast to redistribute therein, rather than pooling under the thighs.

Roast Chicken (Poulet en Concôte method)

Preparing

1) Remove the chicken from the fridge and let sit out at room temperature for about an hour. If you're short on time or are grossed out about food spending time in the 'danger zone' of temperature, run a very small stream of cold tap water over the chicken for 20 minutes or so and continue to step 2.

2) With the cavity (rear end) pointing down, sit the bird upright in a bowl set in the sink. This will allow the blood to drain while you rinse and trim.
To trim, check the cavity to see if there are organs or neck pieces. Throw out the organs but save the neck (trimming away the skin) for either stock or start a freezer bag of necks for braising (I'm hoping to do a post in praise of turkey/chicken necks in the coming weeks). I cut out the tailbone with a paring or steak knife so the bottom looks like this:

It's not completely necessary to cut it out, but it's like 99% fat and you never really eat it anyway, so...
While you're down there, take a paring knife to any extra pieces of skin that they usually leave on around the cavity area. Most of the ones I get have these huge flaps of skin that they tuck into the cavity that are easily removable. Rinse and sit upright onto paper towels to soak up water and blood. Put paper towels on top as well and let sit for a few minutes while you wash your hands and put 4 tablespoons of salt and maybe 2 tablespoons of pepper in a small bowl. Finally, flip the wing tips behind the breast to keep them from sticking out. It makes him look like he's sunbathing, so, you know, pretty cute.

3) Add salt and pepper mixture all over the chicken, being very liberal. It is actually kind of shocking how much salt it takes. You should have just a little bit left over that you can reserve for the vegetables. Turn the oven to 350 degrees and let sit until the oven beeps.

 

Cooking 

4) When the oven's ready, generously oil a 7 quart cast iron pot (or other large, heavy-bottomed pot with a fitted lid that is oven-safe) and heat over medium-high on the stove top.
Pat the chicken completely dry and add, breast side down, to the pot when the oil starts shimmering and just begins to smoke. Let cook, undisturbed, for 3-4 minutes and then flip and cook for 3-4 minutes. The chicken should be golden brown and crispy. add a half lemon and a bunch of thyme sprigs to the cavity. Cover with the lid and put in oven for 45 minutes.

 

5) While the chicken is cooking, peel and chop 3 stalks of celery, 2 carrots, and an onion. toss with the salt and pepper mixture left over from earlier and enough oil to make the vegetables glisten a little.

6) After 45 minutes, take the chicken out of the pot with tongs and let rest on a plate. Take the temperature of the thickest part of the thigh. If it's somewhere in the 140s, you're about 30-40 minutes away from being done. Add the mixed vegetables to the bottom of the pot (there should be some chicken fat and juices that have rendered already). Flip the chicken and let sit on top of the vegetables breast-side down. Cook for another 20 minutes, then start temping every 5-10 until the breast registers 165 and the thigh measures 175.

 

7) Tent with foil and let sit, with the breast side down and propped up a little on an overturned bowl, for about 20 minutes before carving. Strain the vegetables and the cooking liquid or else they'll be a little greasy. You can use the strained liquid to make a gravy if you'd like by adding it back to the pot with some flour and chicken stock and simmering on medium while whisking.

Israel's birthday party

Back in the summer we were invited to our friend Valerie's son's birthday. Valerie passed away in Japan a few months ago. It was very sudden, and as a result, Israel and Alex moved back to Memphis to figure things out. Israel turned 3 and Joanna, Valerie's sister (above) worked so hard to give him a great birthday. He was a little overwhelmed with all the people, but he looked like he had fun.  I love this picture of Joanna.

December Challenge

I am getting SO excited for Christmas this year. For the first time in years, we're not traveling. We're not hosting family from out of town for two weeks. Everyone is happy and healthy and there's no anxiety about putting together a SUPER FUN, VERY EXCITING holiday. 
For the first time, It doesn't have to be a Christmas to make us forget who's missing, or a Christmas to help us forget how to be sad or twinged with bereavement.
It's like I've been given the gift of a holiday unmarred by anniversaries or time.

For the first time, this is just Christmas.

More on all of this later, but my reason for posting is to tell you about this thing that I'm doing. And I know it's halfway through December and I'm sharing it with you two weeks late, but I'm so pleased with how things are turning out I think I might do it for January too, mostly because I am a glutton for punishment but also because I could do a better job of tracking things and posting them (that's the idea, anyway).

Given the excesses in all areas of one's life around this time, I have decided to do a how-cheap-can-you-eat-for-a-month month. I thought it might be interesting to do it during a month where you seem to cook and bake for everyone, a time where mixers are pulled out of their nooks and things get really busy in the kitchen.

The goal is $150 per person for the whole month, so $300 for the two of us and whomever else we end up feeding. I've also thrown in an extra $10 for a bag of sugar and a stick of butter to account for holiday baking, but that's it. (This just made it easier to break down to a day-today since December has 31 days.)

So, the budget is $310 for all meals, snacks, potlucks, holiday baking and company. It works out to $5 per person, per day. We shop frugally, but have a lot of company and a taste for fancy cheeses and artisanal vinegars, so this is way more than half of our usual 'budget'.



Here are some more details about the parameters and full disclosures, and an update on how things are going:

1) We're both in kind of a cutting/maintaining phase. As a result, dinner has to be low carb and can't really involve boiling pasta and opening a can of sauce. Lots of vegetables and more expensive, lean proteins and less of cheap carbohydrates, unfortunately. (-)

2) We have a lot of stuff in the deep freeze, which is half the reason why I wanted to do this anyway. 4 or 5 roast chickens, some tamales, ground turkey, frozen vegetables, and chicken stock. Also our pantry is stocked with pasta, many kinds of flour, canned tomatoes ready for making sauce, trail mix and granola bars that i've stocked up on from back-to-school sales in august/september. This makes lunches a little cheaper since i'm not factoring in the cost of something i bought 2 months ago (+)

3) there's no costco over-supply of coffee, bacon, butter, olive oil or parmesan, which are my staples. When they run out, buying them will create an overage or supply for the following month even though i'm not splitting the cost in half to reflect that i'm only consuming half the product for the month (i've completely overthought this). This may not seem like a big deal, but if i bought just those 5 ingredients at costco, even though they are much cheaper to buy in bulk than run to the grocery store for smaller or individual versions, that still comes to about $70, which makes me wince. I figure that the couponing i do for everyday stuff kind of balances this out (-)


4) Because i've bought bulk herbs and spices from my favorite (and highest quality, in my opinion) online place, I am awash in great, fresh seasoning that i consider a bonus because i can make spice pastes and things for cheaper cuts of meat without making it feel like i'm eating poor people food.
I also have a reduced schedule for the rest of the month until we leave for winter break, so i've got extra time on my hands to do more involved recipes that save money but take longer. (+)

5) I have access to an international market that specializes in hispanic food (Winchester Farmer's Market) and a produce place (Easy-way) that has fresh produce staples as well as sells markdown produce that makes chicken stock (and subsequent soups) really cheap, bringing down the total for the month. (+)


It being almost the middle of the month, we're doing pretty good. We've spent just over $150 and have a pretty amazingly stocked fridge and only need to restock some basic items until the weekend. This extreme reduction month requires a LOT of planning and enough extra work to perhaps make it illogical to do every day for the entire year, but it's not SO much that you can't bring your monthly total down significantly once you get in the routine.

I'll take a picture this week of my menu planner with my item-by-item totals and maybe post a couple of recipes of cheap stuff we're eating. Yesterday was turkey burgers, carrot fries, and stuffed mushrooms and worked out to about $6.40 for both of us, including breakfast and lunch.

so long, sweet summer

 

 

my favorite picture: the little guy's taking a siesta after eating all of my damn parsley

Summer Update: Sangeet

This was by far the most pictures i've ever taken in one night. i think before editing i took over 800 in the span of 3 hours, obsessively trying to capture the vibrancy of all of the colors and ornate jewelry and decorations and absorb it all.

a longtime friend of my mom's is from mexico but married an indian guy. their daughter married a cuban dude in mexico last year, and their son married an (absolutely gorgeous) indian girl in a very traditional ceremony.

this is the first i've really been able to peek into this weeks-long ceremony and have always wanted to see it firsthand. gorgeous!


my favorite picture: 

since we were guests of the groom's family, we celebrated at their party. the bride's family was in an identical room next door and an accordion wall separated the two. after some traditional singing and dancing, they broke the wall down and everyone partied and ate together.

groom's sister in the center

my mom's friend

the groom

 

groom's father

Darrel-lynne "Only Other White Girl Present" Thieson

bride

groom's father

my godmother, the groom's brother-in-law, the groom's father

tiniest woman competition winner