Friday's roast chicken...

Roast chicken, in my mind, is synonymous with "family dinner". The aroma, the skin, the ritual of carving; all of these items come together for me to symbolize a certain kind of meal.
So, after a hard day at work, it was nice to come home tonight and concentrate on something I really like.
After reading The Omnivore's Dilemma I'm trying to be a little bit more aware of my food and where it comes from, so instead of the usual store-brand (or Purdue) chicken, I went with a "Smart" chicken, which appears to be close to organic, but not quite all the way there. The same company sells an organic version of their chicken, but after reading Dilemma, I'm a little skeptical on what I'm getting for my organic dollar.
Anyway, when it comes to chicken, I'm a simple man. I took my chicken (which came trussed), patted it dry with paper towels, brushed it with melted butter. I sprinkled some coarse kosher salt over top, and some fresh ground pepper, and popped that sucker in the oven for an hour at 375deg. When I pulled it out, it wasn't quite brown enough, so I turned the heat up to 425, and let it go for another 15 minutes.
Here's what I ended up with:
Not bad looking, if I say so myself. I could've left it at 425 longer, to get the skin browner, but the meat was just right.


When I make dinner, I'm usually a "meat and two" kind of guy. I make a starch and I make a vegetable, and occasionally we'll get really crazy and have a salad, too. Tonight, I'd bought zucchini, but since I seem to always either saute the zucchini or grill it, I figured I'd do something different. I hunted around, and in James Peterson's (my favorite cookbook author) Vegetables there's a recipe for zucchini pancakes that I went with. They were pretty easy to make, only requiring that you julienne the zucchini (which went quickly with my benriner) and then salt and drain them, while making a simple batter of garlic paste, water, flour and sage. Once the zucchini drained, I had to squeeze them to get all the water out (and you'd be surprised at how much water those little suckers hold. I wish I'd gotten a picture of that), and then mix the zucchini with the batter, make patties, and fry them up.


With the veg taken care of, the only thing to worry about was the starch, and that was kind of a no-brainer. I love mashed potatoes, and I happen to think mine are pretty damn good, so I went with that. The great thing about mashed potatoes is there no recipe. All it is is potatoes, some liquid, some fat, some seasonings, all mashed together. A monkey could make that.
What I do with mine is I take my potatoes, peel them, cut them into chunks, put them in a pot full of cold water, and then bring the potatoes to boil and boil them for about 20 minutes (or until they're done). Then I drain them, and put them in the dry pot over low/med heat, and let the heat dry the potatoes some. I think this drying is important, because I like potatoes that are kind of "fluffy", and if you don't dry out the potatoes a little, then when you mix in your butter, your cream/whatever, etc, it'll be a little more liquidy/smooth than I really like.
But whatever, after they're a little dried out (the pan stops sizzling), I sprinkle coarse salt over top (totally to taste), and then add my butter, and start mashing. I use a masher, not a food mill or anything like that, because I like my mashed potatoes lumpy. If you don't like lumpy potatoes, well, you can always do it some other way. Then I usually add horseradish to the potatoes. I like a little zip in my potatoes, and horseradish gives the potatoes that without being overpowering. I'm not adding alot, just a forkful or two. You could go the roasted garlic route (where you take a head of garlic, cut the top off, put it in foil, drizzle oil over top, wrap it up, and bake at 450 for an hour), but that requires a level of advance planning I'm not really into. Trust me, try the horseradish. Anyway, once that's mixed/mashed in, I add my cream or sour cream to finish things off. All of this (the butter, the horseradish, the salt, the cream) is to taste, and depends on how I'm feeling, and that's the only way you can do something like mashed potatoes. And that's about it. Mashed potatoes are about as easy as you can get, and if you're making the instant version, you're kind of wrong. Ok, you're not kind of wrong, you're just wrong.
My potatoes:


So there's Friday's dinner. I liked it, the kids liked it, and the plates were clean by the end of the night. I guess you can't ask for more than that.

The recipes, such as they are:

Roast Chicken:

3 1/2 - 4 lb chicken
2-3 tbsp butter, melted.
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 375deg. Rinse and pat dry chicken, and truss if so inclined. Place chicken in a roasting pan, and brush with melted butter all over. Sprinkle with salt and fresh ground pepper.
Roast for 1 hour, or until breast registers 165deg and thigh registers 180 with an instant read thermometer. Remove from oven, and allow to rest for 10-15 minutes. Carve and serve.

Zucchini Pancakes:
2-3 med/lg zucchini
6 tbsp flour + more for dredging
2-3 cloves garlic
1/4 -1/2 tbsp ground sage
6 tbsp water
olive oil
1 1/2 tbsp salt

Cut zucchini in half crosswise, and cut into 1/8 in julienne with a mandoline or benriner.
Toss zucchini with salt, and set in a colander over a bowl to drain for 20-30 minutes.
Mash garlic into a paste, and mix in a bowl with flour, water and sage to make a batter.
Squeeze moisture out of drained zucchini (wrapping in a towel and squeezing dry works best) and combine with batter. Form patties, dust lightly with more flour, and fry over med heat for ~7-8 minutes per side.
Serve warm.

Mashed Potatoes:
2-3lbs potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
2-3 tbsp butter
1-2tbsp horseradish
coarse kosher salt + freshly ground pepper to taste
1/4 - 1/2 c cream/sour cream

Starting in cold water, boil potatoes for 20 minutes.
Drain potatoes, and add back to hot pan, and over low/med-lo heat, let potatoes dry out.
Add butter, and salt to taste, and mash to combine. Add horseradish, stir and mash to combine.
Add cream, and stir/mash to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve warm.

All songs considered....

I like music, and while some people (ahem) might think they're more knowledgeable than me (and "they" are probably right), I'd like to think I know a bit about the subject.

However, I didn't know about something really cool called "All Songs Considered...".
The back story:
I went to the doctor today, and on my way, I was listening to one of my favorite bands, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. When I got back to the office, humming and tapping my toes, I looked them on Wikipedia, and found a link to this (a recording of a Ted Leo concert), which served nicely as background music while I made cheese soup (by request of my 8yr old).

It turns out npr.org has a buttload of music on their website, much of it served up in podcast form on the podcast "All Songs Considered..." (link). I don't know who does the concert selection for the podcast, but it's like they're reading my internal setlist. They have concerts from Steve Earle, Radiohead, Fleet Foxes, Jim James (lead singer of MMJ), Spoon, Neko Case, Arcade Fire, New Pornographers, and many more.

So, if you're looking for cool music, consider NPR. It's not just for white-wine swilling, granola-eating, tree-hugging, flag-burning liberals.

My favorite time of the year...

One of my favorite times of the year is the transition from summer to fall. It's still warm during the day (but not oppressively so), and the evenings are deliciously cool, making more cozy fare much more attractive.
One of my favorite dishes for cool/cold nights is a gratin, in tonight's case, a potato gratin.
Gratins are really easy to make (all a gratin is, really, is vegetables with a little liquid, baked slowly until a crust forms and the liquid thickens), and they taste sooooo good.

For tonight, I wanted to make a potato gratin, so after I went to the brewing store for beer ingredients, I swung by my local grocer for the ingredients.
To make a potato gratin, what you need are:
potatoes (3-4 med/lg potatoes)
cream
milk
a garlic clove
a good hard cheese, like gouda or gruyere
salt + pepper

What you do is pretty simple. You combine a cup of cream with a cup of milk in a pan, and add a crushed garlic clove. Warm that gently over low heat and leave it be.
Slice the potatoes thinly (a benriner or mandolin works best), and then in a gratin pan (or a pie pan for that matter), put a ladle-ful of the warm milk in the bottom of the pan, and then a layer of potatoes. Add a little more cream, and then fresh ground pepper, and some grated cheese. Another layer of potatoes, then cream, pepper and cheese. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you've either used up your potatoes or the pan is full. Put some more grated cheese over top so that you'll have a nice crust, and bake the whole shebang for about an hour at 350deg F.

What you'll get is heaven in a pan:


What's more, it's not just good food, it's a good test of character. Any person who doesn't like potatos au gratin is probably not someone you need to spend time getting to know in the first place. (After all, who doesn't like cheese, cream and potatoes?)

The Stock Answer...

Chicken stock is a funny thing. It's one of the core ingredients in cooking, whether making a soup, a sauce, a casserole, whatever; yet most people don't make it, but rather buy the stuff in the can (or in box). Personally, I don't have a problem with that, although this guy does. But even though I don't think it's a hanging offense to use the canned stuff, I think homemade stock is superior, and since it's pretty easy (if somewhat time-consuming) to make, it's probably something everyone should know how to do.

I also wanted to do stock today as a blog post because I figured it would be a good excuse to laze around the house, baby-sitting the stock, and recovering from my run this morning. No such luck.
But I did manage to squeeze in all the steps necessary, so maybe that shows you can make stock-making fit your schedule.

Stock is really just "parts", plus aromatics, herbs, and water. I get my parts by cleaning out the freezer periodically. Backs, wings, giblets (minus the liver), those leftover chicken thighs I never got around to using, whatever. I've got roughly 8-12 lbs, and they're all destined for the pot.
The aromatics I'm using today are the "trinity" of celery, onion, and carrot, the herbs are a combination of parsley, thyme, and tarragon (I couldn't find bay leaf in my pantry, and it'll be fine without it), and the water is Cary's finest straight from the tap.

I'm following the recipe in James Peterson's "Sauces" cookbook for Brown Chicken Stock, but you really don't need a recipe for stock. In the most basic terms, you take your chicken parts, you rinse them off, and then put them in a single layer in a roasting pan.




Preheat the oven to 400deg, and pop the parts in for 20 minutes. Once they start getting golden, add the aromatics and stir everything up. Put it all back in the oven for 45 more minutes.



When the parts come out, they'll be nice and brown and smell really good. Then you take out your parts and put them in a stock pot (I used a 16qt, the book calls for a 25qt, you decide). Then you skim the excess fat from the roasting pan, put it over two burners on top of the stove, and turn up the heat. Add about a quart of water to the pan, and bring it to a boil, and scrape all those nice brown bits from the bottom of the pan.


Once you've got the pan deglazed, you (carefully) pour the water into the stock pot, and then you add about 8 more quarts of water. Bring it to a simmer and let it simmer for about 30-45 minutes, add your bouquet garni, turn the heat down to low, and leave it be for about 3-4 hours. Then you turn off the heat and let it cool.


Once you're done, just strain it with a colander to get all the big solids out, and then strain it thru a mesh strainer to get any finer solids out. What you do at that point is kind of up to you, but what I did was take about 8 ziploc freezer bags, and divvied up the stock among them, and froze the bags.

So that's it. Easy peasy. Your house will smell really good, and the next time you make something that calls for chicken stock, rather than reaching for the can, you'll thaw out some stock, and it'll taste 100 times better.

Marathon thoughts...

I just ran 18 miles this morning as part of my marathon training (and let me tell you, 18 miles is a long, long way), and as I ran, I thought about blog postings that I could do (since I am completely out of gas right now), and while I'm making chicken stock right now for a posting later today, I figured I'd also do a brain dump of various things that occurred to me on the run.

1. Living in an area with 3 major universities and numerous smaller schools means that you see a diverse group no matter where you go, even in Umstead Park at 7am, and unfortunately, they're all faster than me. (At least, the group of Kenyans I saw this morning were just smoking fast, and I saw them several times in my route, and they never looked tired).

2. Most people are very friendly when you're out running, and the ones that aren't probably are just tired.

3. Chafing is an unfair fact of life, and no matter what steps you take to prevent it (from strategic band-aids to different shorts, whatever), you will always chafe somewhere.

4. If I didn't have my shuffle, I'd go totally bat-crazy running long distances. I'm always impressed at the playlist I end up with, since I have enough music on there that each run is likely to have something different.
The bands I have on my shuffle: (in alphabetical order) Beastie Boys, Beck, Ben Folds Five, Breeders, Clash, Clinic, Dixie Chicks (ok, that one's embarassing), Drive-By Truckers, Elvis Costello, Fleet Foxes, Franz Ferdinand, Garbage, Girl Talk, Green Day, Guided By Voices, The Hold Steady, Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Kathleen Edwards, The Knack, Loretta Lynn, Lucinda Williams, Muse, The New Pornographers, Nine Inch Nails, Old 97's, Outkast, Pearl Jam, Pixies, PJ Harvey, Public Enemy, REM, Raconteurs, Radiohead, Rolling Stones, Sleater-Kinney, Spoon, Superchunk, Ted Leo, Throwing Muses, U2, White Stripes, The Who, and finally, Wilco.

I think that's a pretty good mix, and it's interesting to go from one genre to another in one song. I've often thought this kind of trainwreck playlist would be a good radio format, but clearly, no one else does.

5. Finally, just because you're tired after a long run, don't expect sympathy from non-running members of the household. Trees still need planting, kids still have activities, and laying on the couch recuperating doesn't typically figure into things.

Next up, chicken stock.

51st post!

Apparently, my blog-odometer has clicked over to post number 51! That's not bad, I suppose. It averages out, I think, to 1 a week, but there have been several long dry spells of posting, so the average is deceiving.

It's been about a year, when I started writing about "brewing", which then transitioned to "brewing/beer and food, mixed with the occasional music post", which is where it stands right now.

On to the meat of the post:

Grilled chicken breasts are so common in restaurants, magazines, and backyards that they're almost a cliche. This is for good reason, since a grilled chicken breast is easy to do, tastes reasonably good, and goes with virtually everything. But even as useful as they are, they can get kind of boring after a while, and they've always had a sort of "lean cuisine" connotation to me (not that I eat much lean cuisine, as you can tell from my self portrait (but I swear, the double chin is only because of how I'm standing in the pic)). So, instead of grilling your chicken breast, let me suggest breading. Breading is as easy as grilling, you can add more flavor (by seasoning the breading), it's a change of pace, and it has a different feel to it than grilling.

Here's how I bread:

I take 3 bowls, and I put flour (which you can season with salt, pepper, cayenne, etc) in one, a beaten egg or two in the second, and in the third I put seasoned bread crumbs or panko.
Then I melt a combination of butter and olive oil (say 1 part butter to 2 parts olive oil) in a saute pan over med/med-hi heat.
Next I take my chicken breasts, which I've cut in half and pounded between saran wrap (or turkey cutlets, unpounded), and dip each in the flour, then the egg, then the breadcrumbs, with each piece ending up in the pan. Don't crowd the pan, though, so once things get full, don't add more chicken.
Then you just brown one side (3-4 minutes), and then the other (again, 3-4 minutes).



Once all the breast "cutlets" are done, serve them with pretty much anything. I'm partial to roasted potatoes (my go-to starch), and something like steamed (or roasted) asparagus, or some other green vegetable.

The good thing about something like breading is it gets you a little more involved with the cooking, and you can add more flavor by just adding flavor to the breading, like maybe adding some grated parmesan to the bread crumbs.

Anyway, happy 51st.

PS - picked up the Elliot Smith album Either/Or this morning. Very good stuff. I was looking thru my old posts today, since I'd told someone (hey, senea!) that I had a blog, and I wanted to make sure none of my posts were terrible or anything, and I noticed my comments about Neon Bible, by the Arcade Fire. I was wrong. It definitely is a great album. The muddy production I was hearing was due to my cheapo Toyota Matrix stereo, not the very fine music on the CD.

Coming up next, I'm thinking of taking all the spare chicken parts in my freezer and turning them into stock (I was inspired by in part by this post by Michael Ruhlman, whose blog, and writing overall, is vastly better than mine will ever be). Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying, "stay tuned".

The Omnivore's Dilemma, cont'd

So, I've gotten further into The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I've finally gotten to the "hopeful" part of the book. After Pollan discussed "traditional" (industrial) organic food, he paid a visit to a farm in Virginia (called Polyface Farm) which practices an interesting brand of what I guess is organic, and at the same time actively promotes locavorism. (Is that even a word?)
Anyway, what it means is that the farm in question grows chickens, cows, pork, vegetables, etc, but what it really practices is pasture management. For example, the cows are solely grass-fed, and they get rotated over each pasture. When they graze, they contribute manure. After they get moved off a section of pasture, the chickens are brought in to scratch for grubs in the manure, which both controls flies and helps contribute nitrogen to the soil, which fertilizes the grass.
There other examples in the book, but what it boils down to is a more holistic form of farming, and apparently the food generated is great (at least according to the author).
I've been thinking about getting a CSA (community supported agriculture) subscription next year, and reading this section definitely provides added motivation.

The last section of the book concerns "foraging", and I'm kind of rushing through this part of the book. It's not that it's not interesting, but parts of this section were excerpted in the NY Times, and honestly, it's very relevant. I mean, I can eat locally. I can't really forage for my dinner, and other than maybe learning how to hunt mushrooms, I'm not all that interested in hunting.

Any way, it's a good "food book", and while it can be a little preachy at times about how bad Americans eat, it's enjoyable.