ChickenFail

I have mentioned before that Dan is the motherplucking chicken whisperer. It may have been his beef that was served at Chelsea Clinton's wedding, but I feel his chicken transcends poultry in ways that are still not fully understood. I will not lie, though, these are not inexpensive chickens. In fact, given that you can probably pick up a purdue roaster for like $5 (honestly, I don't know, I've never had one) and Whole Foods will sell you a cooked one for like $10; Dan's are $7 a pound.

Believe me when I tell you (though, frankly, it's not important until next year since the chickens are done for the season) that it is worth $7/pound. Yes, there is something unsettling about not really getting change back from 30 bucks when you're buying chicken, but I am happier about eating this chicken than I am about eating 98% of the rest of the stuff I eat that I have decided price is unimportant.

For the most part the chicken comes to our house to be prepared in a most basic fashion. Specifically, the Amateur Gourmet's fashion. It has never not been good. Generally speaking it is out of this world. Two weekends ago it was exceptional, as were the veggies, fingerlings and cippolinis which were absolutely pwned by Maillard reactions.

This past weekend I bought my last chicken of the year. I even emailed Dan to make sure I could get my hands on one. Devoted partner and I decided jointly to try something new. He wanted something that utilized herbs, a more traditional recipe if you will, and I had seen a recipe that used root veggies in this month's Bon Appetit. It sounded fine. And as I had learned, it's really difficult to mess up Dan's chickens.

Until now, that is.

Scratch that, the chicken is fine, the meal sucked.

We threw out the pan juices that I was told to add lager to and reduce because the resulting concoction tasted exactly like skunked beer with meat in it; the root vegetables released too much water during cooking and as a result nothing caramelized and everything was bland. The saving grace? The cup or so of the previous week's pan juices that, when drizzled over this lackluster meal, went a long way to salvaging it.

I know every recipe won't be a winner, but this one was a real loser, the kind of loser that, coupled with my magazine malaise, is really taking Bon Appetit out of the running for renewal. I just can't believe that I messed up the recipe to such an extent that it was my negligence that made it taste bad. I think it was simply a crap recipe.

Tonight we'll give the folks at Saveur a try with a cardamom chicken curry. The chicken has been marinating in salmonella yogurt since yesterday, so if you don't hear from me tomorrow, you'll know why.

Two Summer Recipes

I have always wanted one of those beautiful food blogs with incandescent light sweeping across my beautifully plated foods. There are a couple of obstacles, sort of surmountable, but which I don't seem to surmount. First, the light in my house is yellow. At times of the day there is some nice natural light through the windows, but those times are not in the evening when I cook. In theory I could take my food outside, set it up on a table, and photograph it, but we're going to eat that food and I'd like for the hots to stay hot and the colds to stay colds, and neither to be befouled by bugs, tree matter, or rain. Second, food bloggers seem to know where the best tag sales are because they all have beautiful vintage-y looking pieces in which to display their creations. Last summer, in an attempt to emulate them, I schlepped devoted partner to a dizzying number of local tag sales where we found precisely nothing I would want to serve food on. I've looked at etsy as well and the long and short of it is, these food bloggers either snatch all the good stuff or they're shopping somewhere else.

This is why you're going to get two summer recipes with zero summer recipe pictures (though, theoretically, I am going to attempt to photograph one of them this afternoon in a simple white footed bowl).

In the interest of not infringing copyright-wise, the first recipe, Honey and Spice Glazed Chicken is from Food & Wine magazine. I subscribe and have subscribed to a plethora of foodish magazines and I rip out the recipes I want to try. Then those recipes sit in a drawer. Untried. I don't know why. Similarly, I have a motherlode of cookbooks which are eagerly paged through and then, well, put on a shelf where I like to admire their spines. I don't have an answer to that either. However, I have a plan. Devoted partner and I do some weekly shopping most Saturday mornings. On Friday evenings, we will look over the list of seasonally appropriate recipes and choose two or three to make in the coming week. Successful recipes will then be copied down into a book of some sort that they can be made again and that they can be found again. Unsuccessful scraps of magazine will go to the garbage. See how that makes so much sense?

Anyway, this chicken dish fit the bill on a number of levels including ease of preparation, quickness of preparation, ample flavor, and not at all bad for you (if you don't scarf down the chicken skin). My one caveat would be that the 25 minutes of cooking time suggested by the recipe was a touch on the short side for us. I would have given it another 5-8 minutes.

The second recipe isn't so much a recipe as it is the simple combination of three and a half ingredients to create a facsimile of a dish I enjoyed in childhood that I do not wish to enjoy so much in adulthood as the main ingredient is sour cream and a lot of it. My parent's friend Kayla made a strawberry soup that I could have quaffed by the vat. It's possible that at one time I asked for and received the recipe, but I'm pretty sure it was just strawberries, sugar, sour cream, and heavy cream. With strawberries in their peakest of peaks at the market, I simply had to come up with an alternative. Using two cups of fromage blanc (which is naturally fat free), one quart of pureed strawberries, about 1/3 of a cup of superfine sugar (this should be to taste depending on how sweet you like things), and a quarter cup of (I know this is disgusting) fat free half and half, I was able to come up with a decent stand-in that I felt not at all bad about eating. Oh, and it couldn't be simpler: puree strawberries in blender, add sugar. Beat fromage blanc until smooth, add strawberry puree, add half and half. Chill before serving and slice some whole strawberries into it if you like.