Brandon Eats

Do the Chicken Dance . . . Again

Just a little taste from the past to keep you going. This post originally published May 22, 2006. And I've eaten a lot of chicken since then.

One of the hardest dishes I've ever prepared is roasted chicken.  It's a dish I've prepared a lot, and never with any success--at all.  I've bought fancy digital thermometers, an upright roaster thing that makes your chicken look like it's about to wave at you from the oven, v-racks, and I've brined the chicken, turned it from one side to the other every fifteen minutes, cooked it at a high heat and then at a low, steady heat and every single, frackin' time, my bird was pink and bloody at the bone.  Every time.

So I would buy rotisserie chicken--which was always tender and done, but not hot, having cooled on the way home from the store, and not particularly interesting.  I got tired of that salt, pepper, and paprika taste and wanted something more savory, more garlicky.  I wanted a tender, sticky chicken with a nice loud flavor but I just couldn't get it if I left my chicken whole.  So I gave up on the whole idea, and much to my dogs' regret, the half-cooked poultry carcasses that used to whiz in the general direction of their food bowls disapeared from the canine menu.

Then Nigella saved me.  She made me make one concession however; I was forced to butterfly the chicken, but since this involved just a minor excision of the chicken's spine, I decided to overlook it.  Suddenly, I was able to produce juicy, flavor-jammed roasted chicken just like everyone else, and my shameful, embarrassing inadequacy (re:poultry) was overcome.

Praise be to La Lawson, for she's now my permanent partner in the eternal chicken dance of culinary life!

NIGELLA LAWSON'S BUTTERMILK ROAST CHICKEN (modified by me)

1-4 lb. chicken
2 cups buttermilk
4 cloves garlic, smashed
1 tablespoon crushed peppercorns (I like a mix but just black is fine)
2 tablespoons Maldon sea salt
2 tablespoons fresh rosemary leaves, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil

Butterfly chicken by placing breast-side down and using a very sharp knife or kitchen shears to cut along both sides of backbone. Discard backbone, turn chicken over press gently to flatten it until you hear a nice crack.

Add buttermilk, garlic, peppercorns, salt, rosemary and honey in a large freezer bag. Shake to dissolve salt and honey, then add chicken. Refrigerate for 6 hours minimum or up to two days.

Heat oven to 400 degrees F.

Remove chicken from marinade and place on a rack so excess can drip off.  Place chicken in roasting pan. Rub outside of chicken with olive oil.

Roast for 45 minutes, then reduce heat to 325 degrees F. Continue roasting until well browned and until juices run clear when chicken is pierced where leg joins thigh, about another 20 minutes. Tent with foil if necessary to prevent excessive burning.

Place chicken on a carving board and allow to rest for 10 minutes before cutting into serving pieces.

Gobble gratefully and bless Nigella silently for another meal lacking in the usual frustration.

Poem in Your Pocket Day

This Is Just to Say

by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Time for Vegetables

I didn't think I'd make it this year. The 17th Street Farmers' Market is finally back, every Thursday (8:30 am-2:00 pm) and Saturday (9:00 am-4:00 pm).  Be there or die of scurvy.

The Spice of Life

It's here, it's open, and it's FABULOUS.  I should know, I almost missed carpool pick-up wandering around today, sniffing each and every fragrant jar. Check out the new Penzeys in Carytown. Deveron Timberlake will have the news in her column on Wednesday in Style Weekly, but just between you and me, she says they came because they say there's a high concentration of their mail order customer base here.  That's you and me, baby! WE brought them here!  So go buy some of their great stuff so they'll be able to stick around for a while.

Sticky Lemon Chicken

Can you believe he doesn't always scream a stream of profanities at you, like he does on Hell's Kitchen?  Salon, in fact, had a piece on Gordon Ramsay not too long ago that made me follow their link to YouTube, and I found myself frittering away a large chunk of time watching a few of the videos he's made for the Times Online.

Ramsay seems surprisingly nice, and his prematurely creased face is actually kind of ruggedly attractive when it's not bright red and spitting words that engender fear and horror on the hapless contestants of his almost-impossible-to-watch show. Let me amend that: his impossible-to-watch reality show.  I can't watch it, and I can't watch Top Chef either because everybody on reality shows eventually gets on my nerves, either during the first, say, thirty seconds or by the second episode (generally there's not an in-between).  Just when I think watching Scott Baio (who I was madly in love with after I saw Bugsy Malone) might be mildly entertaining, I realize what a boring, vacuous life he leads and figure my own, boring, vacuous life watching TV is enough for any one person to deal with at one time. So click. Off goes reality TV and on goes Battlestar Galactica (my eyes are now two red molten holes in my head after watching two of season three's DVD's almost back to back). It's so much more fun and rewarding to hate Cylons than chef-contestant-whatchamacallit #1, #2, #3, #4, etc., etc.

Vegan? Or Not?

I'm not a vegan. I have a hard time with a philosophy that prevents me from eating cheese, or even worse, lobster (take that, all you non-pescatarian vegetarians!). Besides, I have little to no will power as it is.  I can't just suddenly ban whole food groups permanently from my diet. I'd never, ever last.

Call me weak. Or call me a pragmatist. And then insert hackneyed joke here. At any rate, it makes no sense for me to love Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero's book, Veganomicon, as much as I do.  Perhaps it's because Moskowitz and Romero make me forget about what I'm giving up and concentrate instead on all the new ways I can non-carnivorously enjoy food.

But I'm still a tough case.  I have a tendency to think, when I make their recipes, how much better they would be if I could throw a little something in from the off-limits column.  That's not to say the vegan food from this book isn't good on its own--it really and truly is--but for those of us ground so far down in that meat-loving rut, it's a paradigm shift that's hard to imagine our way into.

Bacon, I just can't quit you.