My first attempt at a roast chicken

I tend to get really thankful around Christmas. I guess I’m too busy thinking about pumpkin pie and watching the leaves turn at Thanksgiving or something. Of course, in reality, the reason I’m so excited to be home and so glad to spend time with my family and old friends is the fact that winter break gives me more time to enjoy their company. And with more time I get around to reminiscing, laughing, eating, and watching French films. I saw La vie en  Rose, Aux Revoirs Les Enfants, Paris Je t’aime, Coco avant Chanel, and watched Ratatouille and Amelie for the fifth time. Now of course  I know Ratatouille is a Pixar/Disney creation, just as I am well aware of the fact that Julia Child’s My Life in France was published in plain English. But I read and watched and loved both as though they were really French because both have that je ne sais quoi that invigorated my passion and hunger for life and my belief in romance.

And as I sat there reading, with my stomach grumbling, I couldn’t think of a better way to bring France into my Californian world than to recreate a French recipe. I’d been wanting to try my hand at roasting a chicken for quite some time–I’d never done it before and was nervous that I might undercook it and send my brother to the hospital with salmonella poisoning, so I did a little research to find the perfect recipe that would give me a flavorful, juicy chicken with a crispy skin, bacteria-free. When I saw the ingredients for “Roast Chicken Provencal,” I knew I’d found my mark. While I was scouring the internet for dish prep ideas, I came across rave reviews of Judy Rodgers’ roast chicken recipe featured in her restaurant in San Francisco, Zuni Cafe. I decided to marry the flavors of Provence to the style of Zuni’s bird and hoped I would get the chicken I’d been dreaming about for months.

I was happy to discover that Rodgers’ directions were so simple they’d be difficult to mess up; the secret to a chicken with a crispy skin and tender flesh is apparently to just pat it dry and season it with salt and pepper a couple days in advance. Then you slit the skin in strategic spots and insert your herbs–they’ll release their flavors into the  chicken during the roasting process. Since I’m a flavor freak, I tucked pockets of rosemary, sage, thyme, and marjoram underneath as much skin surface as I could manage without tearing the skin off the meat, which would make those “bald spots” prone to getting dried out in the oven. I also stuck five thin slices of lemon underneath the skin of the chicken breasts for a little extra zing and put my remaining fresh herbs, half a lemon, and half an onion into the chicken’s cavity–all deviations from the original Zuni Cafe recipe, but I just wanted a little extra insurance against the possibility of the chicken drying out in the oven. Results after the jump–although I imagine the picture here tells you enough about how it turned out!

Roasted Garlic and Potato Soup

It’s that time of year again, when the frosty wind whips your already-frozen cheeks and the frigid air surprise-shocks your lungs when you inhale. Before I came to New England for college, I never appreciated the joy of warm logs roasting on a fire (we have faux gas “fireplaces” in California anyway, so they’re simply not as special), I drank hot chocolate as if it were an a-temporal dessert rather than as if it were a soul-warmer, and I thought snow was made of pretty white flakes of Christmas. I’d say that I know a little more about cold weather than I used to. I no longer wear flip flops to walk from my room to the campus convenience store. I’ve stopped draping polyester blankets around me when I’m outside because I now have a squishy down coat. I’ve realized that keeping warm means cider in the fall and mulled wine in the winter. I understand now what I couldn’t comprehend growing up in California, that Paula Deen’s obsession with sticks of fat is only her wisdom trying to teach me a lesson. Butter does a cold body a good layer of winter fat.

Since I moved out here for college, I would say that for four years running, the first thought that crosses my mind when I wake up every morning from December through February is, “Gee, I wish it would just be 50 degrees again.” It’s never happened. So, in order to cope, I’ve come up with a defense mechanism that I think works pretty well. It involves staying inside and never going outside. Like most of my other defenses, however, this one defies logic and ceases to work whenever I get hungry.

And so, like many other sun-lovers, I’ve learned to take refuge in layers upon layers of clothing. I remember watching movies on TV during Christmas break with my family when I was still in the single-digits. The plot lines were always annoyingly disrupted by token holiday ads whose points I couldn’t relate to. Every year in the Campbell’s soup commercial Frosty the Snowman would walk into the kitchen and sit down at the table. After one bite of steaming-hot soup, his snowy exterior would melt away into an adorably smiling child who was happy to be inside and warm again. I disliked that little boy. He came between me and my Charlie Brown Christmas too many years in a row. Who needed soup when Christmas meant cookies? Follow the jump for more and the recipe!

That was before I knew what karma was. Now three months out of the year the only thing I can think about is what I can possibly do to make my frozen tummy and blue limbs feel alive again. Ironically, I’ve only just figured out in my last New England winter that the only thing that warms me up quick is a thick batch of cream of “some vegetable” or a chunky, hearty meat stew. I’ve recently been quite fascinated by the trend of blended soups, in which vegetables are roasted or boiled and emulsified in a blender, and so I thought I’d give one a try. I hadn’t seen a recipe for a blended potato soup when I came up with this recipe, but since potatoes and squash are both rather knobby and solid, I figured potatoes might also make a good soup blend. I was in the mood for flavor, but didn’t want to alienate my friends and family so I opted to roast the clove of garlic before putting it in the soup. Roasting garlic turns its pungency into something milder and quite sweet. Once the vegetables were out of the oven, I simply boiled some chicken stock and threw it all together. It’s actually the best and easiest thing I’ve made all winter. Well, that and the cauliflower-parsnip soup I made last night.

Ingredients (serves 4)

1 large russet potato, cubed

1 bulb of garlic, unpeeled, with the  crown sliced off

2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil

2 cups of chicken stock (vegetable stock or water works as well)

salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Coat the cubed potatoes and garlic with the olive oil, salting them lightly. You don’t want to salt them too liberally here, because they’re going into the soup, which you can adjust later. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

2. When the veggies are done, boil the liquid. Add the veggies and the hot liquid to a blender and pulse. Salt and pepper it to your fancy. Alternatively, if you have an emulsion blender, you can put the roasted vegetables into the hot liquid and blend it together in the pot.

The Challenges of Pumpkin Ravioli

Ahhhh the plight of the ambitious home cook.

Rule number one of making your own ravioli: have a lot of time. “Time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions” before you commit to making ravioli. That’s how much time you need. Well, not quite that much, I guess, but all told assembling the dough, letting it rest, and rolling it out took me about two hours. Two hours is a lot of Yale time. And I was determined to get at least a B+ on the dish on my first try. The filling was the easy part—just chopped walnuts, ricotta and parmesan cheeses, mashed in with some nutmeg, ginger, garlic, and pumpkin puree. It was deliciously spiced and fluffy, but would these jewels of flavor be ruined by their imperfect pasta prisons? That brings me to rule number two.

Rule number two: have a pasta machine. Your arms might be slightly flabbier, but you’ll get what you want a whole lot faster. If, like me, you don’t have one, well…

Rule number three: have a rolling pin and some serious upper body strength. And determination. That’s all.

Rule number four: do not over-flour the surface of the dough when rolling it out. It tends to get all crusty and fragile, and that hasn’t been in style since I ruled the jungle gym and skinned knees were cool. You want to make sure that the dough is still pliable enough so that when you pull on it slightly to stretch it as you’re rolling it out it doesn’t break like a crappy piece of receipt paper. The next rule follows this vein.

Rule number five: stick with your project. If you walk away for too long or take a ten minute break to dance to “She-Wolf” and “Single-Ladies” while pretending to wear a black leotard, the pasta will dry out even further and you won’t be able to get them to properly encase the filling without cracking.

Of course, rule number six is: you think you can’t, but you can save any disaster. I can’t account for most failures, but with the pasta dough I found that brushing it or dabbing its surface with some water once it was rolled out revived it just enough so that I could finish making the actual ravioli.

How’d they turn out? Pretty good actually! The cooked ravioli pasta wasn’t as elastic as I wanted it to be, but that has more to do with the fact that I’m working with .22s, not semis. And now I have all sorts of nifty life lessons to add to my archive of do’s and don’ts. So if you’re into making pasta this holiday season, have at it. Just make sure to keep ravioli rules one thru six in the back of your mind. Particularly rule number two.

Recipe after the jump.

Cage Free Cake?

Last semester, when I was supposed to be studying for my finals and writing my final papers, I found myself devouring a copy of the Omnivore’s Dilemma instead. During my summer in New York, I vowed to live as “wholesomely” as I could on my stipend. I bought free range chicken. I went to the Grand Army Plaza farmer’s market and bought greens, berries, apples, and yogurt. When I was craving snacks and desserts, I either made them using organic whole wheat flours with locally grown summer squashes, organic fair-trade chocolate (since, unfortunately, cocoa beans can hardly be local to these parts), etc. I tried. And, to be honest, living my life that way made me feel really good about myself. But it was hard to stick to. The Waffle and Dinges truck on 7th Ave. called to me every time I left the house. I couldn’t live in Brooklyn and not give in to a chewy bagel baked with the kneading of generations of Brooklyn’s Jewish artisans every bite. What was the most difficult part about living this way? I started to realize that there were so many foods I loved that my newly informed mind was “morally” opposed to eating. And my wallet started wincing every time I needed groceries.

I found eggs to have one of the greatest disparities in price between the “eco-friendly” version and the typical grocery store, industrial farm-produced cartons. One half-dozen of free-range eggs, sold by farmers who let their chickens graze and run free in a grassy pasture, at least for some period of their lives, cost me six bucks. Back in my world as a student, cage-free organic eggs, which are the closest to food godliness at Shaw’s, cost me about $3.60.

What does it mean to be cage-free? According to Pete and Gerry’s website, one of the most visible companies that sells cage-free organic eggs, their hens are fed organic grain from birth and live in spacious barn space, free to lay their eggs wherever they may like inside a large barn. There are several third party certifications that you might find on egg cartons, which aren’t approved or officially recognized by the USDA, but if you’re curious enough, you can look them up online. “Certified Humane” is one example of those labels/organizations. The free-range eggs aforementioned mean that the hens who hatched them literally run around (heads on) and spend a good period of time outside pecking for worms.

Recently in New Haven, the city passed a bill that legalized backyard chicken coops. It’s kind of weird; I never thought that backyard chicken coops would develop this kind of Beanie Baby following, to the point where significant numbers of homeowners would demand their right to keep these birds, their molted feathers, and their chicken poo all in the convenience of their yard. Of course, there is the obvious plus side: eggs that you’ve tended from lay to stomach. The right to good food. This recipe for black bean dark-chocolate cake, inspired by this one here, incorporates sustainable and local ingredients in the best way I could manage. It is surprisingly intense, moist, and rich.

Pumpkin Spice Oatmeal

A few weeks ago, I wrote about oatmeal for my Natural Nibbles column at YSFP. I talked about my obsession with oatmeal, how often I find myself thinking about it or thinking about eating it; I even wrote one of my final semester papers on it. I wrote about how I find comfort in each warm, gooey bite, and how the heat and creaminess from the oatmeal spread from my stomach to my blue limbs that would scream for warmth if they weren’t so lifeless and lazy from the cold.

What I didn’t stress last time is the chameleon quality of oatmeal. It can be anything you want it to be. Oatmeal is like one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, which have been on my mind lately, as I’m going through the senior job search and thinking about what I want to do, where I want to live, what stores I want in my neighborhood, whether or not my future land”person” will let me grow vegetables on or around my apartment building, what it will mean if I eat mashed potatoes for dinner,  etc. You know what I mean. Oatmeal is so basic that it can become the dream of whimsy.

You can start with a can of whole rolled oats and end up with plain oatmeal. You could be in a chocolate frenzy and end up with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. You could have a craving for crunchy, buttery, honeyed granola. You could rice for oatmeal and eat it with your stir-fry. You might start out with cinnamon and sugar on hand and realize that what you actually want is maple oatmeal with bacon mixed into it. Mmmm that last one sounds good. For those of you who, like me, are in a “festive fall” mood, your tastebuds might crave apples and cinnamon, or, tired of the traditional flavor, might decide to branch out the tiniest of bits and make this pumpkin spice oatmeal.

The bright orange hue of the oatmeal is so reminiscent of the changing colors on the leaves and, of course, pumpkin flesh. Note: no pumpkins were cruelly harmed during the making of this oatmeal. While one of the most pleasing aspects of this oatmeal comes from its sheer aesthetic beauty, the best part of this recipe is that it tastes just like pumpkin pie. And you’ll still fit into your jeans after you eat it. Recipe after the jump.

Pumpkin Cupcakes

Yesterday, after I spent an hour and a half in the corporate interview hotseat, I went for a jog to East Rock with my friend Erin. Ok, I guess Erin jogged while I was wishing that my legs weren’t part of my body–maybe that would stop them from being really sore the next morning. It was so beautiful and crunchy the whole way there though that I was sufficiently distracted and was able to keep going. Running is so much harder than going to the gym. Anyway, the week before we made these delicious pumpkin cupcakes in our college kitchen. They’re vegan, but don’t knock the absence of egg in the recipe; these cupcakes were moist, spicy, bright, pumpkiny, goooooooood, and one of the best things that will happen during this crazy, stressful month.

The original recipe can be found at Kirby Von Scrumptious. I can’t say that I stuck entirely to the recipe because I was mixing a batch that was four times its size and we didn’t have enough granulated sugar, so I used mostly brown, but they were delightful all the same.

Tomato Corn Salad

It’s officially been fall for almost two weeks now, and I have to say, Connecticut is already getting pretty serious about its chill. Of course, four years later, I am still wholly maladjusted to this idea of seasons, even though I am ever more  certain that they do, in fact, exist. Right now I’m pretending that I’m  enjoying a Californian winter instead of a New England fall. The wind-whipped months of ice that come after that? Well, I’ll just treat that as a fantastical literary experience. Thanks, Dante.

One thing I love about being back at school though, is when I have weird dreams about being at Hogwarts, I can wake up, go downstairs to the dining hall, and reassure myself that in fact I am not obsessed with a teenage story about witches and wizards or deranged. The dining halls here are so Hogwarts. In fact, Hogwarts is so the dining halls here. Gothic architecture and all. Anyway, as much as I love getting meals with friends or with a good story unfolding next to my plate-full of food that isn’t too bad to eat, I get bored with it sometimes and plan dinner parties with friends.

Last week, a group of eight of us got together for a meal of roasted corn, tomato, fennel, and avocado salad; braised chicken and mushrooms in marsala wine, garlic, and lemon sauce; roasted herbed carrots, potatoes, and onions; bread pudding and, finally, cheesecake. Yeah, I don’t know how we managed to eat that much either. It was so good it was disgusting. I initially wanted to make a nectarine and beet salad with chevre, but I couldn’t find beets at Shaws, so I had to change it up. I had two ears of corn that I picked up from the Yale Farm’s Food & Film Festival, and I needed to use them before they turned into those stalks of maize your kindergarten teacher kept as decorations for the classroom from late September through November. I decided to go with a corn and tomato something, but wanted to add something that wouldn’t turn it into a wannabe salsa. Which is why I picked up an avocado to go with it. Just kidding, I picked fennel. I mean, I did end up putting avocado in the salad, but the fennel, with its licoricy taste, totally changed the attitude of the dish. Tossed with some white wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper, the real flavors of the ingredients shone through. I think a simple dressing really does more for food sometimes than something too powerful, which ends up overwhelming a first course in a bad way. This salad is perfect for the crust of fall–the fennel gives it a good edge of licorice, and the roasted corn is so evocative of a farm in New England during the fall.

Kale Chips

When the year first started, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to cook as often as I’d like; I guess, with the amount of stuff that I’m doing for school and otherwise, I probably shouldn’t have time to cook, but this past weekend, I just needed to make something in order to recenter myself. I needed to create a moment that was outside of school, although, ironically, it would end up being on campus. A friend of mine and I went to the Wooster Square Farmer’s Market this past Saturday morning. She was interviewing farmers and vendors for an upcoming article in the new campus magazine, which I am the recipes editor of, and which will debut on Parent’s Weekend (Oct. 9)! That’s one of the things I’ve been working on and taking pictures for–hopefully my food photog skills are good enough for the magazine, I know that I’m definitely learning a lot about photog composition, etc. I’m borrowing a friend’s DSLR, and I’m having a lot of fun experimenting with it, actually.

Anyway, Alice and I stopped by the YSFP stand at the market and the farm manager let us have produce for free if we promised to make something out of it for the Food & Film Festival Potluck. We obviously agreed. Free fresh, organic, local produce? Always a plus. The Food & Film Festival was great, by the way. I didn’t get the chance to go to Julie & Julia, nor did I have time to go to the Jacques Pepin demo, but I did get to watch Babette’s Feast, with my first ever Louis Lunch hamburger in my lap. It was a glorious combination, which I guess inspired me to get out of my bookish life and appeal to my inner creature of comfort by making some food. I picked out some kale from the stand, since I’d never actually eaten it before. It was lush and green, and I thought it would be perfectly poetic to do the opposite with it: bake it to a crisp.

These kale chips were lightly flavored with extra virgin olive oil, some balsamic vinegar, and salt. They tasted delicious; they’re the most legit veggie chips on earth. If you’re not sure what to do with kale, bake it!

To make: Preheat the oven to 350 F. remove stems from kale, cut into desired size (remember veggies shrink when cooked), toss them lightly with extra virgin olive oil and a bit of balsamic vinegar, spread them out on a baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes.

Baked Apples

Coming back to school is always a weird adjustment for me. The last part of my summer is generally filled with indistinguishable hours upon hours of mental vegetation. I did manage to fit a couple of books in there, though. But mostly, I watched too many episodes of House and fifteen clips of Frye & Laurie. The moment I checked my bags in at the airport and had to pay an extra $20 bucks for a bag, I missed sitting in my living room with absolutely nothing to do and no people to charge me sadly necessary extra fares in order to stay afloat. The real world sucks. But, food makes it so much better.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been moving into the last room I will ever live in as an undergraduate. It’s pretty spacious, but only because my room was originally meant for two people. And if I keep eating organic oat bran pretzels and peanut butter at the same rate I have been eating them, I’m going to need my pants to magically expand to fit two of me.

I finally had a chance to make a new recipe for this blog, and I wanted my food to help me transition back into CT and into what I love about coming back to school, which is the beauty of fall. Naturally, nothing inaugurates the fall better than some locally grown CT baked apples. So,  I thought of a sweet, fluffy, and cinnamony filling and went to work.  These smelled so warm and loving in the oven, in only the way that cinnamon can make me feel. I have a secret obsession with cinnamon and a not-so-secret one with peanut butter. Anyway. Baked apples are easy to make, and a must make when apple season rolls around!

Tomato Garlic Focaccia

When I left New York, I have to say I was happy to leave some of the hectic, humid bustle behind. I realized a couple weeks later, that I really missed having dozens of cuisines and their chef experts a short ride away. I really missed Italian food this week, and Pasta Pomodoro across the street wasn’t going to cut it. Sometimes I feel like charging people 10 bucks for something they could make better at home is indecent and outrageous, but then I remember that we live in the land of ten hour work days, two kids at school or in daycare, and I have to judge a little less. The other day I was watching Lidia Bastianich make a gorgeous focaccia bread that looked like it could feed a family of ten. I knew right then that what I needed was a good olive oil and tomato fix, and I had to have it.

Lidia’s recipe is a tomato onion focaccia, but the onions in the fridge that I secretly bookmarked as mine got eaten somehow, so I decided to go forth with some garlic. This recipe is quick and easy, you can substitute wheat flour for white, or use half of each, like I did. It’s one of the easiest bread doughs to make and assembly is just as easy. Waiting an hour or two for your dough to rise is totally worth it after you get the whole thing in the oven and wait for the heat to do its thing. Your house will smell like an old-school pizzeria and your family/pets will thank you, but only if you share. I halved the original recipe, since I’m trying to get my brother and my parents in better shape. Clearly, I have to lead by example, otherwise I’d just be another Rush Limbaugh.

The focaccia had the perfect texture of the ones I saw on Lidia’s trip to Italy. The ones at Whole Foods are monstrously thick–doughy and good, but not quite authentic. This popped out of the oven with the perfect amount of browning, flavor, and crunch. The smell of the olive oil, garlic, and tomatoes is a seriously powerful Neopolitan weapon; beware, or else you shall eat it all in one sitting.