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Chicken Lady Chicken {CtBF}
Roast chicken is always a winner in my book. It’s only downside is that in most recipes the chicken takes over an hour to cook, not quite a weeknight dinner. This week’s recipe for Cook the Book Fridays, Chicken Lady Chicken from David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen, solves that problem. The trick? Spatchcocking!
What’s that? Spatchcocking? you say. It’s simply a whole chicken with the backbone removed and flattened out. Not nearly as complicated as its name. When the chicken is flat, it cooks much faster. Just 45 minutes. The only advanced planning is preparing the marinade and letting it sit for a day or two.
The marinade is quick to mix up. A garlic paste is dissolved into garlic, white wine, soy sauce, olive oil, lemon juice, Sriracha, mustard, and honey in a Ziploc bag. It smells wonderful! Pop the chicken in the bag and rub the marinade all over the bird.
Roasting a flat chicken takes less time than a whole bird. It gets a head start with a stovetop sear to burnish the skin then finishes in a hot oven.
My chicken didn’t come out quite as well I as I hoped, but I blame it on the cook (that’s me) falling down on the job. The first problem was that when I seared the chicken in my new cast-iron grill pan, the skin stuck to the pan and burned. In an essay in My Paris Kitchen, David Lebovitz raves about the skin, but my chicken didn’t have that much left after flipping it over.
My second problem was that I overcooked the chicken. My chicken was a little bigger than the recipe called for and was cold from the fridge when I started cooking it. I roasted it for the 25 minutes called for without checking the temperature at all as I assumed it would take a bit longer. When I did take its temperature when it came out, it was 20+ degrees higher than it needed to be. No wonder it was dry.
The taste of the marinade lives up to its aroma, so I do plan to give this another try, using a regular cast-iron skillet without ridges and testing the chicken’s temperature partway through its time in the oven.
I served the chicken with roasted potato salad and grilled asparagus. Leftovers made a delicious chicken salad too.
To see if my “Cook the Book Fridays” friends had better luck with their chicken, check out their posts here. To try it yourself, you can find the recipe on Serious Eats or on page 173 of David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen.
Since our last post for Cook the Book Fridays, I had the pleasure of sharing dinner with Katie of Prof Who Cooks while she was on the East Coast last week. As with so many Dorista meet-ups, even though it was our first meeting, we met as old friends and talked (and ate) the night away.
You Can Teach a Dog New Tricks {CtBF}
It’s summer! I know we haven’t hit the summer solstice yet, but Memorial Day is the informal start date to summer in my mental calendar. Summer means lots of fresh vegetables and salads, salads, salads. I love salads. When I look at my recipe box, the Salad section is nearly as thick as Sweets. Certainly, it’s the most heavily used.
Panzanella, or simply “Bread Salad” as it’s known at my house, is always a favorite. Croutons of rustic bread tossed with lots of savory ingredients and a tangy dressing make regular appearances. I also make Fattoush, which uses crumbled toasted pita for the bread and has a Middle Eastern flavor profile.
Even when I already have a favorite recipe for something, I’m always open to a new twist. This week’s recipe for Cook the Book Fridays offers just that. David Lebovitz’s version is similar to yet different from mine.
Similar are the chopped vegetables (cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and scallions) and the herbs (parsley and mint). Different: he uses sliced radishes instead of the chopped red pepper in mine. I like the radishes better. Different: he adds a healthy dose of hearty lettuce, making his fattoush more like a green salad. I tried it, but definitely prefer this salad without the lettuce. We both use a lemony dressing and a tangy sprinkle of sumac. David’s dressing with the additions of garlic and mustard has more zing than my simple lemon vinaigrette and is the clear winner.
Lettuce Plus Parsley and 3 kinds of garden-fresh mint!
Fattoush is in the First Courses chapter of David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen. The first night I made it, I was home alone. I made the dressing in a jar instead of the salad bowl so I could use it for several smaller batches of this salad. Dressed salads especially those made with crisp bread are not good keepers. I cut up vegetables to make a quarter of the recipe, even though it serves 6. With a little bit of cheese and crackers on the side, I found that the salad was substantial enough to count as dinner. I made half the recipe another night which Howard and I shared along with a beet salad for our meal.
This recipe was worth trying. It was good, but it won’t displace my own favorite recipe. However, I definitely plan to incorporate parts of his recipe (radishes, dressing) into mine as we move ahead into summer.
The highlight of my Memorial Day weekend was a short hike in nearby Concord Massachusetts to check out a blue heron rookery. I occasionally catch one wading in the pond Bella and I walk around every morning. And I love the prehistoric look of herons flying overhead. They remind me of pterodactyls. When my neighbor (hi, Cass!) told me where to find the rookery, I channeled my inner Mary (Hirsch), had Howard find the binoculars, and we went for a ride.
Observing their high nests on top of dead or dying trees in a marsh, I was surprised to see both parents tending one or two babies in each nest. There were 6-8 nests in all. The babies seemed to be getting ready to fly. We saw a couple of them perched on the edge of the nest where it looked like they were working up the courage to step off and test their wings. This week, I expect they have already flown off. I wish them safe travels.
Back to the food, if you want to try fattoush for yourself, you can find the recipe on page 116 of My Paris Kitchen. To see what my friends thought of their salads, check their links here.
Cook the Book Fridays was formed by bloggers who met through French Fridays with Dorie, have remained friends, and enjoy cooking together (virtually anyway). Others have joined us in this new adventure cooking through another French cookbook, David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen. You can too!
A Plateful of Happiness 