Roast chicken; mashed potatoes

It's fall. Okay, it's technically fall. That doesn't mean much here in NorCal--hey, we didn't really have a summer either!--so it's no surprise that the weather is still constantly 75F and sunny, 75F and sunny, 75F and sunny.

BORING. I want rain and clouds and wind! I certainly want to start wearing jackets and scarves and inhaling cool, crisp air and eating hot and homey fall foods. Well, I can at least have that last one.

So this week we made roasted chicken with thyme butter and garlic mashed potatoes, for one of the most classic fall dinners ever.

Since I am the only meat-eater in the house, we decided not to roast an entire chicken. Instead, we went to the butcher counter and got a bone-in and skin-on breast. This worked out admirably, especially considering our current lack of freezer space for leftover storage. You can use this same method to roast an entire chicken; just be sure to adjust the roasting time up.

Roast chicken with thyme butter and cherry tomatoes

bone-in skin-on chicken
butter
fresh thyme
salt, pepper
cherry tomatoes

Preheat your oven to 400F.

While the oven is heating, prep your chicken. Wash it, pat it dry with a paper towel, and trim off any unnecessary pieces. John was prepping our chicken, so he chopped off a bit of attached ribcage (too thin; would have burnt) and some extra fat. We saved the trimmings to make stock later, and you should too.

Strip a bunch of fresh thyme leaves off their stems. Use a fork to mix them with a chunk of softened butter. Then use your fingers to butter your chicken both under and over the skin. Really get in there and grease it up. If you want to, you can put a few branches of fresh thyme in the pan or under the skin too. Salt and pepper your chicken on both sides as well.

Roast in a baking dish of your choice, basting occasionally.

We weren't sure how long to roast our chicken because it wasn't an entire bird. So instead of doing the intelligent thing and looking up how many minutes a bird generally cooks per pound, we just stuck it in the oven and kept an eye on it. It took about 45 minutes to cook completely, with golden brown skin and clear juices when tested with a knife.

In the last ten minutes or so of cooking, add as many cherry tomatoes as you like to the roasting pan. Fifteen or twenty per person is a reasonable amount; more is probably better. They'll collapse a bit into the rendered chicken fat and become a delicious acidic mess.

When your chicken is done, take it out of the oven and let it rest for at least a good five to ten minutes before carving. This lets the juices absorb back into the meat, so the finished product isn't dry.

Hooray! Chicken!

Be sure to save the bones for stock-making.

Garlic mashed potatoes

boiling potatoes
garlic
olive oil/butter
salt, pepper
milk

Put a big pot of water on to boil while you scrub, peel, and chunk as many potatoes as you want to eat. When the water comes to a boil, add your potatoes. Give it a minute to boil again before you lid the pan, turn down the heat, and simmer. Let cook until the potatoes are cooked through. This took about forty minutes for us.

In the last fifteen minutes or so of potato cooking, warm some olive oil or butter in a small pan. Add a bunch of smashed, peeled garlic cloves. Cook very slowly over the lowest heat, letting the garlic soften and steep in the oil.

When your potatoes are done, drain them well. Add the olive oil and garlic mixture to the potatoes, along with salt and pepper to taste and a dash of milk. Mash everything together to your liking.

To serve, deposit a whack of mashed potatoes on your plate, and a piece of chicken on the side. Cover the potatoes with a couple spoonfuls of roasted tomatoes. Have some salad on the side. Voila!

What classic fall dinners are you eating?

Scones for all & sundry

My friend Jen is having her kitchen remodeled this fall. So a few days ago she brought over a crate of her displaced baking supplies. A crate of supplies that I needed to fit into our already largely full kitchen cabinets. Hmm.

Clearly, I needed to bake with my newfound bounty immediately, so I poked around until I found a recipe that used quite a lot of our new stash. Flour? Check. Oats? Check. 10-grain cereal mix? No, but I could sub it for some of the oats for more interest. Brown sugar? Check. It's time for scones!

I tend to shift recipes around to use whatever we have, so it's not a surprise that I switched out ordinary AP flour for whole wheat cake flour, or that I used milk instead of heavy cream, or that I omitted the pecans (which we might have actually had buried somewhere in the freezer). Also, since we're not particularly into sweets, I decided to cut the maple glaze from the original recipe. I also wanted to be able to put the finished scones in the toaster oven without worrying about glaze dripping everywhere. So.

These guys were easy to make, but a bit sticky to shape and cut. I'm thinking this was because 10-grain cereal mix is quite a bit less powdery than the ground oats given in the initial recipe. Next time, I'd probably knead in 1/4 cup more flour. Still, the end product turned out just about perfect--just barely sweet, with a bit of a toothy crunch from the corn in the cereal mix.

Maple oat multigrain scones
Adapted from Eating Out Loud

1 1/2 cup whole wheat cake flour (or AP)
1/2 cup oatmeal
1/2 cup 10-grain cereal mix (or oat flour)
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
1/3 cup cold butter
1 beaten egg
2 tbsp maple syrup
1/2 cup milk

Preheat your oven to 375F/190C. Prep a baking sheet by lining it with parchment paper or a silicone mat.

Mix together your dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add your cold butter, cut into small chunks. My butter was frozen, so I grated it into the bowl instead of breaking my arm trying to blend it manually. Mix your butter into your flour mix, using a pastry cutter or two forks, until the butter bits are the size of small peas.

In a separate bowl, beat an egg and mix it with the maple syrup and milk. Pour the wet mix into the dry and gently fold with a large spoon until the dough comes together. Flour your hands and the counter, give the dough a few quick kneads, pat it into a circle an inch or so thick, and cut it into eight sections. Deposit your scones onto your baking sheet, spaced a bit apart to give them room to rise.

Bake for approximately 20-25 minutes, or until your scones are just golden brown around the edges. Cool on a rack for as long as you can stand it.

These guys are good all by themselves, but they're especially good warmed, split apart, and slathered with butter. Jam is also an excellent option. I like apricot best with oats, personally.

Hooray! The next several days of breakfast are all taken care of!

Garden update: September

I found a friend! An actual size friend!

I have no idea what kind of spider this is, but as long as it's a good predator and maybe takes out a tomato worm or two, I'm pretty happy it's here.

Why? Well.

The garden is totally overgrown and jungly and crazy. That back fence is about eight feet tall. You will notice that much of the plant life is taller than it.

The tomatoes in particular are insane. Guess how many tomato plants are in this picture! TWO. The sungold is on the right and the purple cherokee is on the left. Underneath you can see some of our gigantic 3-foot scallions. There is also a jalapeno plant buried in between the two tomato plants, but it's completely invisible from the front of the garden.

The purple cherokees are only just starting to turn color--which is fine, because it's not going to be full-on fall in the south bay until November--but the sungolds have been producing steadily since early August.

There are about fifteen new ripe sungolds a day. That means it's totally possible to just go outside, grab a handful, cut them in half, throw them in a bowl with some baby bocconcini (the little fresh mozzarella balls in whey), salt, and pepper, and sit down to a feast.

I could eat a bowl of this salad every day. If only I hadn't run out of bocconcini!

Meanwhile, in the front yard, this is still happening:

Yes! Zucchini for all! At least for another week or three!

Other people's recipes

Lately, I want to eat practically everything I see.

I saw Cupcake Rehab's jammy muffins, followed a link back to the master muffin recipe, determined that we had the necessary ingredients, and was off. I used wheat flour, put rice milk in place of dairy, and stuffed the muffins full of chopped nectarines instead of jam or chocolate chips. Otherwise, they were totally identical! I ended up with eight standard muffins and twelve tiny little dudes, and we slathered them with butter and ate them all over the course of four days.

The butter situation at our house is now pretty dire, incidentally. No butter!

I saw Emmy Cooks's spicy pickled peppers and I ran off to the farmer's market sort-outs bin, which has been reliably full of zucchini and peppers and eggplant for the past few weeks, and brought a big bag of peppers home with me. I chopped them into rings, packed them into a jar, added dill and garlic, and covered the whole thing with simple brine. Then I stuck the jar into the fridge, where it has been for the past two days. I can finally eat some of them tonight! Patience is the only real problem with pickling things.

I saw Stella Cooks's fish tacos with spicy carrot slaw, so I went to the farmer's market fish guy and walked away with a gigantic piece of flounder. I promptly brought it home, cut it into four pieces (three of which are resting happily in the freezer, waiting for the next fish and/or taco occasion), covered the last piece in spices and lemon, deposited it in a foil packet, and baked it for twenty minutes, or until awesome.

Then I sauteed up a mess of carrots, red pepper, and sambal oelek, mounted it with butter (item: this was before the butter situation got quite so dire), and whacked everything together into a series of flame-toasted corn tortillas. Then I took pictures for posterity and crammed them all into my mouth as fast as possible. Hooray!

What new recipes have you guys been trying?

Kale and olive aglio e olio

Lately, even though it's still mostly summer here in CA, my brain has been making a beeline for the fall produce. This time, I had a big bunch of excellent sturdy kale hanging out in the crisper. Why not make it the centerpiece of a fast and easy pasta?

In a standard aglio e olio, pasta gets drenched in a beautiful spicy garlicky olive oil and garnished with grated parmesan. I took this a step or two further, adding green olives and slivered red pepper along with my kale. The result was a perfect quick lunch--full of hearty greens and pungent with olives and garlic.

Kale and olive aglio e olio

olive oil
garlic
olives
lots o' kale
red pepper
salt, pepper
pasta of your choice
parmesan/etc for garnish

First, get out a wide saute pan and warm several good glugs of olive oil over medium heat. Since the oil will be your sauce base, use a little more oil than you'd normally add to a marinara.

At the same time, heat your pasta water. I bring mine to a boil, covered, turn off the heat, and leave the hot pot on the back burner until it's time to cook the pasta. That way, when you turn the heat back on, the pot will come back to a boil almost instantly. Cooking tricks for the win!

So. Smash, peel, and mince several cloves of garlic, and add them to the warmed olive oil. Adjust the heat down a touch, so the garlic sizzles gently and slowly in the oil. This will infuse the oil with delicious garlic flavor.

After giving the garlic and oil about five minutes to infuse, grab a handful of olives, chop them up, and add them to your pan. I used standard small green olives stuffed with pimiento from the big martini-making jar in our fridge door. However, you can use whatever kind of olives you like. I think black nicoise olives would be really good with the kale, for instance.

Let your olives and garlic cook slowly in the olive oil while you wash, destem, and roughly chop your kale. I used about 2/3 of a bunch for just me, but more greens are always better. GREENS!

Add your kale to the pan along with a sprinkle of salt. Turn up the heat a bit, stir, and cook for about five minutes. This is also a good time to start boiling any kind of chunky or thick pasta you may be using.

Core and slice a red (or orange, or yellow) pepper. When your kale is tender, add your chopped pepper to the pan. Stir and cook for another two to three minutes, or until your peppers are cooked through. Season the pan to taste.

When your pasta is done, drain it and add it to the pan of vegetables. Toss everything together and let it sit over the lowest heat for a minute while you wash the pasta pan. This will let the oil absorb into the pasta a bit.

Serve, adding grated parmesan if you so desire.

Now eat your lunch in good health and good conscience.

What are some of your favorite fall lunches?

Carrot salad

Hooray for salad!

This is the kind of thing I make when I think there's nothing to eat in the house, and yet I want a fast and easy mouthful of bright crisp vegetable flavors.

Carrots and garlic are nearly always hanging around in our kitchen. We have a lemon tree, so I never have any problem finding some lemon juice and zest. And of course olive oil is the pantry staple to end all pantry staples. So this salad is just about always possible--which is great, because it's delicious.

Carrot is the perfect bridge between summer and fall. What other root vegetable is so fresh, bright, and juicy? Sure, we'll be roasting them up with parsnips, onions, and thyme pretty soon--but while the sun is still out, I'm definitely on board with a raw and crunchy salad arrangement.

Carrot salad with garlic and lemon

carrot
garlic
lemon
olive oil
salt
pepper

Scrub your carrots under the tap and shred with a box grater. I used two medium carrots. Put your shredded carrot in a reasonable bowl.

Smash a couple of cloves of garlic with the flat of your knife, peel them, and mince them finely. Add them to the carrot. (If you're not into raw garlic, it's fine to reduce the amount.)

Strip a few wide pieces of zest off half a lemon. Slice them up finely with your knife and add them to the carrot and garlic. Squeeze the juice from the lemon half into the bowl of veg, catching any seeds with your fingers.

Add a glug or two of olive oil, a sprinkling of salt, and a couple good grinds of pepper. Mix well and taste for seasoning.

Let your salad rest for at least a half hour before eating, so the flavors have a chance to mix. Then go to town.

While I will absolutely eat a big scoop or two of this carrot salad on the side of pretty much any sandwich, I really like it best IN the sandwich. If you like lavash or pita with hummus or baba ghanouj, you could do way worse than to add a whole lot of this salad. Bagel with cream cheese? Throw on a spoonful of salad--or better yet, mix it in with your cream cheese and spread that on your bagel. Regular old turkey on rye with mustard and lettuce? Salad. It's really good.

I also like this on the side of a bowl of soup, but I could absolutely see using it as a garnish for things like cream of cauliflower, potato leek, or bright green spinach soup. Or putting it on a piece of toast and having a pseudo-half sandwich with said soup. It's all good.

What's your favorite early fall salad?

Last fruits of summer

We're starting to close in on actual fall. Eat all the fruit you can right now.

I had figs and nectarines and they were delightful.

Pickled once, pickled twice

Pickled beets are very nice.

I've been meaning to can some pickled beets for just about the entire summer. The thing is, I've never made pickled beets before, so I needed to find a good recipe. Online research revealed a whole lot of recipes featuring large amounts of sugar. Well and good--except that I historically strongly dislike sweet pickles. So I was pretty relieved when I found the simplest of pickled beet recipes. It not only required no sugar, but was by Marisa "Food in Jars" McClellan. Obviously, this was the perfect candidate.

Right! So I bought two bunches of massive softbally beets at the farmer's market--one red and one golden--and set out for pickletown.

I estimated I'd be able to fill about 5 pints, so I made extra brine. This turned out to be a good plan. Item: it would probably be good to get a kitchen scale if you want to have a really clear idea of how many jars you're going to be able to fill.

Start by washing your beets and trimming off their leaves. Cut the stems about an inch above the body of the beet, and leave the trailing root ends intact. (Keep your beet greens and saute them with garlic for dinner later.) Then put your beets in a pot, cover them with water, and put them on to boil.

Try to boil your beets in a pan bigger than this. I'm just saying.

No disasters actually occurred. However, just imagine the horror that could ensue with that much boiling beet juice. You do NOT want your beets to boil over.

While you're boiling your beets, prep all your canning equipment. Put the water bath on to boil, sterilize jars, warm lids and rings, etc. Check out the National Center for Home Food Preservation's boiling water canning guidelines if you haven't canned before.

My beets were gigantic, so they took about an hour to cook through. Smaller beets will take somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 45 minutes.

When your beets are tender to the point of a knife, drain them and let them cool enough to touch. A cold water bath is not a bad idea here.

Peel the cooked beets by rubbing them with your fingers. The skins will come right off. This is also the point at which your beets will suddenly get ultra-messy, so make sure to wear something that can potentially get beet juice all over it, and keep some towels handy for wiping up puddles of red, red juice before they stain your counter.

Slice the peeled beets into whatever size and shape you desire. I made a lot of quarters and smaller chunks. "Smaller" is relative here, of course.

When your beets are all prepared, make the brine. I used 3 cups of water, 3 cups of apple cider vinegar, and 3 tablespoons of pickling salt. Bring it all to a boil and cook until the salt is completely dissolved. Keep your brine hot.

Now it's time to pack your jars, one at a time. Put a tablespoon of pickling spice in your first jar. Pack the jar with beets. Pour the hot brine over your beets to cover, leaving 1/2 inch of space at the top. Use a chopstick to release as many air bubbles from your jar as possible. Top up the brine if needed before wiping the jar's rim. Top your jar with a hot lid, screw the band to finger tightness, and deposit your jar in your canning rack. Repeat until you're out of beets and brine.

Since I was using both red and golden beets, I ended up with a delightful multicolored variety of pickles. Hooray! I had a few pieces of beet left over, so I poured over the last few bits of brine, added a little bit of pickling spice, and stuck them in the fridge for instant beet pickle.

Process your pickles in a boiling water-bath canner for 10 minutes. Remove to a towel or wire rack on your counter. Let cool for 24 hours. As the cans cool, they'll seal themselves with a loud ping. Hooray! Science!

Test your jar seals before storing your pickled beets. You can do this by trying to lift the jar by the lid (rings removed) or pressing the center of lid to see if it snaps up and down. If any jars didn't seal, just put them in the refrigerator and eat them within a week or two.

What can you do with pickled beets? The classic solution is "put them in salad." If you like beets on burgers, you can put a slice on your burger. If you like the classic ploughman's lunch of bread, cheese, and pickles, beets are an admirable addition. And there's definitely something to be said for a little dish of pickled beets treated as an ordinary vegetable, served alongside whatever main dish you might be having for dinner.

Hooray! Pickled beets! I can't wait to try these.

What are you guys pickling and preserving this fall?

Homemade scallion salt

So. Scallions!

The little 6-pack flat I bought for $4 at the grocery store last spring has definitely done us proud. They were among the only plants that withstood the threat of pillbugs to grow tall and strong. All summer we've been chopping them up and using them in place of onion, as soup garnishes, or finely chopped and mixed into scrambled eggs. Really, they've been in just about everything savory I've cooked for the whole summer.

After roasting our scallions for Labor Day I had lots of scallion greens left over. What to do? Well, I had a total success with a batch of Heidi's celery salt last year. Why not try the same technique with our thoroughly overabundant scallion greens?

Scallion salt

scallion greens
sea salt

Wash your scallion greens and let them dry completely. Chop them into small rings and spread them in an even layer (or a reasonable facsimile) on a cookie sheet. Gently toast them in a low oven until dry but not browned. This took me about 45 minutes at the lowest temperature my oven will go--170F/77C. You can toast your scallions on a higher temperature, but you'll clearly need to keep an eye on them to avoid burning. I also imagine a dehydrator would do the trick.

Once your scallion greens are dried, crush them up in a mortar & pestle, or stick them in a bag and roll them to bits with a rolling pin. Add an equal amount of salt--I totally just approximated this with no issues--and mix thoroughly.

Now decant your scallion salt into a spice container of your choice, and start using it on anything that could use a hit of oniony, salty flavor.

What can you do with scallion salt?
- Put some in practically every single pot of soup you make from now on.
- Season the yolk mixture for deviled eggs or the mayo for egg salad.
- For that matter, just season beaten eggs and then scramble them.
- Sprinkle it over a buttered chicken before roasting.
- Season sushi rice with scallion salt, shape into onigiri, and grill.
- Make some scalliony oven potato chips or fries.
- Popcorn!
- How about gravlax? I bet that would be very exciting.

Next: scallion pesto?

My Labor Day weekend

Hooray! Labor Day! No working! All play!

So this weekend we broke out the grill for the first time this summer. Now we're clearly going to want to grill every weekend for the duration of fall. Oh well. We live in California, where fall = summer = spring = winter anyway.

We decided to grill several ears of corn, a thickly sliced red onion, some garden scallions, and sourdough buns, all brushed liberally with melted butter mixed with lemon juice, paprika, and cayenne. For the burger component, I defrosted one of my lamb burgers and John got himself a vegetarian chik patty.

Look at our gigantic scallions! Three feet tall and counting. They were the true bumper crop so far this year (but just wait--the tomatoes are about to start ripening in droves). We cut off the greens and saved them for future application. I have a sneaky plan for making scallion salt with some of them.

Hooray! Tasty treats!

John displays the delicious post-grill booty.

TIME FOR EATING.

The corn was definitely the highlight of the day. I can't remember the last time I ate corn off the cob at all, let alone from the grill. It may have been when we last lived in Michigan--so that's, what, eight years ago? Eight years with no blistered spicy lemony grilled corn is not acceptable! We definitely need to remedy this. See above re: grilling all fall.

It turned out to be impossible to just eat an entire grilled scallion. That's ok, though--it means we have a big container full of grilled scallion (and also one leftover ear of charred corn) in the fridge, ready to be cut up and used in other applications. Let's just say there may be some truly excellent scrambled eggs in our future.

Top tools for your first kitchen, Part 4: Cleanup

Finally, you have all the equipment to cook practically any meal you might want! Ah, that was delicious. But wait--what's that looming behind you? Oh no--sandwich crumbs, spatters of sauce, DISHES! What can we do?

Let's attack them.

Top tools for your first kitchen
PART FOUR: CLEANUP

Dishtowels

Definitely get your hands on some good dishtowels. They are far more important for general kitchen happiness than you might think. Without a decent dishtowel, your counters will be wet, your dish rack always full, your stovetop crusted with filth, your hands more than likely burned, and your wallet out a recurring fee for new rolls of paper towels.

There is a huge range of dishtowels out there; you can spend as much as you want at Williams Sonoma, or go to the thrift store and find a package of five dishtowels for fifty cents. The most important criteria for me are absorbency, durability, and insulation. Absorbency is obvious: you need your dishtowels to dry dishes and wipe up spills. Durability means you can buy dishtowels once and keep them in the rotation for twenty years--obviously a good plan. And insulation means you can double them up and use them as potholders, which is key, especially if you are the sort of person who misplaces or burns through potholders. If you get great dishtowels that fulfill all these categories, you'll be able to use them for hundreds of different jobs. And when they get dirty, just chuck them in the wash. The end!

How many dishtowels should you have? Ten is a good round number. With a good stock of dishtowels, you have at least a week's worth of leeway between washes; you can just use the towels without worrying about whether you have another dry, clean one hanging out in the drawer. I think we actually have about twelve or fourteen, including both a stack of 15-year-old Meijer specials and eight nearly brand-new crisp blue and white striped towels.

Don't throw out old dishtowels. Reduce them to rag status if they're really awful, but you know there will always be some point at which you need a bunch of towels to throw over a massive spill. As long as they have some hope of absorbing that spill, keep them around.

Dish brush

You're going to have to wash your dishes, and you'll need tools to do it. My tool of choice is the long-handled scrub brush. Plastic bristles are easily washable, don't provide a very hospitable home for bacteria, and are safe for whatever kind of pan you happen to have; the long handle means your hands aren't being scalded in hot water all the time. Sounds like a win to me.

If you like other styles of dish brush, go for it. Plastic or metal scrubbies, steel wool, and delicate towels all have their dishwashing uses.

Personally, I dislike sponge-based dishwashing. Sponges get completely disgusting nearly overnight. However, if that's what you want to use to wash your dishes, go ahead and get a variety pack. Just remember to sterilize them regularly (either with a bleach solution or in the microwave) and switch them out when they need it.

Dish drainer

Once you have your dishes sparkling clean, you're going to have to put them somewhere. No, not on the countertop! Get yourself a dish drainer and you'll be able to avoid an interminably wet counter.

Plastic-coated wire dish drainers are cheap and easy to find. Look for one with a drainer tray underneath--or, better yet, find one that fits either over or directly in your sink. Thrift stores frequently have a stash of older dish drainers piled haphazardly in their kitchen departments. As long as you can find one that isn't riddled with rust, you should be good to go. Take it home, clean it well, and start stacking up those newly shiny pots and pans.

Honorable mention: mop, bucket, massive jug of white vinegar, economy pack of baking soda, dish soap of your choice.

And if you have trouble actually buckling down and cleaning your kitchen, may I suggest a look at Unf%*k your Habitat?

Your basic kitchen toolset is complete. Hooray! Now get in there and start cooking all the deliciousnesses you desire.

The whole top tools for your first kitchen series:
- Part 1: Prep
- Part 2: Stovetop
- Part 3: Oven
- Part 4: Cleanup