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?