Whole Roasted Chicken with Potatoes

After many sacrificial birds and a household disdain for weekday recipes over an hour, I’ve managed to get this one completely nailed.  Playing with a kitchen timer and my trusty Le Creuset in the quest for a perfect balance between flavor, crispy skin and juicy chicken, I came to the realization that while roasting a whole chicken at lower temperatures yields excellent results, the time it takes pushes into dangerously low-blood-sugar levels on weeknights.  In an attempt at keeping myself and the people around me sane, cranking up the nuclear option also happened to yield a perfect bird and veggies in about half of the time without worry of sending myself and my fellow diners to the hospital from either crankiness or salmonella.  While setting the oven to 500° F sets off all of the smoke alarms in my apartment and drives the dog insane without even putting anything in the oven, the results are well worth it. Although remember to always check your bird’s temp - for chicken, a thermometer inserted deep into the thigh and/or the thickest part of the breast should read 165° F minimum according to USDA guidelines.

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Winter Tomato Sauce with Rosemary Cream

In continuing with the theme of open-sourcing my most beloved recipes, here is one of the classics that the girlfriend absolutely loves. However, I can’t take all the credit, since my Dad has been making something very similar for as long as I can remember. I also can’t speak for whether or not he wants this out in public, but it’s a bit late for that and I don’t think he’ll serve me with a DCMA takedown notice.

While this recipe doesn’t call for much active time, it is time consuming as the sauce should simmer for hours. This slow-simmering allows the the flavors to meld together, the sauce to thicken and the tomatoes to become a bit sweeter without any added sugar as is often required to balance out the acidity in quick tomato sauces. You can follow the tomato sauce recipe as a master recipe and exclude the rosemary cream infusion, but that might be viewed as a bit crazy since that is what really makes this sauce really special.

Also of note, this sauce is the recipe that I make in the winter using canned tomatoes, since fresh tomatoes are out-of-season and totally suck. For canned tomatoes, I almost always use fire roasted Muir Glen organic crushed tomatoes, since the roasting adds some nice depth of flavor. No, they’re not paying me to say that, but I wish they were. When it gets warmer again in NYC and fresh tomatoes become available again, I’ll consider sharing some fresh tomato sauce recipes. So, until the weather finally warms up, here you go:

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Baked Tofu with White Miso Udon

After a trip to Han Ah Reum on 32rd Street in Manhattan to grab ingredients for kimchi and coming away with some other goodies that jammed a bunch of ingredients into the fridge and pantry, I threw this together one night. While the list of ingredients seems a bit long, most of them are pantry items if you do some amount of Asian cooking.

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Sausages, Two Ways

First off, no, this post is not about your mom’s favorite porno movie - I’m keeping this strictly professional. Well, other than the introductory sentence. Anyway, wandering around the ‘hood in the cold and ending up with canning supplies from Brooklyn Kitchen and some full-on amazingness from the evil mad scientists at The Meat Hook in the form of bacon-cheeseburger and bahn mi sausages, I needed a plan. The balmy January temperatures on Monday coupled with the MLK holiday (oh yeah, and beer) provided sufficient inspiration to fire up the grill and do up some sausages the right way. High brow/low brow was in full effect with globe trotting sausages on a flight from New York to Vietnam with a layover in Milwaukee.

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Candied Pecans

Back when I was a kid, my grandmother would send up a big ol’ batch of pecans from the South during the holidays. I remember my Mom doing something along the lines of this recipe with them. They’re great on their own, with a glass of whiskey or a hearty red when you have people over for drinks. Alternately, sprinkle them on a simple salad of romaine, crumbled blue cheese and mustard vinaigrette. While the list of spices might seems daunting, they are spices you should really have on hand anyway and the preparation is simple and totally worth it.

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Buttermilk Biscuits with Toasted Sesame Seed and Sage Gravy

I had some initial trepidation about posting this, since it’s so damn good. However, it seems sort of ridiculous not to shared my recipe for buttermilk biscuits. The key is the flour. If you’re in the South, no problem making biscuits - it’s in your blood, and your flour. Southern all-purpose flours are made up of winter wheat, which has a lower protein content, making it more conducive to yielding a nice, fluffy biscuit (among other quick breads). Up here in the North, making perfect biscuits (and cakes, yummm) is more difficult since Northern flours are made of summer wheat, which contains more protein, which is more suitable for yeast breads. To get to about the same protein content as Southern flours, I’ve taken to using a mix of cake flour, which is finer and contains less protein, and Northern all-purpose flour. Don’t say I never gave you anything. Here’s the love:

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Butternut Squash, Sage and Shiitake Risotto with Chard, Raisins and Toasted Pine Nuts

Tonight’s menu was another challenge induced by random things around the kitchen, including leftovers. For one of the items, I received a nice package from my Aunt that contained among other things, raisins that my uncle made at home, so I figured those had to be in there. There were also some shiitake and enoki mushrooms lingering in the crisper. Lastly, I was looking for a way to repurpose the leftover butternut squash gratin and risotto came to mind as a perfect fit. It still being vegetarian week (fortunately, it’s almost over - I’m looking in your direction, Jimmy), I set out to create two dishes that would be a blend of savory and sweet.

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Butternut Squash Gratin

After a long day of work the thought of deciding on what to make for dinner was daunting. Figuring out menu items just didn’t work with the state my brain was in. To switch things up, I had Anna pick up random ingredients from the market on the way home to challenge me to fix something up. To add to that particular challenge, we had previously decided that we would have one week out of each month as a vegetarian week. That week happened to have started on Monday, so the challenge had a bonus factor. She returned with a butternut squash, green beans and local Greenpoint mushroom and sauerkraut pierogi. So with the main decided, the rest had to be figured out.

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Quick Japanese Pickles

Quick Japanese Pickles with Wasabi and Rice Vinegar

Ingredients

• 1 lb Japanese or Kirby cucumbers (about 5)
• 1/2 teaspoon wasabi powder
• 1/2 teaspoon water
• 2 tablespoons unseasoned rice vinegar
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon soy sauce

Method

1. Very thinly slice cucumbers crosswise with slicer; toss with 1 teaspoon salt and drain in a colander 15 minutes.
2. Rinse cucumbers under cold water, then squeeze handfuls to remove excess water; pat dry.
3. Stir together wasabi powder and water in a bowl and let stand 5 minutes.
4. Add vinegar, sugar, and soy sauce, whisking until sugar has dissolved. Add cucumbers and toss well.

The New Year

For as long as I can remember, my Dad has been a big proponent of eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day for luck in the coming year.  I adopted that superstition a while back without really wondering where that tradition came from.  After a bit of research, it seems likely that this practice was the result of a mistranslation and confusion between the Arabic word for fenugreek (Rubiya) and the word for black-eyed peas (Lubiya).  Fortunately for us, Lubiya won out and the Jewish custom of eating symbols of good luck on the New Year was brought to the American South by Sephardi Jews in the early 1700’s.

The Civil War brought the black-eyed pea to a wider audience.  As General Sherman made his was through the South pillaging foods stores, crops and livestock, his troops left the black-eyed pea alone.  The black-eyed pea, also know as the cowpea, is purported to have been ignored as the Northerners did not recognize it as anything other than fodder for livestock.

From there, the black-eyed pea gained its notoriety as a symbol of prosperity, as they swell when cooked.  Served alongside greens, symbolizing money and cooked with pork, representing forward progress, this legume became the center of many place settings in the South on New Year’s Day.

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