My Plate or Yours?

Eat More Chicken

So it’s not a gorgeous picture, it tasted gorgeous and that’s what counts.

Here’s the thing. Even during my meat eating years I wasn’t all that big a fan of chicken. It just tasted like, well, chicken. A little dry, boring, nothing to get worked up about unless you coated it with fry, which we never did in my house. We either grilled it and doused it with lemon and garlic in the Lebanese way or ate a hybrid dish my dad used to make from Craig Claiborne's NYT Cookbook that he called “Poulet Morengo Chicken Portuguese” (catchy huh?) I hated it.

Since venturing back into the land of the omnivores, chicken has given me great pause. I hate what they do to commercially raised chicken and I just flat out won’t eat one, which really narrows my chicken options. The few times I’ve gotten a good local free range chicken I have fried it, with good results, but otherwise, eh, I just haven’t been that into it.

But right before we left Bloomington to come to Apalachicola I bought  ten nice fat chickens from Schacht Farm and we brought two of them with us, frozen, in the cooler. Last night we cooked the second one and it was a poultry revelation.

I used one of my favorite standby cookbooks for when I really don’t know what I am doing – The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. They suggest a way of grilling chicken I hadn’t run into before, taking out the backbone and laying the bird flat on the grill, skin side down over indirect heat for half an hour. Seemed straightforward enough, and hard to mess up.

So that’s what we did. Started with a tasty chicken whose good life I could vouch for. Brined it in 2 quarts of water, ½ cup salt, ½ cup sugar and some chopped garlic for an hour. Took it out and dried it off.

Tweaking the ATK recipe, I heated up a cup of olive oil, lots of chopped garlic, a couple tablespoons dried basil, red pepper flakes, pepper, and a shake or two of cinnamon. Loosened the chicken’s skin and spooned the oil/garlic/basil mixture all under the skin. Saved some for later.

Grilled the chicken as per the recipe – skin side down off direct heat for about 40 minutes. That was it. Carved it and ate it with potatoes and carrots roasted in a bit of the same oil. Meanwhile I had simmered the oil so the garlic was soft and I drizzled it all over the cooked chicken, potatoes, and carrots. Squeezed a lemon over all.

Amazingly good. The chicken was beyond flavorful – a tasty chicken to start out with, then the brine, then the flavored oil, then the grill. Really special. Did NOT taste just like any chicken I’d ever eaten!

Happy 2008!

I haven’t been such a hot blogger this year – what with one thing and another there were some long dry spots between posts on my end. I haven’t been able to read blogs as regularly as I’d like, either.

Makes me feel especially guilty when I consider what I have gained from you all while I have been slacking. When we lost our good Gina girl in July and had a scare with Ginger shortly after, the support you all offered touched my heart and kept me going. When I did get my head above water long enough to post, you were still there to read and comment. And when I wondered how Jerry and I should celebrate the New Year, you all told me exactly what to do.

So many thanks to one of my favorite bloggers, Lydia at The Perfect Pantry. I always learn something about food when I read her blog, but this week, in a really lovely post, I also learned about the tradition of seeing out the old year by welcoming the First Light of the new one.

She and her friends build a bonfire in a field and toast each other with coffee as the sun rises on the 1^st of January. What a lovely idea! So this morning, early, we poured coffee into thermoses, bundled ourselves and the dogs into the car, drove across the bridge to St. George Island, and stood and saluted the sun as it came over the horizon. It was a heartwarming welcome to a new day and a new year.

On the way back, mindful of my lesson last year from another favorite blogger, Lisa (The Homesick Texan), we stopped at the Piggly Wiggly for black-eyed peas and collards. Lisa reminds me yearly that eating black-eyed peas on the first brings good fortune in the new year. Last year wasn’t free of grief or sorrow or hard luck, but it was a very good year overall and I am sure it was those peas. This year I followed, roughly, the recipe Lisa adapted from Gourmet, but I don’t have a Texas tummy  so I reduced the chipotles and the garlic a bit. 

Instead of ham, I used some outstanding smoked sausage from Bradley’s Country Store in Tallahassee that was brought to us by some new friends who are also, indirectly, blog-related. I “met” John when he read my blog post about a restaurant he was interested in and it turned out we had both politics, food and a couple of friends in common. He and his wife came down to Apalachicola one night last  week to try out the restaurant with us, and they came bearing sausage. Who says you should beware the people you meet on the Internet?  (When I posted this I couldn't get the store's web site to load for me.  If it doens't work for you, try this. It looks like a terrific place -- one we will try to visit before we head back north this weekend.)

Now John and his wife echoed what Lisa has posted several times – the appropriate accompaniment to black-eyed peas is cornbread, baked in a cast iron skillet. The only hitch was that I didn’t own a cast iron skillet.  I think, because I’d never seen anyone in my family cook in one, that I was a little intimidated by the whole “seasoning” mystique. Time to be over that! So when we drove to Panama City today  to get a ladder my husband wanted, I found a cast iron skillet as well. It wasn’t old and it was preseasoned – two strikes against it (a third was that it had Emeril’s name on the label) but I followed Lisa's recipe and it worked like a charm -- the cornbread was wonderful, full of corny goodness and crackly on the bottom!

So we ladled up the rich smoky pea stew and dunked our cornbread in it and said a heartfelt thanks for good friends, cyber and otherwise, who made this last year such a good one. Here’s to all of you – happy 2008!

How did the rest of you welcome the New Year?