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Recipe: roast chicken

This past weekend we had roast chicken for dinner in which I finally got off my bum and took pictures. I had a fear of roasting until two or three years ago. That is in large part because I didn’t know what roasting was. One of my favorite cooking magazines is Fine Cooking by Taunton Press. It’s not just the pretty pictures (you can probably tell that I’m a visual person), but I like that they don’t advertise diamonds, luxury cars, cruises, and other things I can’t cook with. They had a lovely spread on how to roast a chicken or two and just like that, I was ready to roast.

Roast chicken is a basic in any cook’s repertoire, and it tastes fantabulous for very little effort. My official taste tester jumps up and down when he sees roast chicken appear on our weekly menu. I just wish I had learned about it earlier, but there is no time for regrets in life! I generally start the day before with a straightforward salt rub of salt, pepper, garlic, and lemon zest.

mix and match as you see fit

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Recipe: soy sauce chicken

Hrm, some recent developments might require that I curtail the posting frequency. Not sure. We’ll see how it goes in the next few weeks.

A few folks have inquired about the lunch I had in this entry, so I figured I should write it up seeing as it is a great dish in cold weather months.

Chinese noodle soups in my mind are as versatile as sandwiches. You can put whatever you want in them. I think of it in terms of a few major components: the noodles, the broth, the fixins. Noodles can be bean thread (aka glass noodles), soba, somen, iron man, ramen, rice noodles, and the list goes on. The broth is whatever you want it to be. The fixins can be vegetables, meat, leftover stir-fry, delicious spicy chili radishes (my fav!)…

We’ll start with one of my standards: soy sauce chicken. It’s just chicken drumsticks simmered for a few hours, but what you get is chicken and a lovely aromatic broth.

ginger, green onions, sugar, star anise

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We are fast approaching the winter solstice here. That means less daylight hours. In our house, it also means the blinding light of late afternoon… and when I say late afternoon, I really mean 3 pm onward. In summer, the sun is high in the sky. But if you think about the Earth’s obliquity at 23.5 degrees and my latitude around 40 degrees, we are talking about a sun incidence angle at max of 63.5 degrees from vertical or 26.5 degrees above the horizon. Our windows face south and in the afternoon that means our windows get the sun full bore. See here.

3:30 pm from the kitchen

[Puke carpet: Kaweah decided to share just how much bark she ate yesterday afternoon by yakking it up on the edge of an area rug this morning. Right after I hosed it off outside, it began to snow, so I had to drag it inside and then it stopped snowing.] Not only does the sun hit me square in the face, but our passive solar set up makes the house HOT. Don’t get me wrong, hot is good because we want to trap that heat so we don’t blow a fortune on heating the house at night when it gets cold. But hot is rather miserable if you’re trying to cook or shoot or think. I’m not a fan of hot… that’s why I live near snow.

unpleasant

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