Roast chicken with Almost Never-Ending Pesto

My first cousin, Misty, came to visit from the spiritual home of food lovers, Louisiana.  (You want to refute that and nominate your hometown or state or country for the position, write me a comment. I have to admit that Malaysia is close behind.)  She loves to eat, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at her.  Fortunately, I love her so I can overlook that enormous fault.

Her first night here, I decided to roast a whole pastured chicken from Olde World Farms with pesto stuffed under the skin, since I still have homemade pesto.  (The Olde World Farms website is sadly out-of-date, but, if you are in Houston, you can buy their products at the Eastside Market of a Saturday morning. Looks like the Urban Harvest website is a bit out-of-date too but at least you can still get directions. What’s with these people?)

Ingredients

1 whole pastured chicken

1/2-3/4 cup or 120-180ml pesto

Sea salt

Black pepper, freshly ground

Method

Preheat your oven to 400°F or 200°C.

Clean the chicken thoroughly and cut off all extraneous fat.  

Slip your finger under the skin at the point of the breast, up to the wishbone on both sides.  Spoon a large scoop of pesto under the skin and use your fingers to push it up towards the wishbone. 

Add another scoop on the other side and do the same.  Turn the chicken over and make a small slit in the skin of the thigh and run your finger around over the thigh meat. Add a little pesto and stuff it under the skin. Do this on both sides.

Pop the chicken into a roasting pan, breast side down and liberally sprinkle with sea salt and black pepper, making sure to get some inside the bird as well.  Turn the chicken over and liberally salt and pepper the top of the bird.  Put it in the oven.  After 15 minutes, turn the oven down to 350°F and drizzle a little olive oil over the bird. Return him to the oven for about one hour or until a thermometer stuck into his thigh reaches 190°F.

Upon reflection, I decided that we probably really needed some extra breasts to roast alongside the first bird since a couple in our party won’t eat anything but breast meat and I wasn’t sure about the rest of them.  Leftovers never go amiss when they are roasted chicken so off we went to Whole Foods to choose some breasts.

I was gratified to see that Whole Foods has a rating system for showing the treatment of their butchery items, including chicken.  The chicken breasts were rated at a lowly two, while the whole chickens were a pastured four.  The choice was simple.  I would roast two whole chickens.

At that point, while I had plenty of basil, I was out of already made pesto.  I decided to do something different with bird number two: Sun-dried tomato pesto.

Ingredients

1 oz or 30g Alessi sun-dried tomatoes

1 3/4 oz or 50g Parmesan

 1/4 cup or 56.7g butter 

2 cloves of garlic

Enough olive oil to loosen into a basil pesto-like consistency

Method

Soak the tomatoes for about 15 minutes in enough hot water (from the tap hot, not boiling) to cover.  

Drain the liquid.  Add the garlic, the butter and a glug of olive oil and mix with a hand blender.  

Grate your cheese with a fine grater and add to the container.  Mix again with the hand blender, adding a little more olive oil if necessary.  This is going to be a thick paste, like the basil pesto, so you may have to keep removing the paste from the hand blender blades and bearing down upon it again in the container till everything is smooth.   

Now you follow the directions above for putting the pesto under the chicken skin and roasting the bird.

I put them both in the baking pan together and the juice they created as the basil pesto bird and the tomato pesto bird roasted was sublime.

The finished chickens were lovely and juicy and delicious.

Side dishes seem like such an afterthought now, but, I can assure you, they were not. I made Johnson Stuffing from Baked Bree with help from younger daughter.  We also made a simple salad of tomatoes, bell pepper, feta cheese and romaine. 

And roasted golden and purple beets.

For the beets

Ingredients

3 purple beets with greens

3 golden beets with greens

2 cloves of garlic

Olive oil

Sea salt

Black pepper

Method

Cut the greens off the beets and trim the stalks, leaving just the leaves. 

Rinse the leaves several times in a full sink of water until you are sure all the dirt and sand are gone.  Scrub the beets and rinse as well. Any dirt will make for a gritty mouthful so you want to clean these suckers longer than you would think necessary to make sure.  Cut the beets in half and put them in a bowl big enough to allow stirring and/or tossing.  

Drizzle with olive oil, white or dark balsamic vinegar, sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.  By stirring or tossing, make sure the beets are completely coated.  

Grease a baking tray with more olive oil and tip the beets onto it. Turn them to expose the cut sides and roast them in a preheated oven at 400°F or 200°C.  

Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a skillet and gently fry the sliced garlic. Add the beet greens and let them cook just a few minutes until they wilt. Add a little sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and cook a few minutes more.  Spread the greens around on the serving platter and put the garlic slices on top.

After 15 minutes, turn the oven down to 350°F or 180°C and cook the beets until they are fork tender, turning halfway through so that the cut sides face the pan.  I ran out of time for the beets because my chicken needed to be on a middle shelf.  It was browning much too quickly up higher, with the beets down below, so I ended up taking the beets out after about 45 minutes and putting them back in their mixing/tossing bowl which was glass and microwaving their already well-roasted selves into fork-tenderness.  Then I arranged them lovingly on the bed of greens. 

I am a lover of purple beets but had never tried golden beets. They reminded me of parsnips and I would definitely buy and cook them again. And roasting seems to bring out the best in both colors. 

For dessert, we had two special recipes, made by younger daughter, quite a whiz in the kitchen from a young age:  Divinely moist brownies and chocolate-dipped strawberries.  Words are not necessary with photos like these.

It was our wonderful pleasure to have Misty over and we hope she comes back soon!

Blue Crabs

Spring in southern Louisiana is all about crawfish. Summer is all about blue crabs.  I don’t know what truth there is to the family lore, ingrained in my psyche since toddlerhood, that the crabs are fullest just after a full moon. The theory goes that the crabs can see better, and therefore feed better, by the light of a full moon.  It may sound crazy but it certainly held true this past weekend.

Saturday evening we enjoyed the most wonderful full-of-meat crabs I have had in a long time, seasoned with just the right amount of red pepper (read: lots!) with salt and other spices.  The Seafood Connection in New Iberia always gets it right. If you ever find yourself within driving distance, do it!

The detritus 

 

Here a little thing that made me chuckle: I was searching for information for Seafood Connection because I always like to add a link if possible when I write about a store or restaurant or market or supplier of anything I’ve used. I came across the official website for my hometown, New Iberia, and was tickled to see it had a link for local recipes, right alongside the link for city history. Food is indeed just as important to the inhabitants! 

Grilled Duck Breasts with Tomato and Fresh Mozzarella Salad

Just me and younger daughter at home the other night. The tomato was a lovely large specimen from Atkinson Farm by way of Revival Market on Heights Blvd.

Ingredients

1 duck breast per person, preferably pastured. Ours came from Countryside Farms

Ripe, summer tomatoes

Fresh ball/s of mozzarella

Fresh basil leaves

Sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Extra virgin olive oil

Method

Magrets de canard or duck breasts

Slit the fat about 1 cm apart on the duck breasts and sprinkle both sides with sea salt and black pepper. 

Preheat your griddle pan. Let it get screeching hot and then put the duck, fat side down, for 3 minutes, uncovered. The fat will begin rendering from the skin so you may need to put a splatter guard over the pan to keep it from spitting fat everywhere.

When your 3-minute timer goes off, flip the breasts and push the timer for another 3 minutes.  Cover the pan with a loose fitting lid.  

When the time has reached 1.5 minutes, turn the fire down to medium. When the timer goes off, turn the duck breasts skin side up again and set the time for 3 more minutes.  Cook with the lid off for 1.5 minutes and then put the lid back on for the rest of the time. When the timer goes off, remove the breasts to a cutting board and cover with the pan lid. Let them sit for about 3-5 minutes. Slice thinly at an angle and serve.

Terrible photo but you get the idea.

Tomato Salad

Slice the tomato in quarter-inch slices and lay all around the plate.  Cut those slices in half again, if they will fit your plate better. Sprinkle sparingly with sea salt. Slice the fresh mozzarella ball and place one slice of cheese of each slice of tomato. Sprinkle a little more sea salt and a few grinds of pepper. Add small leaves of basil or chopped leaves of basil on top of the cheese and tomato slices.  Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and serve.

Best Spaghetti Sauce with Meatballs

This weekend I am going to visit my grandmother. Yes, you read that correctly, my grandmother. I am 48 years old and I am blessed to have one grandparent still living.  She is full of life and an inspiration to us all. One of her favorite meals is spaghetti and meatballs so I am cooking a good pot to take with us.

Several years back, I made sauce with Italian sausage, removed from the casing and browned and chopped up to look like ground beef, and loved the way it flavored the tomato sauce as it cooked.  Then a couple of years back I watched a Jamie Oliver show where he used sausage but pinched an inch or two out of the casing at a time to make meatballs, which he pan-fried before adding them to the sauce. I thought this was brilliant and, for a time, that was the only way I made meatballs as well. Happily, this coincided with our move from KL to Singapore and Cold Storage in Singapore has wonderful, flavorful fresh sausages in a variety of flavors. To cook with Puy lentils, I would buy the small herb and garlic ones. For spaghetti sauce, the spicy Italian.  Lamb with rosemary worked beautifully for a dinner of mashed potatoes and a vegetable of some sort. Quick, easy, delicious.

Now, of course, you know if you’ve been following along lately that since reading Eating Animals, I try not to buy meat from a regular supermarket (at least not here in Houston because alternatives are readily available) because I cannot know its provenance and how the animal was treated. I would prefer to support the family farmers who raise cows and pigs and chicken out in the pasture, eating what animals should eat, by which I don’t mean antibiotics and other unnatural feed.  Unfortunately that means the selection of sausage is not that great.   So, I was back to making meatballs the old-fashioned way, but trying to mimic the flavor of my beloved sauce with Italian sausage.  

Ingredients

3 lbs or 1360g ground pork, preferably pastured pork

1 oz or 30g hot Italian sausage seasonings (I bought mine from a great supply store off of I-45 at Airline but you can get them online at Penzeys or in their store, also near me. I love the Heights in Houston! If you buy Penzeys, you might want to add cayenne or crushed red pepper since theirs isn’t hot.) 

1 large yellow or white onion

4-5 cloves of garlic

One large 28 oz or 794g can whole peeled tomatoes

One large 12 oz or 340g can of tomato paste – not sauce – paste. The really thick stuff.

2 heaping tablespoons of oregano

2 bay leaves

2 tablespoons of sugar

Method

For the meatballs

Preheat your oven to 375°F or 190°C.

Mix half the seasonings into the pork thoroughly. 

Fry up a small piece to taste. 

Add more seasonings, frying a little piece after each addition. Only you know your family’s taste and you don’t want it too spicy or salty.  That said, some of the seasonings will be transferred when the meatballs cook further in the sauce so don’t panic if you find it suddenly spicier or saltier than you think it should be.

Grease a baking tray with olive oil and drop the meat mixture spoonful by spoonful on the tray. 

With your oily hands, roll each piece into a ball and return to the greased tray.  

When all the balls are rolled, pop the tray into the oven for 20-25 minutes.

Tray one

Tray two

Meanwhile, get started on your sauce.  Chop your onion and garlic and sauté them gently with a little olive oil.  

When they are soft and translucent, add the can of tomatoes (and a can full of water) and the can of paste (and a can of water.)  Add oregano, bay leaves and sugar and bring to a boil.  Turn down to simmer and cover. (Yes, my meatballs are already in for this photo. Truth is, I forgot the oregano and bay leaves and had only added the sugar.  It doesn't really matter if you put them in before or after the meatballs but I thought the instructions should reflect how I MEANT to do it.)

When the meatballs are browned, add them to the sauce pot, making sure to scrape any sticky meaty goodness out of the pan and add it to the pot as well. (Add a little water to the pan if you have to.) Stir gently and cover the pot again. 

Simmer for as long as you can before serving over pasta boiled according to package suggestions. The finished sauce you see here is a little thicker than I would usually serve it but since I am transporting it across state lines, I let it cook down and will add some more water as I reheat it.

All my life, my grandmother has cooked for the family and, like most folks from New Iberia, LA, everything she makes is made with love and spice. She doesn’t cook as much as she used to, although she’ll still fry chicken when begged. (I have watched her and written down her every move but I will be darned if I can replicate her chicken. Hers is still the best!) Every summer I am grateful that Gram is still around and grateful that she can still enjoy some good home cooking.  Preparing one of her favorite meals has given me great joy and it will be even more joyful when we can sit together to share it.  (I’ll add photos after the meal.)

The finished bowl

After note:  The spaghetti and meatballs were a hit!  I could not get a good photo of Gram, despite younger daughter and I both trying with two different cameras.  She does not pose and when we asked her to smile, it reminded us of the Friends where Chandler and Monica were taking engagement photos. Here are a couple anyway.

Courgette Polpettes

My new favorite thing is the Jamie Oliver magazine. Okay, not so new since I have been buying it for the last couple of years and have a complete collection from Issue No 1, except for a couple I missed because they just didn’t bring them to Singapore and KL and no one I knew was traveling to the UK.  I say new favorite thing because I just bought Issue No 20 with my iPad as an iPad app. It is wonderful!  I came across this recipe and had to make it with the one large zucchini I got in my last share basket from Central City Co-op.  Courgette is, of course, the British word for zucchini.

Adapted from Jamie magazine

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil

250g (8 oz.) courgette/zucchini (I used the one good-sized one you see here on the left)

1 clove garlic

1 egg, lightly beaten

4 heaping tbsp freshly grated Parmesan

3/4 cup of grated mozzarella

1 slice of whole grain bread

1 tbsp chopped parsley

Freshly ground black pepper and sea salt, to taste

METHOD

Preheat the oven to 200ºC (400ºF.)  Peel the zucchini and chop into little bitty squares. 

Heat oil in a large frying pan over a medium-high heat and fry the zucchini for about 10 minutes, until tender and golden. Set aside to cool a little. 

Whizz the egg, bread and garlic around in a food processor, and then combine with all the other ingredients to make a thick, sticky mixture. 

That mush is the egg, bread and garlic.

With the cheese piled on.

Everything mixed together.

Season if you like with black pepper and a little sea salt, remembering that the cheese will add salt, so be careful. If you don’t have a food processor, use breadcrumbs in place of the slice of bread and mince your garlic very finely before mixing the egg and all the other ingredients.

Drizzle a little olive oil in your baking tray.  Spread around with your hands. Do not wash them as the oil will help with the next step. Using a spoon, drop blobs of the mixture onto your pan and, one at a time, roll gently into balls in your oily palms and place them back in the pan. 

Bake for about 15 minutes, until golden. Serve warm with a dipping sauce of spiced yogurt, if desired.

Very tasty!  Enjoy!