Roast chicken with butterflies

Even though I'm not the biggest poultry fan in the world (they remind me a little too much of my parrot sometimes), I've been roasting chicken on weekends for many years now. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how a roast chicken makes your whole house smell cozy; how delicious and crispy the potatoes become when they get thrown in the pan too; or how easy it is to turn a tattered chicken carcass into stock the next day.

But usually I think my roast chicken sucks. I've never quite gotten the combination of oven temperature and cooking time right. That deep little pocket of flesh above the thigh continues to leak pinkish juice far too long after the breast has cooked through and the skin has grown dangerously tan. I sigh and swear and shove it back into the oven with foil on top until the whole bird turns rubbery and weird and we're about to pass out from hunger.

People always look at me like I'm an asshole when I admit this. "But you went to COOKING SCHOOL. You mean you can't roast a simple chicken?" Ok, yes, I can roast a chicken. It will be decent and will not poison you. But is it the Perfect Chicken to End All Chickens? Am I satisfied with it to the point that I can serve it without pointing out every single flaw? No.

Am I too hard on myself? Yes. Often.

Like any hack, I enjoy blaming the equipment. I own a gorgeous All-Clad roaster that weighs about 20 pounds, and no matter what method I use, its sheer bulk always seems to double the roasting time of any recipe that I try. (No, my oven temperature is not off. And yes, I have tried preheating the roaster.) So lately I've taken to using an insulated baking pan combined with a small roasting rack that I bought at Goodwill for 60 cents. This works better.

After watching Mark Bittman's 45 minute turkey video, I thought I might try a different approach: butterflying the chicken first and just laying it out on top of the vegetables.

Well, wouldn't you know it -- it worked great, and the whole thing cooked to perfection in about 50 minutes at 400 degrees.* Still longer than the hypothetical Bittman turkey, but who cares? Every bit of it was tender and juicy, and the vegetables still got a good dose of chicken drippings for flavor. It's not as pretty when it comes out of the oven, but it is easier to portion. The skin also wasn't as crispy as I would have liked, but we cannot have it all. There I go again, nit-picking.

Try this recipe, and if you suffer from the same roast chicken impairment that I do, give butterflying a shot. More importantly, don't give up. Your dream chicken is out there somewhere in a field filled with butterflies.




*At least, I think it was 50 minutes. The memory is a little hazy because I was simultaneously cleaning up the living room, making rice pudding, listening to music and drinking beer. Just set your timer for about 40 minutes and take a peek and decide where to go from there.

The Egg

Marcel from Top Chef always irked me, but that didn't stop me from poring over his biography on the Bravo website with a voyeur's delight. Initially I found his response to the "What is your go-to ingredient?" question unspeakably pretentious: "The Egg." With Its Unnecessary Capitalization and All. But it stuck in my head. Months later, I'm still thinking about it.

The Egg.

I must give the man some credit. It's true. The Egg is fascinating. The Egg is also mind-numbingly versatile. The Egg strides purposefully from breakfast to lunch to dinner and onwards to dessert with ease. The color, the flavor, the textural possibilities ...and let's not forget that shell. Eggshells are both works of art and feats of engineering. (Although I have not yet read it, Michel Roux's book apparently does great justice to this ingredient.)

Yes. The Egg.

Recently we had too many eggs rapidly approaching their expiration date. Hard-boiling is always a solid way to buy some time, of course, and Chinese tea eggs are a great twist. They are only marginally more complicated than the usual recipe, which in my family goes something like this after an unfortunate incident a few summers ago:

"Drop eggs in boiling water. Try not to forget and go out for ice cream sundaes, only to return hours later to find a scorched pot, a shrieking smoke detector, and every kitchen wall pasted with exploded egg bits."

And Chinese tea eggs produce far more striking results:

I like to eat these eggs straight up, with just a bit of salt. I think this complements the admittedly subtle flavors that are imparted by the boiling liquid. You'll miss out if you dose each egg with a tablespoon of mayonnaise and a hit of paprika. Just keep it simple.

Chinese Tea Eggs
4 eggs, previously hard-boiled
3 bags black tea (I just used PG Tips; loose tea is fine too)
2 T. soy sauce
4 star anise
1 cinnamon stick
1/2 t. Sichuan peppercorns (optional)
A little orange peel (optional)
Approx. 3 cups of water

Use the back of a spoon to lightly crack the shells of the hard-boiled eggs. This creates the marbling effect that will emerge later. Place eggs in pot and add all ingredients except water. (If you are using tea in bags, open bags and empty tea leaves directly into pot). Add water to cover. Bring to boil, then reduce heat and simmer gently, 1.5 to 2 hours. Remove from heat and let stand in liquid one more hour. Remove eggs from liquid, allow to cool, and peel. Rinse them if they are covered with tea leaves, and serve.

Cheeeyucken potpie

In college, I had a stellar roommate. We were very lucky to have been assigned to live with each other, and we shared a similar sense of humor along with our hippie tapestries, G. Love CDs, and mini-fridge (in which I always kept a log of raw cookie dough and a spoon...shudder).

R. was great at impersonations. My all-time favorite was her version of some twangy-voiced, simpering aunt of hers back in Pennsylvania. The details are fuzzy now, but I believe she was immortalized for repeatedly pestering R. during family holidays with the unforgettable, "Dontcha want some cheeeeyucken and pee-yummpkin pee-ayee?" All R. had to do was mutter "peee-ayee" under her breath and I'd lose it.

It's been a long time, but I still have trouble saying the words "chicken" and "pumpkin pie" like a normal human. When I decided to make chicken potpie last week, you can bet I had to suppress a snort or two before embarking.

I hadn't made one of these in a long time. I turned to Julia Child, of course. I knew without even looking that Cooking at Home would contain a chicken potpie recipe, and that it would be exactly what I wanted: creamy chunks of chicken with a smattering of veg underneath a crispy brown crust. Julia knew a good thing.

To complement the potpie, I threw some extremely low-quality frozen peas on the table (although I don't exactly know if high-quality ones even exist...). For some odd reason, Randy decided that he would enjoy a nice frosty glass of milk with his meal that night. I suspect that it was perhaps the second time ever that a glass of milk had been drunk in our house (and that first glass was, I'm sure, an accompaniment to warm cookies).

All of sudden we realized that dinner was starting to resemble something from The Gallery of Regrettable Food. But it tasted great, cheap peas and retro milk aside.

P.S. If you've got a potpie itch that must be scratched, you might want to check out this book, newly released from Chronicle Books.