Her husband was away for a week having eye surgery and I thought to myself, “Why not?”
She was very excited to come to dinner and hang out and mentioned that there are some nights where she is bored to tears and forgets that she could just come over and have a chat if she’d like, so she was very happy to hang out with us!
So I broke out my list of trusty, but yet-to-be-made Dorie recipes from Around My French Table to find something to make for dinner. Without knowing any possible dietary restrictions or personal dislikes when it comes to food, I tried to stick to something that would be liked no matter what and veggies that could be chosen at will so she wouldn’t have to pick out anything she didn’t like in a tedious way.
When my eyes skimmed over the Roasted Chicken for Les Paresseux and the Garlicky Crumb-Coated Broccoli, I knew I had dinner figured out! I had been wanting to roast a chicken for sometime now and just never felt that the perfect occasion had presented itself – until now! Mei inspected each item as it went into the basket at the grocery store and she insisted that we pick up some cream and fresh strawberries to make strawberry panna cotta with so instead of refusing her brilliant idea, I went with it and those went into the basket too.
stuffin' it's butt!!
There is something decadent feeling about roasting a whole bird – I don’t know what it is but I love to do it! I love every part of preparing the bird. The seasonings, the rub, trussing, and watching it crisp and become juicy in the oven. Reading over the directions, I planned to give myself plenty of time to cook this chicken – and while it wasn’t a great big chicken or anything like the Thanksgiving turkey, I wanted to plan this meal so that I could just quickly coat and warm the broccoli when my dinner guest arrived, and the chicken would be just finished resting and ready for carving.
pockets of butter, a personal addition
So here I am, chicken in the oven, waiting for the first 45 minutes to go by so that I could run down, baste a bit, and tuck some veggies in with the chicken and I notice that the chicken has gotten quite a bit of color fairly quickly! The chicken looks done! I poked the thickest part of the chicken with a knife, and the juices ran clear….. and a part of me began to sink…. I had started cooking the bird two hours before my neighbor was supposed to arrive and an hour and fifteen minutes before she would get here, the protein is finished??
prep is finished!
Patella and I were hungry enough that we would have just put the pan on the table and started eating right then and there, but then that might make for an awkward dinner experience later…
“You didn’t come over when the chicken was done, although there is no way you would have known to come over, so we ate the chicken. All of the chicken….. ”
makeshift steamer!
So I put up a foil tent over the chicken, decided to come down and baste it every ten to fifteen minutes and reduce the oven temperature a bit so that the veggies would roast, but the chicken wouldn’t dry out … and I added a bit more wine. Because it is delicious…. I didn’t have any baguette to prop my chicken up on, so I will just have to roast a chicken again soon and try it with the liver and such… even though I’m not crazy about putting liver in the chicken and eating it myself – I’m pushing myself to try it out. As I sat thinking about the chicken, I figured that because I wasn’t cooking it in a dutch oven, and in a regular roasting pan, that is why the chicken cooked so quickly – especially at the temperature that Dorie suggested. I’m chalking this up as another reason why I should just go and invest in a dutch oven. Every week, I come up with another recipe or two that would back up the decision and make the investment in it worth it – but if I do it, it will have to be a Le Creuset variety, color undecided.
mise en place for the broccoli
I got out my steamer tray and a stockpot and because the steamer tray was meant for a different pot and didn’t quite fit right, I had to improvise a bit, I piled on the broccoli and let it steam for a few minutes, rotating and shifting around the florets until they were all steamed, and set them aside for garlicky crumb coating after my neighbor arrived. That gave me a chance to check on the panna cotta, and it was setting up nicely and ready for eating whenever we were ready! (Check for a post about that tomorrow)
golden & roasted!
After another half hour of constant basting and roasting the veggies, I turned the oven off and let the chicken rest. I could have made a nice gravy with the pan juices since there was more than Dorie intended with the extra addition of the wine, but I just didn’t feel up to it, instead, Patella and I tested each of the different veggies and were totally blown away by the flavor and texture of each one. It made it that much harder to wait for the neighbor to come over for dinner!
The neighbor’s side door has a tell-tale screeching noise it makes when it is opened that Patella is very familiar with, so she ran to the window and immediately started barking and scratching the glass as she saw our neighbor and her dog Paige coming to our door, then shot down the stairs and sniffed the door frame frantically begging me to open the door and let them in.
You know those conversations you have with someone you want to get to know but you have nothing really to talk about or know enough to find a common interest to bring you together and (at the very least) keep the conversation going? We had one of those “conversations” for about an hour and a half. But it wasn’t painful! We learned a lot and laughed and watched our dogs run in circles through the house, into the garden, back into the house, up the stairs, down the stairs and collapsing in the kitchen to drink water all while Mei giggled hysterically. All in all we had a good time!
Some people might think it’s just a matter of time, but since we got Patella as a puppy, we have not showed her that she can (easily) get food off of the table and our plates (if she should want it) so we don’t have a problem with her begging with her nose to the table, but Paige on the other hand knew where the chicken was and if she pushed her nose so far, she could probably lick the chicken! She was adorable and spent plenty of time right under the table – patiently waiting for us to have a collective aneurysm and let her drag what we hadn’t eaten of the chicken off of the table! Needless to say, it never happened.
devoured...
The chicken was moist, probably due to the basting but the next time I bake it, I’m going to put the veggies right in with the chicken and roast everything at once since the chicken was done in 45 minutes. The skin was delectable however, when cooked in this way and it is one of the extremely rare occasions that I like the crispy chicken skins! The broccoli was delicious, just tender enough to offer some resistance to a bite and have a bit of a crunch when you bit into it and the flavor of the garlic was perfect I am definantly going to make this again in this way for other meals. It’s a great, easy variation to work into a meal. And it took under ten minutes to prepare on the stove while we talked and dinner hit the table quickly after that!
When it came time for dessert, we sat back to digest the chicken a bit more and give the puppies a treat and I set down a tall glass of panna cotta in front of our dinner guest, who inhaled it promptly – I guess she liked it! We took the puppies into the garden to run around some more before we ended our evening and watched our two dogs run spastically around the garden, each baiting one another to chase the other was pretty fun for us and especially fun for Mei, whose little eyes darted a couple of seconds too slow while she tried to keep up with Patella and Paige.
This was a great recipe for a dinner that doesn’t require a lot of prep or tending when you have had a long day. All in all, another great couple of recipes from Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan. One last thing? This is the best part of having missed a few months of cooking and coming in on this project a bit late, I can make a main and side dish together that I wouldn’t have done if I was going these as they came out. To see how the other Doristas fared, click here. If you would like to join our cook-along group, find more details here.