If I do a post on Friday, it’s usually because I have a weekend breakfast that I want you to make. There was that time I told you how to make eggs, biscuits and bacon; and let’s not forget these banana walnut waffles. This weekend, all you’ll need are a few stray Yukon gold potatoes, olive oil, salt, pepper, some slivers of garlic, finely chopped rosemary (use the fresh stuff) and a hard Italian cheese (Pecorino or Parmesan) and you can have this breakfast ready in no time.
It occurred to me last Thursday that one of the best recipes in my repertoire isn’t even something that I consider a recipe. It’s a thing that I’ve done for years and years–I talked about it in my video “How To Roast a Chicken”–and, yet, when I look at it by itself, separate from the main event, this thing that I do is pretty extraordinary. And that’s cutting small potatoes in half and placing them cut-side down around a whole chicken before it goes into the oven.
A good argument to be made about the farmer’s market is: if you really believe in it, and go there to support farmers and local, sustainable agriculture, you should patronize it all year, including those rough months of winter.
That is a good argument but, unfortunately, a rather impractical one. I mean when it’s bitter cold out, I can barely get myself out the front door, let alone 14 blocks north and 3 avenues east to the farmer’s market. In my own defense, though, when the weather turns nice? I’m there in a heartbeat.
When I was writing my first book, I had a chapter called “Stretch a Chicken” in which I was going to try to stretch one chicken over as many meals as I could. That chapter never materialized but last week I found myself stretching a chicken without really thinking about it. I made two dinners and froze the carcass for chicken stock. Both dinners were excellent and, because I used the same chicken, relatively cheap. Here’s what I did.
Last weekend, I decided to make a very ambitious breakfast of poached eggs on roasted potatoes with Hollandaise sauce. It took a whole carton of eggs (three for the Hollandaise, four for poaching and the rest for throwing away after the yolks bled into the whites) but the resulting dish, as you can see, was pretty dazzling. It’s the kind of breakfast that makes you, the chef, feel proud and triumphant, roaring with the might of a culinary lion. “I made that!” you keep saying to yourself, reluctant to disturb the plate with a fork. “I really made that.”
“Yes,” says your companion, digging in.
“I’m a culinary lion!” you continue. “Rawwwwwwwwr!!”
Since I already put up one video today, I can’t think of a good reason not to post this crazy music video from 1977 called “My Name is Potato.” Tell your head to get ready to have a song stuck in it. [via Metafilter]
If you’ve been alive in the last week, you’ve no doubt heard of Susan Boyle. She comes from Scotland–Blackburn, West Lothian to be exact–and has taken the world (and YouTube) by storm with her appearance on Britain’s Got Talent in which the audience, dubious of her looks, her dress and her speaking style, got put in their place the second she started singing–by the end, they were electrified. Let’s go to the tape:
My go-to roast chicken recipe, that one from Chez Panisse (here’s a video I made on how to make it), is such a gut bomb of fat–and fat from just the chicken itself–that any roast chicken recipe that requires the addition of more fat (butter, olive oil) usually provokes my inner Richard Simmons who bursts out in short shorts and says, “You don’t need all that fat you fat fat fatty!”
