Cooking for Geniuses

[matthewdaly]

(Actually, I joke. Cooking for Dummies is actually an outstanding and non-insulting book for people who don't know a pot from a saucepan, the difference between oil and butter, or how much a dash of salt is, and that's knowledge that didn't come to some people through no fault of their own. Joy of Cooking is a great reference but a lousy primer.)

Anyway, I stand before you as a cook. And that's new; kindly people have told me that I have the skills of a sous-chef, but until about six months ago I was always running on the rails. I was a recipe monkey, in the same sense that a code monkey is not a software engineer. But now I have a much better appreciation, for those things that I do cook, of why those ingredients are there and how changing them changes the food that comes out at the end. It's fun. Better yet, it's cheap.

I started out very simply with things like hamburgers on the George Foreman grill and Tater Tots in the toaster oven, shredded grilled chicken breast on a bed of rice-cooker rice, Kraft Dinner with fried Italian sausage mixed in. Over time, I started Julienne-ing my own potatoes, baking my own hamburger buns, and making fresh pasta and pizzas, and just made my first dish of rice and beans yesterday. In a routine week, the only processed food I eat is spaghetti sauce.

Also, with my parents wintering in Florida, I took over the dessert duties for family dinners. Again, this started modestly with apple crisps and Toll House cookies, but I've worked up to making my own homemade pies. With homemade crust. And homemade meringue. I admit that the pies are not winning blue ribbons yet, but they taste just fine and presentation will come with more experience.

Next up is the final loin-girding: roasting a whole chicken. I don't know why it seems daunting. I am Matthew, master of pie. Bread trembles before my might, I am single-handedly putting the ravioli market out of business. Is it that it is recognizably an ex-animal? That making it wrong could make me dead from salmonella or trichinosis or whatnot? I don't know, but it's a wall I've been putting off. I also don't have a roasting rack.

Comments

[piglet]

I had never roasted a chicken until I visited Dr. Brat last year. I followed these instructions: http://www.finecooking.com/articles/how-to/roast-chicken-start-to-finish.aspx

There was some skepticism expressed that this was my first roasting. ;-). Mmmmmm.

[matthewdaly]

Your timing is impeccable. Ten minutes ago, I finished my first chicken dinner and was thinking about where to go from here. The man with two watches has no problems compared to the man with twenty recipes for the same dish. Yours looks like the union of all of them with the rub, filling the inner cavity with spices, and the compound butter under the skin, so I'll use that as my template. The fact that you would start out with a tough recipe, served to snigglers, and completely ace it? I am awestruck as usual, but not at all skeptical.

Me, I went with the intersection of all the recipes, which was just salt and pepper on the skin and in the cavity. And I largely abandoned the drippings because this is a week's worth of meat instead of a single unified meal that could use a proper pan sauce. Although, after checking out another twenty recipes, I reclaimed the drippings and tossed them into the crock pot that is currently making the stock out of the carcass. The next challenge is figuring out what to do with all this chicken glace.