Sunday Night Dinners: My First Roast Chicken

When I came across this roast chicken recipe on Chez Pim, I was overwhelmed by the desire to make it. No, I’ve never roasted a chicken, and yes, I was slightly intimidated. But really, how hard could it be? Armed with a meat thermometer and a free range chicken in tow, I set out to make my very first roast chicken.

Stuffed with garlic and lemon, rubbed with butter, and ready to go into the oven!

Since roasting a whole animal seemed like a very domestic thing to do, I decided to dress the part too. I donned a 1950’s style shirt dress that I got from my sister. (If only I had a petticoat to wear under the skirt!) My guests, A, the talented and fashionable blogger at fitforafemme, her wife M, and JA all obliged my request to dress 1950’s style. It was really fun!

To start, JA concocted a delicious cocktail: champagne (Prosecco, actually), gin, and cran-apple juice, garnished with a wedge of lime. Then we moved on to the persimmon, curly endive, and radicchio salad from the Chez Panisse Vegetables cookbook. Even though the salad was beautiful and the first few bites were quite good, it quickly gained a strange texture on my teeth and tongue. It was like something weird was growing on my teeth and I wanted to lick it off. So weird! I couldn’t tell if it was due to the different variety of persimmon I used — the recipe calls for fuyu persimmons, but Berkeley Bowl was only selling hachiya persimmons at the time. My other guess was the radicchio. In any case, I’m not tempted to try this experiment again.

So pretty yet so sad.

The roast chicken turned out quite good, though the winter veggies roasting underneath didn’t fare as well. Due to the low cooking temperature, the chicken was in the oven for a long time, resulting in singed vegetables. Luckily for us, a few veggies escaped scalding — the pieces right underneath the bird ended up caramelized and tasty. As for the recipe, I followed it mostly, except that I cut back on the amount of butter (about 1/4-1/2 stick). It resulted in super flavorful meat — great for sandwiches! But crispy skin? As noted on the recipe, not so much.

Chicken basting, action shot!

Out of the oven, almost done. Looking good!

The carved chicken, with a side of burnt veggies.

To end things on a sweet note, A&M brought over a box of sumptuous cookies from Anthony’s in SF. We had tea and coffee and laughed as A tried to tempt my scaredy cat Sasha from his hiding place under the couch. What a great evening!

What's in that box? Only the best cookies ever.

Sunday Night Dinners: Celebration Edition

Lucky you — two posts in two days! I’m trying to catch up on blog material, since I’m leaving for Taiwan and Japan this week, and I KNOW there will be much to blog about from that trip!

I had the second of my Sunday Night Dinners a few weeks back. On the guest list: LC, who cooked dinner for me in order to appear on this blog; SP, who has hosted me many times especially at Stitch n Bitch; and JL, my good friend and film watching buddy. In addition to being a very fun group, there were special reasons to invite each of these friends. LC and SP are both moving far, far away soon, and JL was celebrating a birthday the following Tuesday.

For the menu, I decided to focus on the dessert since it was JL’s birthday. In addition, SP is vegetarian and JL doesn’t eat red meat or pork, so I went with two recipes from the Chez Panisse Vegetables cookbook by the one and only Alice Waters. We started with olives and Manhattans — very civilized, no? For the first course, I made a pink grapefruit, avocado, and curly endive salad with citrus vinaigrette. It was delicious but would’ve been better had I chosen riper avocados. You’d think four years of living in California would confer some innate ability to buy avocados, but nope. Big shame!

Yummy salad!

For the main course, I made a simple roasted eggplant and tomato penne pasta. The key to this dish was the ricotta salata cheese that is crumbled on top of the pasta. Ricotta salata is an amazing and flavorful (and salty!) cheese that is solid, unlike its liquefied and more common cousin. It will beat Parmesan any day of the week, in terms of being a pasta topper. It is also, for the record, the only cheese made from sheeps’ milk that I have ever liked.

Penne with roasted eggplant, tomatoes, and ricotta salata.

Now, for dessert! Back when LC cooked dinner for me, I had requested moelleux au chocolat, or molten chocolate cake. It is probably my favorite dessert of all time, which is saying a lot! He didn’t make it then, so I thought better late than never, right? And as I said earlier, it was JL’s birthday so I wanted to make dessert extra special.

You might recall that I’m not the best baker in the world, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the recipe (from The Gourmet Cookbook) was fairly easy.  Instead of the coffee créme anglaise that I was supposed to serve with the cake, I bought Häagen Dazs vanilla ice cream, which I thought would provide a refreshing cold contrast to the warm cake. Besides, LC said that the créme anglaise would have been too rich as an accompaniment. I’m so happy when there’s a good excuse to be lazy!

The cakes, straight out of the oven. Check out the chocolate oozing out the middle.

Happy Birthday friend!

It was a very successful dinner party, in part due to the amount of alcohol we imbibed. Between the four of us, we managed to put away four Manhattan cocktails and three bottles of wine. Cheers!

Three empty bottles of wine. Manhattans not pictured.

Sunday Night Dinners: A New Tradition

I love cooking but I hate cooking for myself. That’s why I recently decided to start having mini-dinner parties about once a month. For my first “Sunday Night Dinner,” I had M & K over, my Rivoli dining companions.

We were experiencing very warm temperatures in Berkeley, so I opted for a light, summery menu. (Translation: as little stove/actual cooking time as possible!) As I had never prepared a 3-course meal before, I also wanted to keep it simple.  I knew I could rely on my favorite cookbook author, Giada De Laurentiis, for simple and delicious dishes.  All of the recipes that I chose were from Giada’s Everyday Italian cookbook, some of which can also be found on the Food Network website.

To start, I made Caprese salad. The organic heirloom tomatoes were what really made this dish stand out. It was very good but next time, I will add some balsamic vinegar, to add a bit more flavor.

Caprese Salad: visually and gastronomically tasty!

For the main course, I had intended on making pasta with what I thought would be a light shrimp tomato sauce. However, the light tomato sauce ended up being more like a soup (almost like cioppino).  So I ended up serving the components of the main course separately.

Lemon spaghetti with grilled baby asparagus.

Shrimp fra diavolo. So good, and really easy too!

Keeping with the summery theme, I prepared a seasonal fruit salad with a twist: following Giada’s recipe, I poured a white wine reduction, with sugar and mint added, over the chopped fruit.  I made a very similar fruit salad for a potluck last week and I’ve renamed it, “Fancy boozy fruit salad.” I think it makes it more fun, don’t you?

Nectarine, peach, and strawberries, served in my recently acquired half-martini glasses. Ooh la la!

Of course, what would a fancy dinner be without wine? M & K didn’t disappoint with a lovely bottle of rosé from Chateau Saint Pierre.  As usual, I neglected to remember to take a photo of the wine until the bottle was empty.

A very distinctive bottle for a very distinctive wine.

All in all, a very successful and yummy dinner. The thing that made my meal complete, however, was the fact that my guests volunteered to do the dishes. (Honestly, they volunteered! I didn’t make them!!)

Working for their dinner.