Git Back In The Kitchen, Fool!

This cook might not be so confounded if he'd keep his caboose in the kitchen a bit more. I still need to work on just doing it no matter how busy or stressed life gets. So after last week's bizarro bent, we got back to some cookin'. We gathered some beautiful tomatoes and green beans from our garden as well as some seriously fragrant basil and used that as the foundation for our Saturday night dinner.

We put together a luscious salad of our basil leaves and cherry and Roma tomatoes along with farmer's market cucumbers, red and yellow peppers and feta cheese tossed with Dr. Pete's Chipotle-Lime dressing. Pondering on what the accompaniments should be, I remembered reading a passage in Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw stating that everyone should know how to perfectly roast a chicken. Imagining his dulcet tones addressing my blog helped me decide to go for it...

"So the Confounded Douchebag can't even roast a #*@*! chicken!".

At the store I perused the birds and asked which of them would be good for roasting. I was told that the chickens they had were for frying, not roasting....I not only had no idea there was a difference, I was baffled by the fact that they had no roasting chickens. I bought one of the birds anyway. I drove home, deep in thought over that quandary. So deep in thought in fact, that when I started to unload the groceries, I realized the bird was missing. I was so rocked by possibly having the wrong bird that said bird was still in the grocery cart that I'd left in the parking lot of the store. I hauled ass back to the store which was thankfully only five minutes away and there she sat in her bag, still in the cart. Sigh....I really need to lift the fog in my brain.

Back in the kitchen, we also decided to saute some of the green beans from our garden as well as make a Food Network dish we had admired. Aaron McCargo made something called Funked-Up, Smashed and Roasted potatoes and they looked so good we added that to the menu as well.

We preheated the oven at 375. I unwrapped the bird, rinsed it and placed it in a baking dish to begin a proper spa treatment. I gave the chicken a loving butter massage and then coated it with the Herbes du Provence from Penzey's as well as salt and pepper. We added about a cup and a half of water to the dish to set up some steaming action. I covered the chicken with aluminum foil and put it in the oven. We consulted the chart and our four pound bird was going in for 1 1/2 hours. After an hour, we checked it and removed the foil and put it back in for half an hour.

The potatoes threw off our timing a bit. We somehow missed in our original perusal of the recipe that the potatoes needed to bake a bit(check out the recipe below). We were able to catch up as the chicken needed to rest awhile post-roasting. When all was said and done, the meal was nothing short of awesome. The chicken despite not being a 'roasting chicken', was juicy and flavorful. The potatoes turned out even yummier than they looked. The salad was summer on a plate. We were so pleased...

Ah, what an idyllic moment. Wait, what's that rushing sound? Why is water pouring out of our freezer? Well....the icemaker has gone rogue.

Never a dull moment.

Aaron McCargo's Funked Up, Roasted and Smashed Potatoes....

Ingredients

• 1 pound fingerling potatoes
• Salt
• 4 shallots, sliced
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 stick butter
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1/4 cup chopped chives

Directions

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

Wash the potatoes. Add the potatoes to a large saucepan of salted water over medium heat. Bring to a boil and cook the potatoes until tender, about 10 to 12 minutes, Drain potatoes.

In a large bowl, toss together the potatoes, shallots, olive oil and salt and pepper, to taste. Add them to a quarter sheet pan and bake in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes. Remove the potatoes from the oven, allow to cool and then smash.

Warm the cream, butter and garlic in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the smashed potatoes and season with salt and pepper, to taste. Stir to combine, then transfer the potato mixture to a serving bowl and garnish with chives.