Cooking Experiments
A friend gave us a cookbook for a housewarming gift. I supposed it's classified as a cookbook, but it's more a philosophy-of-cooking book, with probably an equal number of pages devoted to talk about cooking and food, as to actual recipes. I read it cover to cover, and felt inspired. I've been too busy to cook much the last few years, but I used to really love it. Buying a new home seems like a good time to get back into the "homey arts" and since we've been talking about having dinner parties now that we actually have a table to dine at, I've been thinking about cooking.
What I like best about cooking is the experimental nature of it all. You can follow a 100-step French gourmet recipe to the last accent grave and have it come out all wrong, just because of the moisture level in the air or the altitude or the fact that your yeast isn't French. Or you can improvise along the way and substitute ingredients you have for ones you don't and make it all up as you go along. This has always been my philosophy, and it is shared and propounded by the author of the cookbook. So I decided to go for it.
I wanted to make a nice, homey, wintry-but-almost-early-spring dinner for a Sunday night. I wanted to bake a chicken. And I wanted roasted beets and potatoes. And maybe something savory in pastry as a starter. And that was about all I knew for sure when I set foot in the grocery store.
In the vegetable section, I decided on an onion tart, the infamous tarte tatin my friend raved about from the cookbook. I had pre-made pie crust at home in the freezer, and bought some onions. We had lettuce, so I bought apples and blue cheese. We had cream cheese, so maybe I'd do a cheese layer under the onions. I bought beets and potatoes to roast, and of course a chicken. Vegetables would be green beans, and perhaps the beet greens. I decided I wasn't going to use a recipe for anything.
I got home and after a while started to cook. No pastry pre-made was in the freezer. That was all right; I could make one. But I hadn't done it in so long, I did have to cheat and use a recipe. I also cheated and looked up the tart tatin recipe, decided it was too complicated, and decided to just do a variation on the tart idea with onions and cheese in pastry, which I've done a million times as a roasted vegetable tart. I also had to cheat and look up how long it takes to roast a chicken, since I couldn't remember that off the top of my head. But that was it; that's all I looked up.
I know it sounds like I'm bragging, but frankly, I'm still amazed - it all worked out so well. Sure, there are things I'd do differently if I made the same meal again, but those are refinements, not major changes. We didn't have about 4 or 5 ingredients I planned on using in various ways, but I improvised and just went with the flow. Vague directions/recipes follow:
Onion, Apple, and Cheese Tart
Made a simple, non-sweet pastry crust. Although I like butter flavor best, Crisco is actually easier to use and more consistent, in my opinion. I sliced one medium-large yellow onion into thin half-moons, and sautéed in butter with a little honey until they turned translucent. I added a sprig of rosemary, a dash of white wine. I decided I didn't feel like making a salad, so I thought I'd use the apples in the tart instead. When the onions smelled lovely, I added a diced Braeburn apple, with peel, and a little more honey, and sautéed until the apple turned soft.
Here's the part that got weird: we didn't have cream cheese. We did have sour cream. So I beat an egg, used the rest of the sour cream (non-fat, and only about a tablespoon), and about half a cup of blue cheese. This is usually a nice thick paste, using cream cheese. It was a gloppy raw egg mess this time. I put it in the refrigerator to thicken. No such luck. I considered adding a roux. I decide it couldn't hurt, and mixed a tablespoon of flour and water and beat that in. No help. I decided to pour off the extra runny liquid, and hope for the best.
I rolled the pastry out, poured (rather than spread, as I wanted) the cheese mixture, quickly topped it with the onions and apples, and folded the edges up for a flat tart. (I know it's probably got a nice French name, but I don't know what it is, so I'm calling it a flat tart. Feel free to email me with the proper name.) It baked at 375 (coincidentally the same temperature that the chicken was baking at) for 20 minutes, plus another 15 minutes when it was obviously still not done.
What I would do differently next time: Have the pastry pre-made for the tart. Make sure we have cream cheese or not use a whole egg. I loved the impromptu onion-apple combination, but wished I had used more apples, to have a more even balance (it was more like 70% onion 30% apple). I looked up the vegetable tart recipe later and it should have baked at 375 for a whole hour, too. Ah well.
Roasted Chicken with Beets, Potatoes, and Onions
I cleaned the chicken and started the giblets boiling for the dog. Decided not to put anything in the cavity other than a few branches of rosemary (we have a LOT of rosemary on our property). I put the chicken on the rack in the roasting pan. Melted a stick of butter in the microwave, with a large blob of crystallized honey. When that melted, I added about three pressed garlic cloves and a cup of white wine. I brushed the chicken with it and poured it over the top. Peeled and cubed three gigantic Idaho potatoes, and four rather smallish beets. I quartered two onions and spread it all out evenly underneath the chicken. It all roasted at 375 for 90 minutes, and I stirred the vegetables and basted the chicken every 15 minutes. Then I let everything rest of about 20 minutes before we carved it.
The chicken was moist and tender, the potatoes were soft but not overdone, the beets were wonderful, and the onions were caramelized and delicious. It was sweet but not sugary, and was very succulent.
What I would do differently next time: At one point things got too dry and I added more butter so I could baste everything. Big mistake. Eventually the fat from the chicken melted out and everything was nice and moist but very oily; I would have been better off adding chicken stock or more wine. Basting the chicken with the juices from down below meant that the beet juice turned the chicken black. It tasted fine, but looked a little weird. Serving the vegetables with the pan drippings poured over them meant they were extra rich, and later we both had unhappy tummies from all the butter and chicken fat.
Green Beans and Beet Greens
I sautéed the green beans in some of the pan juices from the chicken roasting pan, and added the beet greens, some minced rosemary, and a touch of honey and wine at the end. The beans were just right, and the bitter of the greens worked well with the beans, and the honey was a nice flavor as well.
What I would do differently next time: Parboil the green beans so they don't soak up quite so much fat when sautéing. Otherwise they were yummy.
Dinner was about an hour later than I had intended, and just way too butter-laden. Also, a light red wine would have been better than the Bonny Doon Pacific Rim Riesling we drank. Dessert was unwanted, we were so full, but ideally I would have wanted it just to have a "full dinner" to serve. But in spite of all that, overall, this is my ideal kind of dinner to make and to share - casual, homey, and tasty. I like to use a thread of common ingredients throughout all the dishes, and have the flavors play off of the dishes in different ways. Most of all - it got me cooking, and proved I could do it.
So let me know if you want an invitation to dinner - I promise I'll be more aware of cholesterol for a while!