Roast chicken. I rarely cook this successfully, and I think it’s because food safety is the top priority when it comes to chicken even if taste goes out the window. And to cook it evenly, it’s also advisable to let the chicken rest on the counter until it gets to room temperature, but this step is nearly impossible on a weekday. In this month’s Cook’s Illustrated, however, I found a technique that more or less worked. What you do is brine the chicken for an hour, using half a cup of sugar as well as half a cup of salt, dissolving both in two quarts of cold water. Then you rub it with olive oil and seasoning and cook in a preheated 12-inch skillet at 450 degrees. (At other times I’ve found the chicken is more tender if you roast it at a low temperature, but I usually run out of patience.) I probably kept it in the oven a little too long, but it ended up cooked all the way through and only a little tough.
Most of the Cook’s Illustrated article is devoted to explaining how you can roast vegetables separately and still make them taste like they were in the same pan with the chicken. The technique is too involved to reproduce here, but in essence you’re supposed to use potatoes, diced into small pieces, and an equal portion of some mixture of root vegetables like carrots, parsnips, or leeks. I ignored all their suggestions and used brussels sprouts. While the chicken is still in the oven, you cook the vegetables for about a half an hour (which, however, is too long for brussels sprouts). When the chicken is done and you’re letting it rest, you pour the liquid from its roasting pan over the vegetables and cook them for another ten minutes or so. (Cook’s Illustrated says to use a fat separator and cook the vegetables first in the fat, then in the juice.) The result? Potatoes with the texture of hash browns and the flavor of a purée, and vegetables dripping with fat and still not all that unhealthy.
(Photo: Historic blizzard in Arlington, Virginia, 2010.)
365 Days of Food 