A New Kitchen and Roast Chicken

The other day when I went to pick Emmett up from school one of his teachers asked me if we were remodeling our kitchen.  I must have looked confused because she said “Emmett keeps telling me that you are building a new kitchen.” Of course he meant a TOY kitchen, the one that my parents bought his sister for her birthday. I had been assembling it over the course of a couple of evenings this week. She laughed when I told her what he was talking about and said that he was very, very excited about it.

For awhile I was not quite on board with a toy kitchen.  I wondered why the kids couldn’t just cook in the real kitchen, with me. But as they grow older and I see how much they enjoy pretend play, I realize that they can have fun doing both. And honestly, sometimes they don’t have the patience to enjoy doing all of the real kitchen tasks, including waiting 20 minutes for something to come out of the oven or stopping every time something is too hot or sharp for little hands to be trusted.  Sometimes they would rather just pretend. Having a toy kitchen, as it turns out, is great for getting them more involved in the real kitchen.  They can help me with a discrete job like kneading dough or mixing or stirring something and then pretend to do all of the other steps in their own kitchen.

So what are we “pretending” to cook today? Roast chicken, because I think that everyone should have a go-to roast chicken recipe. It’s so easy and relatively inexpensive to do. Plus, everyone seems to like a good roast chicken. Sometimes the simplest things are the best.  I actually made this two days in a row because we couldn’t get enough.

My cooking method is based on the America’s Test Kitchen technique which I have summarized below.

Perfect Roast Chicken

1 whole chicken about 3-3.5 lbs

1-2 teaspoons fresh rosemary, minced

1-2 teaspoons fresh thyme, minced

zest of one lemon, plus the lemon

1 tablespoon kosher salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

½ teaspoon smoked paprika

cinnamon, just a small pinch

½ teaspoon powdered garlic

1 tablespoon vegetable oil*

*I use vegetable oil over butter or olive oil because it has a higher smoke point. I'm not sure that it makes a difference, but I'm cooking the bird at a high temperature and don’t want to set off the smoke alarm.

1. Arrange your oven racks so that you can put the chicken roughly in the middle of the oven. Place a large cast iron pan in the oven and preheat the oven to 450F.  

2. Combine the herbs, lemon zest, salt and pepper, spices and oil and rub all over the chicken both on top and under the skin. Cut lemon in half and place in the cavity. Tie the legs together with kitchen twine. I don’t even worry about the wings.

3. Once the oven has come to temperature, take out your cast iron pan (carefully, it’s hot) and place your chicken in the center.

4. Put the pan back in the oven for 30 minutes.

5. After 30 minutes, turn the oven off. That’s right. O-F-F.  

6. Leave your chicken in for another 25-30 minutes or until the thickest part of the thigh reaches 160F and the juices run clear.

A bunch of good stuff about to be slathered on the bird. 

Oh no! I ripped the skin - slathered it too vigorously I guess. I'm a vigorous slatherer. Believe it or not, everything was still ok. Once it was cooked, I carved this baby up and no one even knew about the skin mishap. Until now. 

Sometimes I make a simple pan sauce on the stove with the brown bits left in the skillet.  I just add a little water or chicken broth to the pan, turn up the heat, scrape up the brown bits that are stuck on the bottom of the pan, season it and well, sauce. 

The last time I made this, I made some mushroom risotto to go with it and found that if I start cooking the risotto around the time I turn the oven off, everything is done at the same time. So, the chicken takes approximately 1 hour: I used the first 30 minutes to prep the ingredients for the risotto, make a salad and clean up; and the second 30 to cook the risotto.  Voila, semi-fancy Sunday dinner in an hour. I would totally make it for company.  

After we picked all the meat from the bird, I put everything that was left in my slow cooker with some water and roughly chopped vegetables for about 12 hours to make stock. I used that to make chicken soup that I blended into a puree for Eve. Nothing went to waste and she loved it!

We must have all been hungry because I didn't take a single "cooked chicken" photo.  I resumed photographing the next day while making baby food for Eve. 

Pureed version of the chicken soup pictured above. 

It's going to be a busy year in this kitchen. Oh yeah, in case you were worried, Isla never opens the oven without her oven mitts on. 

Two scoops in Every Batch: Raisin Bran Muffins

It’s funny how types of food, like people, can have stereotypes attached to them.  In America, it seems like whole grain flour and wheat bran are given a bad rap because of their (unfair) association with “bad-tasting health food”. Yet the Irish seem to embrace these products, with traditional baked goods like brown bread and oat cakes relying primarily on whole grain flours for taste and texture.

Odlums, an Irish flour milling and packaging company, originally established in Portlaoise by the Odlum family (in 1845!) has a whole range of flours, most of them whole grain (wholemeal). Odlums makes wholemeal self-raising flour, organic wholemeal flour, coarse wholemeal flour, extra coarse wholemeal flour and strong wholemeal flour to name just a few. It reminds me of the way Eskimos have so many words for snow. Like "aqilokoq" for "softly falling snow" and "piegnartoq" for "snow that is good for driving a sled".  

Sweet Ireland, the land of baked goods where so many varieties of flour get their due. How refreshing.

Recently, I saw an article entitled how to make Old-School Bran Muffins from Scratch online and, as a lover of whole grains and bran, I knew I had to make them.  I was sure they would be delicious but I needed to “spin this” so that I could describe them to my family as something other than whole wheat, bran or healthy. Any of those terms would be bound to conjure up images of dry, hockey-puck style muffins in Paul’s mind and through osmosis, in the minds of our children (and by “osmosis” I mean that if Paul isn't waiting by the oven door ready to pounce on any fresh baked goods that may emerge, the kids know there's something wrong).

Then it came to me...RAISIN BRAN! Everyone loves Raisin Bran.  Have you ever seen the amount of sugar sticking to those raisins? As if the raisins themselves were not basically pure sugar.  Sugar dipped in sugar. No matter. This was just marketing. The mere association with Raisin Bran would make them forget all about the whole wheat and surprisingly, even the bran. It seemed to work. We each ate one fresh out of the oven (they were delicious) and I froze the rest. The next day after school, when I turned my back on Emmett and Isla for an instant to unbuckle Eve from her carseat,  I turned back to find them each eating a muffin - straight out of the freezer! They were all smiles, even more so when I warmed up their muffins and slathered them with butter.

My deep thinker, contemplating...muffin.

You can find the recipe for Raisin Bran Muffins here. I was one tablespoon short of butter so I replaced it with a tablespoon of coconut oil.  Otherwise I didn’t change a thing. And of course, I used Odlums Coarse Wholemeal Flour for the whole wheat flour called for in the recipe.  Odlums flour can be found at the Irish Boutique.  

Saturdays: Breakfast for Dinner

Saturdays are sort of a free-for-all around here.  Some Saturdays we are all about cooking, cleaning and getting other housework done, some are packed with activities and socializing and some are just plain slow and lazy.  If we aren’t having anyone over for dinner, Saturday’s evening meal can be a free-for-all as well.  Soup, leftovers and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches come to mind.  We aren’t a big breakfast-for-dinner family but on weekends anything goes. This weekend we had some sausages, courtesy of the Boutique, in the fridge and not much else. We added some eggs, beans, toast with butter and Vegemite for me and rice for Paul and made it a meal.  It made me wonder why we don’t do breakfast for dinner more often.  

I'm so thankful that I always have sausages in my freezer and beans in my cupboard.  Have you been by the Boutique lately? They've got a new freezer and its stocked with all of the good stuff. Brown bread, soda bread, sausages, black pudding, sausage rolls and so much more.