An easy dinner for houseguests - roasted chicken

Roasted chicken is one of my favorite meals to prepare for guests. It’s easy and a crowd pleaser. We’ve had two different sets of houseguests in the last two weeks. First my brother-in-law and his wife were here for a long weekend and then friends of ours who bought one of our houses in the islands stopped by to spend the night on their way north to visit their son. I served the same meal to both couples – roasted chicken with homemade croutons and asparagus salad Brazilian with hearts of palm and grape tomatoes.

Recipe

I took two of my favorite roasted chicken recipes - Lemon Roasted Chicken with Croutons from Barefoot in Paris by Ina Garten and Grandmother’s Roast Chicken (Poulet Roti “Grand-Maman”) from Simply French, Patricia Wells presents the cuisine of Joel Robuchon and combined them into one. I love the simplicity of roasted chicken and lemons in Ina’s recipe and the sauce from Patricia Wells’ recipe is divine with its rich herb and garlic flavor. As you know if you watch The Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network, Ina and Patricia are friends so I’m sure they would approve of my combining their recipes.

I got the idea of combining the two recipes from a comment T.W. @ Culinary Types made on my post about Mark Bittman’s new Kitchen Express cookbook. T.W. said, “Sometimes, I will look at two recipes and try to come up with a hybrid.” I thought at the time that it was a great idea, so when I was planning the meals for our guests, I looked at both of these chicken recipes and said to myself why don’t you try combining them like T.W. suggested. And by golly, it was a success. Thanks T.W.

The homemade crouton recipe is from Ina. The croutons are prepared on top the stove and it’s so much easier because you don’t have to constantly check the pan in the oven to make sure they aren’t burning. I use this method of preparing croutons all of the time. Give it a try. I promise you’ll never eat another store-bought crouton again and it’s so easy they practically make themselves. Also make sure you use really good bread and good extra-virgin olive oil.

Roasted Lemon Chicken with Homemade Croutons

This is adapted from Lemon Roasted Chicken with Croutons from Barefoot in Paris by Ina Garten and Grandmother’s Roast Chicken (Poulet Roti “Grand-Maman”) from Simply French, Patricia Wells presents the cuisine of Joel Robuchon

Printable recipe

1 (3 to 4-pound) roasting chicken

1 large yellow onion, sliced

Extra-virgin olive oil

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1 lemon, quartered

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

1- 2 heads of plump fresh garlic, unpeeled, tops cut off

1 to 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary

Several sprigs of fresh thyme

6 cups (3/4-inch) bread cubes from a French baguette or boule

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Take the giblets out of the chicken and wash it inside and out. Remove any excess fat. Pat the outside of the chicken dry with paper towels, sprinkle the inside with salt and pepper and tuck the lemons inside. Brush the chicken with the melted butter and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Tie the legs together with kitchen string and tuck the wing tips under the body of the chicken. Put the sliced onions in a roasting pan, toss with a little olive oil and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Place the chicken on top of the onions and add the garlic, rosemary and thyme to the roasting pan.

Roast for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, or until the juices run clear when you cut between the leg and the thigh. Remove the chicken, onions, and garlic to a platter. Sometimes the onions may burn, but their flavor is good. Cover chicken with foil. At this point Patricia Wells places the chicken at an angle against the edge of an overturned plate, with its head down and tail in the air to heighten the flavor by allowing the juices to flow down through the breast meat. Then cover the chicken with foil, turn the oven off and place the chicken back in the oven with the door ajar and let it rest for at least 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat a large sauté pan with 2 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil until very hot. Add the cubed French bread. Lower the heat to medium-low, season with salt and pepper and sauté the bread cubes, tossing frequently, until nicely browned, 8 to 10 minutes. Add more olive oil, as needed. When nicely golden brown, set aside.

For the sauce, place the roasting pan over moderate flame and scrape the bits that cling to the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Add juices from chicken that’s on the platter in the oven. Cook for 2 – 3 minutes, being careful not to let it burn. Discard any excess fat. Add 2 tablespoons cold water (hot water will cloud the sauce), white wine or dry vermouth and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for about 5 minutes. Strain the sauce through a fine mesh strainer and reserve. Patricia Wells say straining the sauce makes for a finer, more elegant and smoother sauce and is well worth the effort. She believes it is this extra step that transforms an amateur’s efforts into a professional’s.

When you’re ready to serve, place the croutons on a platter. Slice the chicken and place it, plus any carving juices, over the croutons. Sprinkle lightly with salt and serve warm with the sauce. Yield: 4 servings. Excellent accompanied with Asparagus Brazilian.

Our friends from Abaco

Our friends arrived mid-afternoon. Around four o’clock I fixed a little pre-dinner pizza with smoked salmon. It’s one of my favorite appetizers and it’s adapted from Jacques Pepin.

Recipe

These were our two houses when we lived in the islands. They bought the one on the right, which we called Lazy Days. They’ve made some great changes to it, including a new dock and a white Bermuda roof, and renamed it Somewhere (from Over the Rainbow). An appropriate name don’t you think? Here’s a shot of the dock and our boat that we took from the front porch when we lived there.

Ending on a sad note, here’s a link to the story about Conde Nast’s closure of Gourmet magazine. It’s hard for me to envision life without this beautiful food magazine. It's probably the first food magazine I subscribed to. I will miss you old friend. How will Gourmets departure affect you?

Celebrating Pink Saturday at Crane Creek Vineyards & Winery in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia

On Saturday a group of bloggers from around the world get together to celebrate everything pink. Pink Saturday is sponsored by Beverly of How Sweet The Sound. In fact, it’s one of the reasons we came to the winery today – to enjoy a glass of pink wine. If you love pink salmon, be sure to visit Mary at One Perfect Bite. She prepared a yummy pink salmon chowder last Saturday and treated us to breathtaking (pink) photos of the San Juan Islands. If you would like to join in the fun, visit Bev and sign up for next week’s Pink Saturday.

We’re visiting Crane Creek Vineyards & Winery, which sits high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia, just a few miles from Young Harris, a quaint college town and in the shadow of Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest peak. Less than two hours north of Atlanta, it feels like it’s a world away. Sun kissed days, cool summer nights and rich mineral soils allow the winery to cultivate grapes with fresh, assertive aromas and concentrated flavors. In addition to blush and rose wine, they also produce a nice selection of reds and whites.

We stopped by their tasting room, housed in a charming old, yellow clapboard Georgia farmhouse that overlooks the vineyards and were greeted by a darling little metal pink pig at the gate. Inside we sampled a bottle of their Villard Noir, Blanc de Noir, 2008. Crisp and dry, it reminded us very much of the fabulous French rose wines we enjoyed during our trip to Provence a couple of years ago. While visiting with Chef David, he said he likes to serve this wine with figs and goat cheese drizzled with a little balsamic glaze. Sounds like a winner to me.

Crane Creek Vineyards is a great place for lunch. If you call ahead, they’ll prepare a cheese tray for you and customize it with various vegetable medleys or assorted antipasto meats. They also offer soup (today’s selection was Fresh Tomato) and a glass of wine.

On the grounds there’s a beautiful pavilion that’s perfect for parties or even a wedding, which sounds like a fantasy experience for a new bride to exchange vows in the vineyards and start a new lifelong journey with the one she loves.

Crane Creek is a member of the Wine Growers Association of Georgia. In December the association sponsors a Georgia Wine Highway Weekend. The participating wineries are all within driving distance of Atlanta, Asheville or Chattanooga. So if in mid December you’re feeling stressed-out and want to escape for a couple of days from the holiday hustle and bustle, the winery tour might just be the perfect weekend trip.

In addition to the winery tours in North Georgia, there’s hiking on the Appalachian Trail and plenty of trout fishing in the area. Crane Creek offers two lovely guest houses, one of which is located a few feet from Frogtown Creek, a branch of the Chestatee River, which is a certified Georgia trout stream. Regularly stocked with rainbow trout, it’s a trout fisherman's paradise.

We’re looking forward to Crane Creek’s upcoming Annual Harvest Day on Saturday, October 24, where they celebrate the completion of the year’s harvest with hayrides, grape stomping, winery tours and tastings. I’ll give Catawba a scratch on her ear and tell her I’ll see her on the twenty-fourth.

My husband Meakin raises a glass of this wonderful rose wine and we both wish you a very happy (and rosy) Pink Saturday from Crane Creek Vineyards & Winery located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia.

Houseguests for lunch and a secret to making good soup

As you know from my previous post, it rained the entire weekend our house guests (my husband’s brother and his wife) were visiting. There’s nothing better for lunch on a rainy day than a good bowl of soup followed by a salad and perhaps a nap. Since our guests had an appointment to look at a house that’s for sale in the afternoon, we decided to save the nap for later and visit a local winery a few minutes away from the property they’re seeing with the realtor.

I believe I’ve found one of the secrets to making a really good soup. It’s how you sauté the vegetables. My mother used to throw the vegetables in without browning them first. While there’s nothing wrong with this and it does save a bit of time, if you brown the vegetables first your soup will have a much richer flavor. The second secret is to add the herbs and a little bit of tomato paste to the vegetables at the end of the browning stage. Here’s what I do. I start the vegetables on high heat, then quickly switch to low, season with salt and pepper, and cook them slowly until they are nice and brown taking care that they not burn. Then I add the herbs I’m using (thyme and fresh rosemary are my favorites) and a little tomato paste and cook the vegetables for a few more minutes until the tomato paste is blended in and begins to brown.

I adapted this bean soup from Pam Anderson’s Perfect Recipes for Having People Over. The mushrooms were my idea and I like using both the cremini and white button ones. You could easily leave out the prosciutto and sausage and substitute vegetable broth for the chicken used here and have a meal perfectly suited for a vegetarian guest.

White Beans & Sausage Soup

Adapted from Perfect Recipes for Having People Over by Pam Anderson
Printable recipe

Olive oil

¾ pound of mild Italian sausage (or up to 1 ½ pounds as in the original recipe)

2 ounces thinly sliced prosciutto, minced

2 medium onions, cut into medium dice

2 medium carrots, peeled & cut into medium dice

2 medium celery stalks, cut into medium dice

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 teaspoon dried thyme

1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary

8 ounces sliced white button mushrooms

8 ounces sliced cremini (baby bella) mushrooms

1 quart chicken broth

3 16-ounce cans cannelloni or great northern white beans

Freshly grated Parmesan cheese for garnish

Remove sausage from its casings, crumble the meat (discard casings) and sauté in a ten inch non-stick skillet in a tiny bit of olive oil until nicely browned and fully cooked. Set sausage aside and wipe out the skillet.

Add about two tablespoons of olive oil to the skillet and sauté the prosciutto, onions, carrots and celery over high heat about three or four minutes until they begin to soften. Season with salt and pepper, turn the heat to low and continue to sauté until they are nicely browned, about ten minutes. Add the thyme, rosemary and tomato paste and cook for a couple of minutes, then remove the vegetables and set aside with the sausage.

Sauté the mushrooms in olive oil until nicely browned, seasoning with salt and pepper about half way through. Remove the mushrooms and set aside with the sausage and vegetables.

Smash the beans from one can with a fork, then add it and the remaining whole beans with their liquid to a soup pot along with the broth, vegetables, mushrooms and sausage. Cover, bring to a simmer, then reduce heat to medium-low and continue to simmer, partially covered, to blend the flavors, about 20 minutes. Turn off heat and let sit for 10 minutes for flavors to develop. Return soup to a simmer and serve. Can be made ahead and frozen. Before serving, sprinkle each person’s bowl with freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Makes eight servings.

Spinach salad with oranges and blue cheese

Make lemony vinaigrette by mixing together one part fresh lemon juice to three parts extra virgin olive oil and a dash of Tabasco in a jar with a tight fitting lid and shake well. Toss fresh baby spinach with the vinaigrette and top with fresh orange segments and blue cheese crumbles. Avoid buying pre-crumbled cheese; in my opinion it is dry and crumbling your own is well worth the effort.

This is the property they saw. One is of the pond in the summer and the other is of the barn after a fresh snowfall in the winter. As you can see the grounds were beautiful, but the house was on two levels and all of the rooms were extremely tiny. My husband and I have remodeled a dozen or so houses over the years and this one would be a major challenge.

Join us next time as we visit a local winery, Crane Creek Vineyards in nearby Young Harris, Georgia, and celebrate Pink Saturday.

What to serve house guests for breakfast

This past weekend my husband’s brother and his wife flew down from Long Island and were our house guests. They came to take a look at our beautiful western North Carolina mountains to see if it’s a place they might like to live when they retire. If you watched the news over the weekend, you know that the entire southeast was drenched with rain and flooding. We live about a hundred miles north of Atlanta and within a fifteen minute drive of the northwest Georgia border and about the same distance from eastern Tennessee.

When we woke up Monday morning and watched the news from Chattanooga, the weather was so bad they listed the schools that were open rather than the ones that were closed because there were so many more closed than open. Knowing they didn’t want to miss their flight from Chattanooga that stopped briefly in Atlanta (where there was massive flooding) on the way back to New York, I decided to make something quick that we could eat for breakfast before we left for the airport.

I choose Ina Garten’s Breakfast Fruit Crunch which I adopted from her Barefoot Contessa at Home cookbook. I used purchased granola, but Ina made her own and served her fruit crunch in parfait glasses. Since I didn’t have parfait glasses, I substituted martini glasses. I’ve never eaten granola with pineapple, but I found it quite refreshing. Feel free to substitute different fruit combinations, such as apples, pears, bananas and red grapes in the winter. Peaches or nectarines with blueberries, strawberries and kiwi would also be pretty. This recipe is my favorite breakfast for a guest in a hurry.

Breakfast Fruit Crunch

Adapted from Barefoot Contessa at Home by Ina Garten

8 to 10 strawberries, diced

½ cup blueberries

½ cup raspberries

¼ fresh pineapple, diced

1 teaspoon grated lemon zest

2 cups plain Greek yogurt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 cups purchased granola, preferably flavored with vanilla

Combine the strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, pineapple and lemon zest in a bowl. Add 1 teaspoon cinnamon to the yogurt. If your granola isn’t flavored with vanilla, you might want add a little good vanilla extract, such as Nielsen-Massey’s Madagascar Bourbon, to the yogurt.

In four martini glasses alternately layer half the fruit, then the yogurt and sprinkle with granola. Top with remaining fruit and a few sprinkles of granola and a small dollop of yogurt. If you’re using parfait glasses which Ina used, you’ll be able to have two layers. In that case, alternately layer half the fruit, then half the yogurt and sprinkle with granola. Repeat with the second layer of fruit, yogurt and granola. Serves four.

Printable recipe

Falling in love with Mark Bittman's latest cookbook - Kitchen Express

Award winning cookbook author Mark Bittman has done it again. He’s written another fresh and inspiring new cookbook - Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Express, 404 Inspired Seasonal Dishes You Can Make in 20 Minutes or Less, that has already become one of my current favorites

He’s taken a whole new approach from some of his other best selling cookbooks, such as How To Cook Everything, which has formally written recipes. He writes one paragraph instructions and talks you through the recipe, allowing you to do what you Mother did: add a pinch here and there and taste as you go. Don’t have an ingredient? Substitute what’s in your pantry or throw in some fresh herbs in you have them.

I can hear Mark’s friendly voice talking to me all the way through the book, like a big brother looking over my shoulder, offering suggestions but never in a pushy or bossy way. Perhaps it’s because his voice is so accessible to us on television and the internet. If you’ve ever once heard him talk to Al Roker on the Today Show about how easy it is to stuff a chicken breast, in the New York Times Food Section video when he first introduced his readers to Jim Lehay’s no-knead bread from the Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan in 2006, or trekking around with Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow in the PBS series Spain – On the Road, you’ll know what I mean.

Heather of Girlichef first brought this new cookbook to my attention when she introduced it in her post, Souper Simple Tuna Bean Salad. She prepared the salad and served it, as Mark suggested, over chilled asparagus, but added her own touches including amazing black truffle sea salt. I thought to myself - I’ve made a tuna and bean salad very similar to this for years, but I’ve never thought of serving it on asparagus – what a clever and refreshing twist to an old favorite. And there my love affair began with this cookbook. Thanks Heather. I owe you one.

Here are two of my current favorite recipes, but I assure you my list of recipes to try is already long, starting with sophisticated sounding Seared Pork Paillards with Prunes and Olives and a yummy Tomato, Goat Cheese and Basil Strata. I’ve adapted the following two recipes to suit my taste and pantry.

Cajun-Style Salmon with Mixed Baby Greens

Adapted from Kitchen Express by Mark Bittman

Mix together the following blend of Cajun-style spices (or use a store bought Cajun spice mix): one teaspoon each paprika, coriander, cumin and dried oregano; one-quarter teaspoon each cayenne pepper and cinnamon. Add kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Rub the spice mixture on the top of salmon fillets. Broil, spice side up, skin side down, or until desired doneness. If spice mixture begins to burn, turn the oven to 400 and bake until done. Serve the salmon on a bed of mixed organic baby greens that have been tossed with one part freshly squeezed lemon juice to three parts extra-virgin olive oil and seasoned with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Tuna and Bean Salad on Fresh Asparagus

Adapted from Kitchen Express by Mark Bittman

Whisk together 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice and 1 finely chopped garlic clove in a bowl. Add 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil or 1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary (depending on the season), one 15-ounce can cannellini or great northern beans, drained and rinsed, 2 plum tomatoes, seeds removed, 3 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley and toss together. Gently add one 6-ounce can of solid white tuna in water, drained and flaked or packed in olive oil if you prefer. Serve over freshly cooked asparagus spears.