Beer Can Chicken, a Guest Recipe from Andy

We gave Andy and his family some dried herbs from our garden for Christmas. He coated a chicken with them, refrigerated for 24 hours, and then made this Beer Can Chicken:

We like beer can chicken. It's dead simple, easy to clean up, keeps the chicken moist, entertains Abby... it's a winner. I'd recommend getting one of the can stands; they sell them in kitchen stores or even in the supermarket for like 5 bucks. The stand makes it easy to stabilize the chicken, although I've done it with just the can as well. Any beer works or really anything in a can... I've used Dr. Pepper. Just jam a bunch of your favorite spices in the cavity, drink a little of the beer, jam some more spices in the beer can and poke a few more holes in the top of the can, shove the chicken on so its legs are hanging down, maybe put a little olive oil and spices on the outside, put it on the grill on medium (if it's gas) for about an hour and 15 minutes for a 5 pound bird... a little longer for a larger bird... easy. I take it off the grill with a couple metal spatulas and put it on a big wooden cutting board to rest and cut.

Olive Update

Back in January I posted about curing the olives from our backyard tree. It took a long time, maybe about two months total, but they were delicious. I used this marinade featuring vinegar, garlic, and lemon:

1-1/2 cups white wine vinegar

1 Tablespoon salt dissolved in 2 cups water

1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

3 lemon wedges

2 cloves garlic

Olive oil to cover

Next time I wouldn't cover them with olive oil. They tasted best after a whole month of marinating. I wish I had some left!

Pictures above is our herb garden. Mostly you can see parsley, sage, and rosemary, but maybe there's tarragon squeezed in there. The sage is blooming with purple flowers. Since most things are in their prime now, I plan to dry big batches of each. Sage and tarragon are especially fragrant and palatable when dried.

Winter Summer Pasta

It's mid-December, so all our garden herbs are dead except mint and parsley...so I made pasta with mint and parsley. I do what I can to feel alive during the winter.

Cook very slowly in a big pan until light gold:

• 3 or more cloves garlic, sliced
• Several T olive oil

Add:

• some vermouth
• a can of diced tomatoes
• red chile flakes
  

Cook slowly until flavors blend, but don't let tomatoes get that cooked flavor -- maybe 12 minutes?

Add:

• 1/3 cup ricotta
• a handful of chopped fresh mint
• a handful of chopped fresh parsley
• lots of pepper
• salt

The ricotta should be just enough to make the sauce a little thicker and richer -- it shouldn't be a cream sauce.

Don't put on as much Parmesan cheese as Lawson did above.

Herb

Yesterday at the grocery store a college-age boy was standing in the produce section looking confused. When I smiled at him he stopped me and asked me to help him. "I'm supposed to get parsley and rosemary," he said, "but I don't really know what I'm looking for."

It might have just been a line, but he really did seem confused. I showed him the (hideously expensive) prepackaged rosemary, labeled "Rosemary," and he said "Oh!" and nodded. But when I pointed out the parsley, he furrowed his brow. He reached out for a bunch, then drew his hand back. "This is cilantro right next to it," I said. "Don't get that." He looked at me, then back at the parsley. "Thanks," he said.

When I left the produce area he was -- I kid you not -- holding a bunch of parsley in one hand, staring at it, and scratching the back of his head with the other hand.

I wish I'd asked him what he was making (or who he was shopping for). Maybe he'd been told to get flat-leaf parsley, and they only had curly. Maybe he was high.

At a time when gourmet cooking and food snobbery is pushed on even the unwilling, it was kind of neat to remember that not everybody knows the same things. You and I could tell cilantro from parsley at fifty paces. That kid could not. So what? I wish I could make him dinner.

Easiest Frittata

The oven is still broken. So I made a frittata out of a potato, an onion, rosemary, parsley, oregano, and four eggs. And lots of pepper.

I cooked the cubed potatoes separately in the microwave to soften them before browning them with the onions.

I usually use the broiler to brown the top, but with no oven, I had to flip the entire frittata to cook the other side. It worked, miraculously.

We ate it with some of Lawson's habanero-carrot salsa. He made a new batch this past week.

Vegetable-Herb Soup

Especially with the oven broken, this October is definitely soup season.

I made sweet potato-peanut stew over couscous earlier in the week.

Another night, I stewed some chicken legs with New Mexican red chiles (soaked in water then pureed), tomatoes, beer, cinnamon, cumin, and nutmeg; we ate that with homemade flour tortillas.

And recently I made a simple vegetable soup from leeks, potatoes, carrots, garlic, white beans, and a small bit of bacon. Fresh rosemary and thyme and bay leaves made it smell big and herby. And because we had some leftover pesto, I put a small mound of that on the soup to stir in, pistou-style.

The soup was actually a little better the next day, minus the pesto.

I want my oven back. But for tonight we have seeded sourdough bread from Heather's Artisan Bakery, and I will make another soup to go with it. Something containing collard greens, I think.

Summertime Noodle Bowls

I think Lawson has made versions of this dish for you and Dad a few times. We made it a few weeks ago; now, looking back, I realize it was the last meal of summer. We had a cold snap...temperatures have dropped into the 30s at night...and while it's clear and beautiful here, it's definitely no longer the season for grilled shrimp and cooling rice noodles and bowls full of fresh herbs.

There are a few consistent ingredients in this dish; the rest depends on what you have around:

• rice vermicelli, soaked and then briefly boiled and rinsed
  
• leafy things: a mixture of fresh herbs and lettuces, especially Thai basil, mint, and cilantro
• crunchy things: bean sprouts, red peppers, sweet onions, and/or cucumbers, attractively cut
• meat and/or tofu, cooked some delicious way
• raw peanuts, chopped
• a sauce made of equal parts lime juice and fish sauce to pour liberally over everything

We just prepare everything and layer it in bowls. Lawson makes a big batch of the sauce in an old vinegar bottle and puts it on the table.

This particular time I bought some local shrimp and Lawson marinated them briefly in lime juice, lemongrass, and some other stuff. We grilled them with the shells on -- something I LOVE but which is not worth it unless the shrimp are really fresh and pretty. Lawson removes the slightly charred shells but I eat the whole shrimp, shell and all.

Gluten-Free Adventures

Here's a picture of Mock Rye Bread--actually I did put a little rye flour in there--it was flavorful but more like cake than bread. Fine for toast, bad for a sandwich. I found that my Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook by Beth Hensperger had a whole chapter on gluten-free breads.

Tonight I made Quinoa Tabulli, quite a success. Dad provided parsley and green onions from the garden.

Herbs, Food, etc.

Here is Dad's herb garden at the beginning of our spring--rosemary, lemon grass, thyme, cilantro, parsley, and some assorted greens in the tubs.
Tonight we had ahi burgers, quinoa salad, and Dad-grown Swiss chard with cumin and tomatoes. Everything contained one or more fresh herbs--I'm grateful.

We are experimenting with a wheat-free diet for a while. It certainly encourages us to eat quinoa and other things instead of the bread we lazily eat at most meals. Mexican cuisine is perfect in that way, because corn and beans are the common starches--except for the North where flour tortillas are more popular.

I made your southern cornbread this week and it was great.

Roasted Tomato Soup with Rice

This is roasted tomato soup, another recent recipeless creation. With a sunny side up egg on top, it made for a light but complete meal.

I destemmed about 12 tomatoes and squeezed the seeds out into the compost bucket. I then roasted them under the broiler, holes down, until they got blackened and juicy. Meanwhile I sauteed a Vidalia onion, then added the tomatoes and their juices, some chicken stock, some fresh basil, bay leaf, salt, and pepper. After it was heated and the flavors had mingled, I pureed it in the blender, then added some big basil leaves. I added cooked white rice to each bowl and put an egg on top.

The soup would have been better with some more interesting, less classic spices. Basil was fine and summery, but I think cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder, and cilantro would be good, especially with the rice and egg.

It continues to be unbearably, record-breakingly hot here. The last night my parents were here we made a vaguely herby-noodly Vietnamese dish, another infinitely adaptable Lawson specialty: cold rice noodles, grilled scallops, mint, cilantro, Thai basil, red onion, cucumber, and red pepper, all sliced in a bowl and dressed with fish sauce, cider vinegar, and chopped peanuts. We passed the fresh herbs around on a big plate and drank a lot of wine.

Project Spice Purge

Last weekend I decided it was time to do something about this:


When I moved in several years ago, Lawson and I combined our rather large and old spice collections without any weeding whatsoever, and it's gotten pretty ugly. So I took everything out of the racks and cabinets and hauled it out on the back porch. There I arranged everything on the railings, with each type of spice arranged along the x axis and duplicates on the y. We had about 14 horizontal feet of spices, with the highest redundant tower at about 16 inches. Alphabetical arrangement wouldn't have worked at this point, so I used a rough taxonomy: seeds/pods, leaves, blends, things we have a kajillion of, bad ideas, unidentifiable, etc.

Here's part of the kajillion sector:

That's four containers of baking powder (not an herb or spice, but whatever), four containers of paprika, two of nutmeg, three of cream of tartar, and three of ground ginger.

And here is the grossest thing I found:

After I had it all arranged, I began sniffing, tasting, and throwing things away. In most cases I tried to get us down to one of each thing, unless that thing was garlic powder or lemon pepper, in which case we needed to get down to none, and not just because the ones we had were nine years old and rancid (and contributed by me, I'm sorry to say). For some items, like dried basil, everything we had smelled and tasted like dusty dirt, so I kept a list of what we needed to restock from the bulk herbs at the health food store.

The price of the average herb has increased tenfold since Lawson purchased this dill seed:

It took a few hours, but I managed to get it all cleaned out. Unfortunately, it doesn't look a whole lot better in the cabinet than it did before.

When I was done, I made lentils with garlic, mustard seed, and cilantro; and a vegetable curry with sweet potatoes, corn, and okra:

Kuku

These are paperwhites that I forced from bulbs Nancy gave us for Christmas.
I made a Persian kuku today. It’s like a frittata or omelette, except that it’s baked and surprisingly light and fluffy.

The version I made, from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden, is the traditional dish served on Iranian New Year’s Day. It had shredded spinach, green onions, two handfuls of fresh herbs (I used dill, parsley, and cilantro), and a few walnuts and raisins, all lightly mixed with six eggs and baked for 45 minutes. I will definitely be making this again, especially for a picnic or cold lunch.

We had the kuku for dinner tonight along with baba ganoush, Ak-Mak, olives, feta chunks, Greek yogurt, and cherry tomatoes—a light Sunday night supper.

I have a recipe for cauliflower kuku that I’m planning to try next.