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Za’atar Roast Chicken

03.21.2015 by J. Doe // 1 Comment

So many food blogs seem to have a theme: Baking, healthy eating, gluten-free, paleo, food on a budget. And then there’s this blog: Dating, divorce, and what I cooked when I discovered I’d bought too much of something. Though the three elements don’t seem to add up to a unified theme, they actually do.

This is what someone did when things didn’t go as expected – in life, and in the kitchen.

A while back, I made Yotam Ottolenghi’s Slow-Cooked Chick Peas on Toast recipe, which called for za’atar, something I’d never heard of and certainly didn’t have.  It wasn’t at my usual supermarket, either.  To avoid a lengthy hunt, I ordered it from Amazon. If I’d found it in a store, I probably would have grabbed whatever jar had the prettiest label or the best price relative to the other jars on the shelf. Online shopping is a little different, though: It’s all about price plus shipping cost, and more to the point, getting the purchase to the point where there is no shipping cost. This usually entails getting the price of the item above a certain amount; once that happens, you can kick back and say, instead of paying for shipping, I got more stuff.

This is how I ended up with a pound of za’atar, when what I needed was a pinch of za’atar, for a recipe that I ended up omitting za’atar from anyway.

If I made Slow-Roasted Chick Peas on Toast every day for a year, even if I used a generous pinch of za’atar, I’m pretty sure I would still have too much.

I saw a recipe in another Ottolenghi cookbook for Roast Chicken with Za’atar, which sounds awfully good, but that recipe also calls for sumac, and given my current za’atar predicament, I’m reluctant to add another jar of infrequently used spice to my collection. Then I located a recipe on Sunset that sounded good, didn’t require any additional trips to the store, and as an added bonus, called for a full quarter-cup of za’atar.

Suddenly, there’s a chance that all this za’atar will get used, rather than expire in my pantry. I’m in.

I almost walked away from the recipe: Users who left ratings gave it a whopping one star our of five – an inauspicious sign. When I read the reviews, though, it turned out there was only one, left by someone  who had clearly not read the recipe. The complaint was this: if you cook the chicken at 475 degrees as directed, the coating would scorch and smell up your house.

I don’t disagree. The oil would smoke and smell foul if you did it that way, a fact the recipe author also notes when directing the user to roast the chicken at 400 degrees if it is coated with the oil-and-spice mixture.

Armed with this knowledge, I tried the recipe, and it worked.

In fact, it didn’t just work – it was delicious, and made my house smell like yum. I ended up cooking the bird a bit longer than called for – about an hour and a half – due to its large size. I also turned it over a couple of times during the roasting, to let the skin get crispy all over and help the bird stay moist (it’s a technique I learned from an Alice Waters recipe that always results in a delicious chicken).

I tossed in some potatoes towards the end, and let them soak up all the delicious accumulated juices.

Superb.

I hope to find some more ways to use up the za’atar, but if I end up making this chicken a dozen more times, it won’t be a hardship.

Zaatar Roast Chicken

Za'atar Roast Chicken
 
Print
Author: adapted from Sunset Magazine
Ingredients
  • ¼ cup zaatar
  • 2½ tbsp olive oil
  • 2½ tbsp lemon juice
  • 2½ tsp minced garlic
  • ¾ tsp pepper
  • 1 tsp salt
  • A roasting chicken
Instructions
  1. Whisk together zaatar, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper.
  2. Rinse chicken and pat dry. Smear the paste all over the outside of the chicken, and under the skin where you can. Use it all up! Let chicken sit at room temperature for a half hour.
  3. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
  4. Roast chicken uncovered, breast side up, for 20 minutes, then flip it over so the breast side is down for the next 20 minutes. Then flip chicken a final time, so that the breast side is up again. Roast until the skin is crispy and the bird registers 160 on a thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast.
  5. Let chicken stand 10-15 minutes, then carve and serve.
Notes
I used a 5-lb chicken for this recipe, roasted for 1.5 hours. For the last half hour, I added small yellow potatoes to the pan, which absorbed some of the spices and juices as they roasted.
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Categories // The Joy of Cooking Tags // chicken, meat, za'atar

Laurie Colwin’s Mustard Baked Chicken

01.03.2015 by J. Doe // 1 Comment

The first year I attempted gardening was the year I knew, for sure, that I could continue living in my house. The Brazilian man who mows my lawn built two large raised beds, that I joyfully filled with an assortment of nursery plants that did not grow. I planted them too close together, or too early or late in the season, or over- or under-watered them, depending which website I read and which day of the week I read it on.

I learned quite a bit that year, mostly this: It doesn’t matter what website you read or how often you water or what fertilizer you use if the actual problem is slugs.

The second year, I started plants from seedlings, carefully applied slug repellant, discovered the wonders of Neem oil spray, and followed the planting schedule recommended by Seattle Tilth. I  managed to grow even less than the first year, a feat I would not have thought possible. Sections of the beds often seemed to be dry, in spite of regular waterings, and I noticed there seemed to be fewer earthworms, but I could not account for it until I finally removed some despairing pea plants, but could not seem to remove their roots.

No matter how much I dug and pulled, there were more roots, fighting me tenaciously to remain in the raised bed, next to my melancholy zucchini.

I dug in other areas of the beds, and there were roots there, too: tangled masses of them in bone dry soil.

Then I looked a bit to the side, just past the fence, at the three large emerald greens that hide my windows from the street. They don’t know where the fence line is, or at least, their roots don’t – they are growing right up into my beds.

I showed the gardener and he was as surprised as I was, and when he had a day in the fall, he came and trimmed the emerald greens back. This past week, he stopped by again one quiet day, and carefully dug out all of the dirt and roots from the beds, and lay down a barrier, and refilled the boxes.

Gardening doesn’t seem like it should be that hard, and I do have evidence that it isn’t, really. Last summer,  I had the gardener put in an extra garden bed, just for The Child. We put it in an unused spot on the far side of the house, where it was filled with one rhubarb plant for me and several strawberry plants for her, and left it mostly untended. She rejoiced in bowls of fresh juicy berries, and I delighted in big, tart, unnervingly green stalks of rhubarb.

If you get the basic mix right, you can be successful with very little work involved.

I’ve only managed to apply this rule successfully in one other area of endeavor: the kitchen. I received a review copy of Laurie Colwin’s book Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, which is a delight to read, filled as it is with stories of kitchen disasters and unnerving dinner party offerings (Starry-Gazey Pie, anyone?). I’ve run across Colwin’s name and recipes before, and searched her out – I wanted more.

I discovered, with much sadness, that she died in 1992, at the absurdly young age of 48. I felt like I had lost a friend, and one I’d only just met, at that – the writing is so fresh and effortless, it feels like it could have been written yesterday, in an email, to me and a few other close friends.

Her recipes are a little unnerving for those of us who are in the measure-and-follow-directions cooking crowd: Scarcely paragraphs of instructions, with ingredients listed as you go, and sometimes with no specific quantities. She promises things will work, and since she seems like someone I should trust, I decide to give it a shot with her recipe for Mustard Baked Chicken.

Okay, I looked around the internet for some approximate quantities, which I’ve included below. Who am I kidding? I measure; it’s who I am.

That said, I don’t think I’d need to measure this recipe out a second time, and it’s a recipe I’d definitely make a second time, and a third, and so on. It’s comically easy – mix together some mustard, thyme, and garlic, roll the chicken pieces in it (I used thighs since that’s what I had), and then roll the mustard-coated chicken in bread crumbs or panko.

Then toss it in the oven and ignore it for a good long time. Two hours or more.

Really.

The chicken isn’t dry or burned at the end of all this baking; rather, it is delicious and moist, encased in a flavorful crisp, crisp, crisp and mustardy crust. It’s perfect for a Sunday afternoon, or any time you have time to cook something for a long, but untended, time.

Success, with almost no effort.

The chicken is good for lunch the next day, not as crisp but definitely still tasty.

 

Laurie Colwin's Baked Mustard Chicken

 

Laurie Colwin's Mustard Baked Chicken
 
Print
Prep time
10 mins
Cook time
2 hours
Total time
2 hours 10 mins
 
Author: adapted from Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking
Serves: 4
Ingredients
  • ¾ cup Dijon mustard
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1 tbsp fresh thyme (or 1 tsp dried)
  • ¼ tsp ground cinnamon
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1 cup panko crumbs
  • 4 chicken thighs
  • 3 tablespoons butter
Instructions
  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.
  2. Combine mustard, garlic, thyme, cinnamon, a pinch of salt and ½ tsp black pepper, in a bowl. Place panko crumbs in another bowl.
  3. Working in batches, coat chicken thighs on all sides with mustard mixture, then coat completely with bread crumbs. Arrange in a single layer in a large, shallow baking pan. Dot with butter.
  4. Bake until crust is deep golden brown and crispy, about 2 hours. Serve hot or at room temperature.
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Categories // The Joy of Cooking Tags // chicken, meat, mustard

Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuanese Chopped Celery with Beef

09.10.2014 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

After I made Big Sur Bakery’s Baked Beans, I had a problem: I had bought a whole head of celery, and used one stalk, leaving me with, well, a lot of celery. I know, I could put peanut butter on it, or even peanut butter and raisins, and try to pass it off as a healthy snack, but since the advent of the vegetable crisper – the thing that forces us to look at all that unused celery and feel guilty for not eating it when we know we should – has anyone, ever, been fooled into actually wanting to eat one?

Fortunately, I ran across a blog post some time ago on The Wednesday Chef, in which she mentioned a recipe that solves  the what-to-do-with-the-rest-of-the-celery dilemma, and even more fortunately, I remembered the post and was able to find it after I got tired of feeling Celery Guilt every time I opened the crisper.

It took a while to find a couple of the ingredients on the list (the vinegar and the chili paste) – there were items that seemed to fit the bill at my local grocery, but since the blog post said that these two specialty items were, in fact, quite cheap, I passed on my store’s $12 vinegar and $8 chili paste, and made a special trip to our local Asian market, where I found both items for $3, and, feeling proud of my culinary bargain-hunting prowess, tossed in a package of Matcha Kit-Kats for The Child (which she loved) and then went to the liquor store next door and stocked up on Belgian beer for me (which I loved).

Not only does this recipe use up leftover celery, it used up exactly what remained of my celery head, minus the one stalk I bought it for (for use in the beans). If that weren’t enough, the recipe is startlingly easy to make – startling because each time I’ve tried to make actual Chinese food at home, it either doesn’t taste as good as restaurant Chinese, or it involves complex preparations or obscure ingredients or both, and I generally end the meal wishing I’d simply gone with takeout.

Though the recipe begins with two seemingly involved steps – blanching and de-stringing celery – blanching takes all of 30 seconds, and I learned a handy trick for de-stringing celery: simply run a vegetable peeler on the outside of the stalk. You might have known that one already, but I picked it up from The Kitchen Chick’s post about this recipe. Everything else is pretty straightforward: dice the celery, cook the ground beef, and toss everything else in. Have the rice cooked (or nearly so) when you start the beef, because it all cooks up very quickly.

I’m not sure I need to say it, but just in case you were in doubt: I adored this recipe. It’s quick and simple to prepare, tasty, serves two precisely. The flavors are pure, very authentic Chinese, with a nice spice that you can adjust to your taste.

Did I mention The Child loved it? To my amazement, she did, even though I followed the recipe precisely and it was fairly spicy as a result. The spiciness didn’t bother her at all: She declared it was a nice spicy, not a burning spicy.

The recipe is originally from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice, which is on hold for me at the library as I sit here typing. I used the directions from The Kitchen Chick’s blog post.

 

Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuanese Chopped Celery with Beef

 

Sichuanese Chopped Celery with Beef
 
Print
Author: Fuchsia Dunlop, Every Grain of Rice
Serves: 2
Ingredients
  • 11 oz celery
  • 3 tbsp neutral cooking oil
  • 4 oz ground beef
  • 1½ tbsp Sichuan chili bean paste
  • 1½ tbsp finely chopped ginger
  • light soy sauce to taste
  • 1 tsp Chinkiang vinegar (brown rice vinegar)
Instructions
  1. Boil a pot of water for blanching the celery.
  2. De-string the celery by running a vegetable peeler along the outer side. Dice celery into ⅜ pieces. Blanch celery in boiling water for about 30 seconds; drain.
  3. Heat oil in a large pan or seasoned wok over high flame. Add ground meat and stir-fry until cooked. Break up pieces as needed.
  4. Add chili bean paste and stir-fry a bit more until fragrant and the oil is red. Add ginger and stir-fry for a few seconds. Add celery.
  5. Stir-fry until celery is hot but still crunchy. As you cook, season with a bit of soy sauce to taste. Stir in vinegar.
  6. Serve with rice.
Notes
This dish cooks quickly, so don't begin stir-frying until your rice has finished cooking.
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Categories // The Joy of Cooking Tags // celery, ginger, ground beef, meat

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