Pasta with Broccoli, sun dried tomatoes and mushrooms

Here is a simple gluten free dish to warm you up on a brisk fall day.

It is pasta with Broccoli, sun dried tomatoes and mushrooms.

This very simple to prepare. You need

2 heads of broccoli
10 cloves of garlic
2  boxes of mushrooms
1 jar of sun dried tomatoes
1 box of gluten free macaroni
   olive oil

Chop up the garlic and put half of it in some oil in a frying pan. Clean and cut the broccoli so the florets are not too big. Saute the garlic until soft and enjoy the delicious smell of garlic in the morning, it smells lick victory. Put in the broccoli and cook until crispy. Take out of pan and reserve.

Put the rest of the garlic in some more oil and then put in the mushrooms that you have sliced thinly. Saute until they are cooked but drain the moisture that the mushrooms throw off. Then throw in the sun dried tomatoes. Now if you are using tomatoes that were in oil you will have a lot more liquid and enhanced flavor. For a "cleaner" less oily taste get sun dried tomatoes that are sold loose and dry. After the mushrooms are done add the broccoli and get everything nice and hot.

Serve over gluten free pasta. I prefer brown riced based pasta but it is up to you.

Simple. Gluten free. Delicious. Enjoy.

I am almost there!

I am almost half way through my goal of getting 1,000 Instagram followers. Currently I am at 469 and growing. Pretty good for a couple of months work.

Mostly I post cooking, gardening and tarot card photos. Each brings its own following. In addition I follow a bunch of conservative sites and they then follow me.

Here is a video that was popular. I made my Mexican chicken which is a recreation of a dish I used to get at Mezcal's on Court Street.

I simply dice up four chicken breasts. Saute them in olive oil and garlic. Then I thinly slice and shred three or four Chorizo sausages in put them in the pan. That sheds a great deal of oil and liquid that coats the chicken. Then I add a veggie that I had previously prepared. Sometimes peas. This time Trader Joe's peppers and onions. I add a couple more onions to beef it up. Mess it all around to coat all of the stuff in Chorizo juice. Mix in some brown rice. Looks like this when it is done.

My recipes are never as precise or informative as Chip's stuff. I found that out when I had to send my granddaughter some when she went to college. I generally just throw a little of this and a little of that and make a busta chote out of it. I don't need no stinking measurements or listing of ingredients. I just know what shit to throw in it to make it taste good. Waddayagonnado?

They seem to be popular on Instagram though.

Is barbecuing a guy thing?

30 Minute BBQ Recipes

East Side New York Half-Sour Pickles

From Eat, Enjoy! The 101 Best Jewish Recipes in America:

30 -35 small kirby cucumbers
2 quarts water
1/2 cup salt
3 ounces pickling spices
3 garlic cloves, smashed

Directions:
1 Fill a 1-gallon jar with cucumbers; set aside.
2 In a separate container, mix together water, salt, pickling spices, and garlic.
3 Pour over cucumbers and then cover with waxed paper to keep cucumbers in the solution.
4 Leave out for 2 weeks without refrigeration!

Food.com

h/t Michael Haz

Haz's description, "Half sour pickles are fermented rather than cooked like most other pickles. The flavor is quite a bit different that a regular pickle," is intriguing. The above link was provided by him.

It reminds me of my grama's sauer kraut which was mild yet yummy. She once wrote down the recipe for me, which was basically, pack a jar tightly with shredded cabbage, add one-half teaspoon salt on top, close jar (can't remember if it was tightly or loosely; probably loosely). I can't remember the waiting time, but whenever I came across it, I was like, 'that's it? No boiling?' I had that recipe a long time, but recently did not find it when going through my recipe box. It's probably still there, I just missed it. 

I have both of my late grandmothers' recipe collections. They look, similar. Jumbled stacks of recipe cards, variously-sized pieces of paper with recipes written by them or others, recipes torn from boxes, recipe pamphlets from food companies. 

Note to Self

Self, when making krumkake do not touch the base of the krumkake iron with your bare fingers.

What I was making:

Recipe:

3 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 tsp vanilla, or almond, or lemon, or cardamom
1/2 cup flour

Do the usual stuff with the butter and sugar, flour and eggs, and flavoring.
Cook a teaspoon at a time on a krumkake iron over low-ish heat until they are golden.  Roll onto a tapered dowel while hot.  Slide off the dowel.  Sprinkle with powdered sugar if you must.

Devils On Horseback

Detail of medieval stained glass from Sainte-Chapelle de Paris,
now at the Musée National du Moyen Âge, Paris

No, no, not that kind of Devil on horseback! These:

... wonderful little savory-salty-sweet-smoky hors d'oeuvres that go great with cocktails, as party tidbits or as appetizers. They're often only prunes (or dates) wrapped in bacon, but I got the idea (from Jennifer Paterson) to stuff in a bit of chicken liver which I think makes them more interesting. I've no idea why they're called Devils on Horseback— there's another, similar dish called Angels on Horseback, which is an oyster wrapped in bacon, skewered and cooked. If you wish to be gastronomically and religiously ecumenical, you could serve both culinary equestrians, Godly and Satanic, together.

Devils On Horseback

Ingredients:

• chicken livers
• about 2 tablespoons butter
• Cayenne pepper
• salt
• medium-size pitted prunes
• about 2 cups Sercial or Rainwater Madeira, Tawny Port, or brewed black tea
• good-quality sliced smoked bacon
• toothpicks or small wooden or bamboo skewers
• A baking tray, lined with aluminum foil for convenience

Soak the prunes in the Madeira, Port or tea for at least an hour, or up to 24 hours, then drain and dry the prunes slightly with paper towels. If you've used Madeira or Port, don't throw it away after the soak— drink it! The pruny nuance is delicious.

About 30 minutes before you plan to cook the Devils, put the toothpicks or skewers in a little bowl of water to soak; this helps prevent them burning in the oven.

Preheat oven to 450º F.

Trim the chicken livers, removing any membrane that's still attached, then dry them with paper towels. Melt the butter in a sauté pan over medium high heat. Gently sauté the livers on both sides for a few minutes. Do not overcook. The livers should be firmed but still quite pink inside; overcooked livers are crumbly, dry and terrible to eat. Remove the cooked livers to a cutting board and slice them into pieces that will fit inside a prune. Sprinkle the liver pieces with the Cayenne pepper and a little salt.

Take a soaked prune and stuff it with a piece of liver. Flatten out a piece of bacon and cut it in half, then roll one of the halves firmly 'round the stuffed prune. Pierce the whole thing with one of the soaked toothpicks, then place it on the baking tray. Repeat this process until all the prunes are stuffed, wrapped and pierced and placed on the tray, about 1.5 inches apart.

Put the baking tray into the preheated oven and cook for about 7-9 minutes, then carefully flip each Devil over using tongs. Place the tray back into the oven for about another 7-9 minutes, until the bacon is cooked, crisped and a bit browned.

Serve hot.

Scotch Eggs

I first tasted Scotch eggs, I'm a bit ashamed to admit, at a Renaissance fair(e) when I was a teenager in the early 1990s. I recall that the eggs were better than the turkey leg(ges), but when your strongest memory of the time is of wearing robes and arguing with a community theater actor portraying Sir Francis Walsingham about why there is so much medievalism at a purported "Renaissance" fair(e), it's perhaps best to discount any recollection of culinary opinion.

Since that dim and distant time, I've eaten Scotch eggs in the UK and the US, freshly- (and not-so-freshly) made. Like many a simple dish, this one is frequently ruined by poor ingredients and careless preparation: rubbery eggs with greenish-grey haloes 'round chalky yolks — grainy, overcooked sausage meat — boxed breadcrumbs — a poverty of spices… all rolled together and dropped like a stone into the murky, rancid depths of a deep fat fryer. I suppose that the reason people are so forgiving of these gastronomic atrocities is because they're often quite intoxicated when they order and eat bad Scotch eggs— the "beer goggles" phenomenon seems to occur when drunkenly choosing food as often as it does when drunkenly choosing sex partners. What appears a succulent, flavorful and appetizing morsel in the dim light of the bar does not always seem so fresh in the harsh light of the morning.

Of course, Scotch eggs can be a delicious dish— whether they're served with drinks, or at a picnic, or for breakfast or lunch— what's important is to use the best ingredients you can find and to prepare the dish carefully. Here's my recipe:

Ingredients:

• 10 extra-large eggs
• 1 pound loose sausage meat
• 2.5 cups fresh breadcrumbs (see procedure below)
• 6 anchovy fillets, minced
• 1 tbsp Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 tsp freshly-ground black pepper
• salt to taste (about 2 tsp)
• about 1/2 cup clarified butter and/or meat drippings, or peanut oil

Equipment:

• A saucepan with a tight-fitting lid
• A large bowl filled with cold water and ice cubes
• A large mixing bowl
• A sauté or frying pan with steep sides.

Beat two of the eggs in a bowl and set aside.

To perfectly cook the remaining 8 eggs: Take each egg and, using a pushpin, thumbtack or straight pin, pierce a small hole in the larger end of the egg; this prevents the eggs from cracking when they're cooked. Gently place the eggs into the saucepan and cover them (by about an inch) with cool water. Set the pan on the stove and bring the water to a boil, then immediately cover the pan and remove it from the heat. Let the eggs sit in the covered pan for exactly 10 minutes, then drain out the hot water. Swish or bounce the eggs around in the empty pan until they're all cracked, then drop them into the bowl of ice water. Allow the eggs to stand in the ice water until they're thoroughly chilled (about 10-15 minutes) then carefully peel the eggs under running tap water. Peeling eggs is hit-or-miss; very fresh eggs don't peel as well as do slightly older eggs... but if they're too old, they'll be misshapen due to the expanding of the air space in the shell. Don't despair if the whites of some of the eggs get a bit shredded, this recipe doesn't require perfectly-peeled cooked eggs with flawless surfaces.

You must use fresh breadcrumbs in this recipe. If you've never made them before, here's the procedure: cut a loaf of good, close-grained white bread (such as my pain de mie) into medium-thick slices and put them onto a tray or baking sheet into in a 250º F oven for about 20 minutes, until they're dry-ish but not browned. Break up the slices a bit, then whizz them in a food processor or blender until they're medium-finely ground, with no greatly outsized chunks of bread left.

Put the sausage meat into the large mixing bowl, then add 2 cups of the breadcrumbs, about three-quarters of the beaten eggs, the minced anchovy fillets, the Worcestershire sauce, the ground spices and the salt & pepper. Mix everything up very thoroughly with your impeccably-clean hands.

Take a peeled, cooked egg and dip it into the remaining bit of beaten egg, then form some of the meat mixture (about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of meat per egg) around it, so that the cooked egg is completely covered with a tight layer of meat of an even thickness. This takes a bit of practice but you'll get the hang of it. Repeat the process until all of your cooked eggs are encased in the meat mixture. Set each onto a plate as you finish preparing them.

Heat the clarified butter/drippings/oil in the sauté pan over medium high heat. Roll each meat-encased egg in the remaining 1/2 cup of breadcrumbs and then put it into the sauté pan. Don't crowd the pan— depending upon the size of your pan, you may need to do this in two batches. Gently fry the Scotch eggs on all sides, until each is a uniform brown color; this will take about 8-10 minutes per batch. Sprinkle the cooked eggs with a little kosher salt.

Serve the eggs warm or cold, on a plate or wrapped in a napkin, accompanied perhaps by good mustard, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, or even a good meat gravy. And, of course, a nice strong drink.

A Pleasant Sallet: Celery Rémoulade

Celery Rémoulade, also known as céleri-rave rémoulade or celeriac salad, is a delicious and simple salad made from a julienne of celeriac. Celeriac, also (incorrectly) known as celery root, is a brownish, lumpy, tuberous-looking thing, about the size of a large turnip, that has ivory-colored flesh with a mild celery flavor that’s a bit like a cross between a potato and celery. Although called a root, it’s actually the hypocotyl storage organ of a variety of celery, Apium graveolens var. rapaceum; ordinary celery is Apium graveolens var. dulce.

It took me a while to locate celery in European culinary history, since it was barely eaten at all in much of Europe until the late 17th century, and it wasn’t called celery, but elioselinon (a transliteration of its Greek name), marsh parsley (it is in the same botanical family, Apiaceae, as parsley), and smallage, which seems to be the most common English name for celery before the word celery came along. Celery, by one or another of its names, appears in various European herbals and botanical books from the 16th century on. It doesn’t seem to have been very highly regarded by early writers, with various sources calling it bitter and strong in flavor.

From Botanologia, the English herbal
by William Salmon, 1710

William Salmon, one such early botanical writer, was a mysterious self-taught surgeon, astrologer and general dilettante who wrote and/or plagiarized a number of books in the 17th- and early 18th centuries. I own a 17th century copy of one of his books, entitled Polygraphice, which is nominally a manual of drawing, painting, and the visual arts, but which also explores such divers subjects as chiromancy, perfumery, cosmetics and transmuting mercury into purest gold. Salmon also published an extensive illustrated herbal in 1710 in which smallage is described. Interestingly, Salmon includes a recipe for preparing a celery root salad:

The Sallet of the Whited Stalks and Roots. They are cut or sliced and eaten with Salt, Vinegar and Oil, raw, they make a pleasant Sallet, are grateful to the Palate and Taste, strengthen the Stomach, and cause a good Appetite and Digestion.

Primordial Soup

Our always-brilliant friend El Pollo Raylan wrote in his most recent post:

Lastly, Lem posted an intriguing story about life on other planets. I think the unspoken question is, "but did they have the spark of life?"  I'm not being creationist here. The famous Miller-Urey Experiment was anything but that.

This reminded me of one of my most favorite little digressions from one of my favorite people, the great writer, cook and personality Julia Child. This video, produced for a 1970's exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum called "Life in the Universe", features Child cooking up Miller & Urey's (and Cyril Ponnamperuma's) recipe for Primordial Soup.

Kasha Varnishkes

Kasha Varnishkes is an Ashkenazi Jewish recipe that originated in Eastern Europe. Kasha, in case you're not familiar with it, is buckwheat. Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) is a plant, related to rhubarb & sorrel, whose fruit is used as a food. Even though buckwheat fruit is not an actual cereal grain, it is dried and hulled in the same manner as cereal grains such as wheat (to which buckwheat is unrelated) and rye. The product of this hulling process is called buckwheat groats (no, not the medieval coin groat), or kasha. Kasha can be cooked to make a porridge, just like cereal groats; it's very hearty and healthy and since it's not a grain, is a good fiber-rich, gluten-free food. It has a unique, slightly bitter flavor, like other related plants, and a very chewy texture so you might need to get used to it. Kasha is also a common filling for knishes.

Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum)

Kasha varnishkes was originally little kasha-stuffed dumplings, sort of like Yiddishe ravioli, but since the early 20th century it's usually a blend of kasha and Farfalle pasta. The dish is easy to make, the ingredients can be found in most grocery stores— look for kasha in the "Kosher" or "International Foods" aisle of your supermarket; the most common brand is Wolff's, which comes in a small black and gold box that you can see in the pictures accompanying this recipe. Get the "medium" texture kasha.

First off, you need schmaltz to make this recipe properly. Schmaltz is simply rendered chicken fat. If you live in a town with a good Jewish deli or store, you can buy a container of schmaltz, but it's very easy to make. Click "Read more" below for the technique & the recipe for Kasha Varnishkes.

Mayonnaise!

Mayonnaise is one of the things that makes our life on earth worth every hardship. Here is my absolutely foolproof, easy and delicious recipe for mayonnaise. All it takes is about 5 minutes and a food processor, and the result is far, far better tasting than anything you can buy bottled.

Use a light-tasting oil; oils such as extra-virgin olive or peanut have too strong a flavor for mayonnaise. I think the some of the best oils to use are grape seed oil, light-flavored olive oil (this kind of olive oil is usually labelled as "light tasting", "pure", or pomace), sunflower oil and safflower oil, but any neutral or light-flavored vegetable oil will do in a pinch.

You may use all lemon juice, all wine wine vinegar, or any combination of the two; it's a matter of taste. I prefer a 50/50 mixture of both. If you're using vinegar, be sure to use wine vinegar, not cider or distilled white vinegar. I like to use Champagne vinegar, but even store brand white or red wine vinegar produces good results.

I've found that this recipe works best when all the ingredients are at room temperature, especially the eggs and oil. Before you crack the eggs, put them in a bowl of warm water for 5 minutes if they've just come out of the fridge. If, for some reason, you refrigerate your oil, let it warm up to room temperature before proceeding. You may not be able to create an emulsion if you use cold ingredients.

Frightened of raw eggs? Salmonella is very, very rare in good-quality eggs in the US, and the acid pH of mayonnaise, combined with its low water activity, makes it a fairly undesirable environment for pathogens as long as it's kept refrigerated. Try not to worry about it… If you are, however, still worried about it, don't bother making this recipe.

Click "Read more" for the recipe:

A Tomato Summer Pudding

No, not pudding in the American sense, of sugared sludge with the texture and appeal of a vat of vanillin-flavored tile grout, nor in the British sense, of dessert in general. This "pudding" gets its pudding-ness from the fact that it's molded in a dish, and from its relationship to an old-fashioned British dish, Summer Pudding, which is a mélange of fresh berries and sugar poured into a bread-lined basin, weighted, and allowed to amalgamate into a succulent warm-weather treat. 

Jennifer Paterson

Since the original form of Summer Pudding is made from whatever berries are available, it seems reasonable to make it out of tomatoes, which in late summer are a plentiful berry (yes, tomatoes are berries), and therefore transform the old Summer Pudding into a savory dish. This is such a good idea, I wish I had thought of it, but credit for the original concept goes to the late, great Jennifer Paterson, a British cook and eccentric who is most well-known for her participation in the television cooking show Two Fat Ladies. Before her television career, Paterson had worked as a live-in personal cook and caterer. In 1978 she got a job as the house cook, and later the food writer, for the British conservative magazine The Spectator. In the late 1980s, she was fired from her job as The Spectator's cook after a temper tantrum during which Jennifer angrily hurled dirty crockery, which was sullying the tiny top-floor kitchen where she worked, out the window and into the backyard of the neighboring funeral parlor. Fortunately she kept her job as the magazine's food writer.

Paterson had conversational style of writing about food and cooking that would have been quite at home on a blog, and her recipes are an interesting mixture of (pre-WWII) British traditional cooking, with eclectic Mediterranean, Portuguese and Middle Eastern influences. Her food writing for The Spectator is collected in a very good little book called Jennifer Paterson's Feast Days. As the title of the collection suggests, Paterson, a devout Roman Catholic, makes frequent reference to the saints and liturgical celebrations of the Roman Catholic Church in her writing and recipes. Her advice for poached eggs involves first rolling the whole eggs around in a pan of simmering salted water "whilst intoning two Our Fathers and one Hail Mary" before cracking the shells and doing the actual poaching.

Paterson's receipt (as she referred to recipes) for her Tomato Summer Pudding is like many of her recipes, breezy and loose, so I've expanded it a bit here. This dish is a great use for all those delicious tomatoes that you (hopefully) have ripening in your garden right now. Like so many simple dishes, this pudding depends upon good ingredients for its success. Exact quantities of the ingredients you'll need depend upon the size of basin or bowl that you use to mold the dish. When I made the one you see in the accompanying photographs, I used a tall Pyrex bowl with a 6-cup capacity, which required about 10 medium-sized tomatoes to fill.

EBL's Blueberry Pie

Blogger EBL has posted a recipe for blueberry pie with a vodka crust. It looks as tempting as Key Lime Pie. 

Meatzza

El Pollo Raylan requested a recipe for this the other day after I mentioned making it. I threw this little number together after one of my summer hosts asked for a low-carbohydrate, pizza-like concoction. It's of course not a substitute for pizza, but it's good and fun to eat. I usually despise portmanteau words, but I've heard this sort of thing called a "meatzza", which seems apt.

Click "Read More" for the recipe...

To make Catchup to keep twenty Years

A scan of the title page of my late copy
of The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse

In the comments about my previous post, Secret Ingredient: Anchovies, there was interest in Hannah Glasse's recipe for "Catchup to keep twenty Years". I used to be the proud owner of a 1778 copy of Glasse's book The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, but difficult times forced me to sell it earlier this year. Not to worry, as another edition of it is available for free, courtesy of Google.

The Art of Cookery, written by Glasse in 1747, was a huge success and became the standard reference cookbook in England and in the American colonies in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Because the book was published in earlier editions as simply "By a Lady", Hannah Glasse was assumed for many years to be a pseudonym. Her biography was not researched and her authorship of the book was not confirmed until the early 20th century.

Spaghetti Estivi Freddi

Here's my recipe for a delicious summer pasta dish called Spaghetti Estivi Freddi, which means chilled summer spaghetti. It's sort of what we Americans would call a "pasta salad" and thus it's great for a picnic or for eating outdoors on a hot summer evening. It's quite easy to make, though it does require a little planning, as you must prepare the marinated mushrooms ahead of time. As with all simple dishes, success depends upon the quality of your ingredients, so try to get the best and freshest things that you can find. I was able to obtain everything needed for this dish at a rural supermarket so you shouldn't have any trouble. 

A Leg Of Lamb

Gigot d'agneau rôti à la Palladian

'Tis wond'rous strange, that I should be compelled to cook a leg of lamb, at this moment in my life. I lost a lot, a lot has gone wrong for me, with me, and through it all I have done my best to survive. In need of somewhere to sleep during the summer of 2013, I decided that it was only fair that I offer something, or some service, to sheltering friends in return for their kindness (and tolerance). So I decided to cook for my keep.

For these sheltering friends I have cooked meals great and small, familiar and revelatory. Often my cooking depends upon what I can find on offer at the supermarkets in small towns. Recently I decided to cook a special dinner, a feast of gratitude for my hosts, so I went to the local supermarket and searched for inspiration in the meat section. There were a lot of beasts and cuts of beasts available, but none seemed special enough to express my appreciation for my friends' hospitality. There were chickens, a bit too ordinary. Some frozen quail, but not enough. There were some thin, greying steaks with ridiculous prices, and some forlorn frozen turkeys with torn wrappings.

And then I saw, next to the overpriced organic beef and "Hundred Calorie" steaks (which looked to be rounds of beaten beef about the size of a large slice of pepperoni and half as appetizing), a leg of lamb. Lamb, in the small town where I was staying, is an unusual meat so stores usually carry little of it. I suspect that much of it reaches its "Sell By" date unsold. This was such a piece of lamb, its price reduced: 50% off. A very good buy, and not a bad leg at all, shrink-wrapped as it was, and from Australia. So I bought it. My feast of gratitude would feature lamb. A late-summer, shrink-wrapped, special-offer leg of lamb, from the other side of the earth to this rural American supermarket.

Just a note to let you know I tried your recipe and everybody loves it.

I changed the flour tortilla to corn tortilla because my husband is on a gluten-free diet, and I eliminated the cheese because I'm lactose intolerant, and I didn't have any pork butt roast so I used beef chuck instead and substituted sweet potatoes for regular potatoes, and Tim cannot have any wine so I left that out and used Cool Aid instead, and put a can of creamed corn where the recipe calls for fresh spinach. Everybody loved it! Thank you so much for the idea, this is an instant family hit and so easy to do I can't wait to try it again.

Key Lime Pie

I recently followed this recipe for key lime pie and my family said it was the best one ever:


Ingredients

1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
1/2 cup granulated sugar
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick butter) melted
2 (14-ounce) cans sweetened condensed milk
1 cup key lime or regular lime juice
2 whole large eggs
1 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
1 tablespoon lime zest

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

In a bowl, mix the graham cracker crumbs, sugar, and butter with your hands. Press the mixture firmly into a 9-inch pie pan, and bake until brown, about 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature before filling.

Lower the oven temperature to 325 degrees F.

In a separate bowl, combine the condensed milk, lime juice, and eggs. Whisk until well blended and place the filling in the cooled pie shell. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes and allow to chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.

Once chilled, combine the sour cream and powdered sugar and spread over the top of the pie using a spatula. Sprinkle the lime zest as a garnish on top of the sour cream and serve chilled.

Poulet En Cocotte, Sur Le Barbecue

I usually prepare my casserole-roasted chicken by first browning the flavored, trussed whole bird in a skillet, then sealing and slowly roasting it inside of one of my old French earthenware pots from Vallauris. Unfortunately my batterie de cuisine is packed away in a distant storage unit, and I'm adrift— homeless and unemployed— this summer.

In exchange for a week-or-so use of a couch, I'm doing the cooking at my temporary digs and, as there are no earthenware cocottes here, and the weather is fine, I've modified my usual technique to make use of a barbecue grill. The grill is makeshift; It's a broken propane-fueled grill which, through the removal of valves, hoses and regulators, and the addition of a bent sheet of steel, I've converted to charcoal use. The rôle of the earthenware poelon has been filled by a lovely old Griswold cast-iron kettle. The chicken is filled with flavorings, trussed, and then browned on the grid, right above the hot coals. The bird then goes into the kettle, along with a scatter of aromatic vegetables, and cooks for about 50 minutes.

The flavor of the cooked bird is different than the skillet/earthenware pan version: it's smoky, more savory, more assertive, and the juices from roasting and deglazing the kettle are dark brown instead of a light ochre color. If you've a grill, a casserole and a chicken, give it a try!

Recipe after the jump: