I don’t really understand the marketing of Mother’s Day. I see all these floral pastel cards and delicate lacy handkerchiefs and early morning breakfast in bed and advertisements for “brunch” and “afternoon tea” with fussy hats implied. Let me set the record straight. I am a mom, and I know a lot of moms. An informal survey of what our ideal Mother’s Day would look like involves 1) sleeping in; 2) a pedicure with some celebrity gossip magazines; 3) sushi; 4) chocolate and 5) lots of wine. Maybe this holiday doesn’t sell so well on a greeting card, but it sounds pretty awesome to me. Too awesome to be an also-ran Mother’s Day. Maybe I will name it something else, like “Saturday”. And it will fall once a week.
If your Mother’s Day veers towards the more traditional, or you’re trying to fill the time between pedicures, sushi and wine, try cooking brunch at home, and avoid the overpriced and overcrowded restaurant brunch options. (For more on this, see Brooke of FoodWoolf’s insider’s take on the restaurant Mother’s Day brunch. If you’re not feeling confident in your hollandaise sauce, or you’re a late sleeper yourself and don’t want a giant fuss in the morning, this is the brunch dish for you.
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Tags: brunch·cheese·eggs·holiday·Mother's Day
I was roasting a chicken the other night, and I realized that I’ve never posted roast chicken on my blog, which I really should. It’s my go to Sunday night supper, one we have at least once or twice a month. It’s elegant enough for company, but casual enough for a kitchen supper (if you had an eat in kitchen, which we don’t. Say it’s casual enough to eat while curled up on a couch, with a glass of $4/bottle Tempranillo and a DVD of Mamma Mia. Don’t judge.) It appeals to kids, picky eaters, those who don’t eat red meat. It doesn’t require fancy ingredients. And it creates wonderful leftovers which can be repurposed into all sorts of great things — chicken salads, chicken curry, and chicken stock (more on all of those, later). In short, roast chicken might just be the perfect meal. And as such, it’s my duty to share this recipe with you.
I’ve tried many different roast chicken recipes — Martha Stewart’s Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic, Thomas Keller’s Roast chicken (which, incidentally is almost identical to my family roast chicken recipe, which was given to us by the Moroccan cook at my godmother’s in-laws’ villa on the Cote D’Azur), and the standard rub with butter and roast at 350 until it’s done recipes, but I always come back to this one, which I found in Judy Rodger’s marvellous Zuni Cafe Cookbook
(incidentally, this is one cookbook I think every serious cook should own. The techniques are amazing, the recipes flawless, and the dishes wonderful). Judy Rodgers has converted me to dry brining — sprinkling the chicken with salt well before you want to cook it — which yields a tender and juicy chicken with a crisp, salty skin that is seasoned all the way to the bone. Dry brining can yield great results in any meat (even the Thanksgiving turkey), but a dry brined chicken is a thing of beauty and should be in everyone’s repertoire.
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Tags: chicken·Zuni Cafe
I’m not much of a muffin girl. Despite my rather extreme sweet tooth, I don’t tend to like sweets for breakfast, and most muffins are just cupcakes without frosting. And the times I actually want something sweet — elevenses or tea time — a muffin doesn’t quite cut it. I might as well have the frosting. Or a cookie. Or a bacon salted caramel brownie.
And it doesn’t much help that most muffins are not worth the paper they’re baked in. Take the blueberry muffin — what really should be the king of the genre. Most are cakelike, too sweet, with an indifferent texture that has neither the chew of bread nor the tenderness of a good cupcake. The exterior tends to dry at best, sticky at worse, and they always seem to insist on serving ice cold gluey blueberry muffins on airplanes. The thought makes me shudder.
But then I encountered these muffins.
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Tags: berries·brunch·fruit·muffins·teatime
