food stuff

sunday supper, volume 1: roast chicken

I’ve been telling my friends that John and I are starting to adopt some strange version of a suburban, childless, middle-aged lifestyle. As able-bodied, fun-loving New York City residents in our twenties, we sure do spend a lot of time cooking simple dinners at home, watching episodes of 30 Rock over and over (as I femme-crush on Liz Lemon), then going to bed at exactly 11:55 PM. Are we becoming the couple in that cell phone commercial with eleven bulldogs named Steve?

Then John decided to learn about wine (I’ve held up my end of the deal, learning about food). Every Sunday from now on, we’re planning to open a moderately priced (in the $20 to $30 range) bottle of wine, and cook something nice and new to us to go with it. If we’re going to be homebodies, we’re going to be homebodies with finesse, dammit.

For our first crack at this, we went with a simple roast chicken, using Thomas Keller’s straightforward, no-fuss, minimal-ingredient method. I (finally) learned how to truss a chicken, which is not as much of a special skill as it may sound like (if you can tie ribbon on gift boxes, you can truss a chicken). We roasted chunks of root vegetables (celery root, potato, carrot, and onion) with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, and thyme in the toaster oven to go with it, along with some Dijon mustard on the side. The wine was a white Burgundy (2006 Domaine Patrick Javillier Bourgogne Blanc Cuvée des Forgets, to be more specific).

I think I can safely say that the whole thing was a raging success, and we’re rather proud of ourselves. There wasn’t much active cooking time involved either, since things just hung out in the oven, then rested on a cutting board. The chicken’s skin was crisp, the meat was moist and tasty, and there was enough on that 3.2-pound chicken for four servings. The bony remnants, along with some of the trimmed vegetable ends, will be spending some time in a stock pot soon. I even saved the fatty pan juices for a future sauce or gravy.

I know everyone always says this, but an organic, pastured, antibiotic-free, added hormone-free, Alice Waters-approved chicken is totally the way to go. Food politics aside, it just tastes better. At $3.75 per pound, my chicken came out to $12, which isn’t so shock-inspiring considering it produced four portions of meat and a few quarts of flavorful stock that can be stored and frozen.