Post-Modern Drunk: Chickens, Chicharron, and Anniversaries
I’ve spent the previous weekend more or less eating myself to death. It’s like Leaving Las Vegas, except with food rather than with alcohol, and more or less happy. And significant parts of it were in Texas. And I didn’t actually die. So not very much like Leaving Las Vegas at all.
I did overeat, though, in various different ways, and it took me a week to recover enough to write this post. And this post doesn’t even get me to Texas. I’ll have to do that next.
Roast Chickens
My girlfriend and I have become obsessed with roasting chickens. It’s easy enough to do, it’s awesomely tasty, and when it is as hot as it has been, roasting a chicken means I need to spend only a couple minutes here or there in the hot kitchen to get it done. So we have about eight different recipes and techniques to try out, searching for the best one, the one that gives the best tasting chicken and the crispiest skin.
The recipes/techniques I have on my plate so far.
- Marcella Hazan's, from The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, adapted by Serious Eats
- Thomas Keller's One-Pot Roast Chicken
- Thomas Keller's My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken
- Zuni Cafe's Roast Chicken, adapted by Smitten Kitchen, possibly with the bread salad as well
- Peruvian Roast Chicken with Aji Verde Sauce, from Sunday Nite Dinner
- Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall's Herb-Roast Chicken (which I swear I'm not doing just because Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall is the most English name ever. I hear good things about his knowledge of meat).
- Also, Mark Bittman has two or three recipes, including a standard roast chicken, and a chicken under a brick recipe.
Recommend more if you have one that you love!
I’ll do a post letting you know which I prefer most once I’m done. I’m doing a write-up of each recipe on my cooking LiveJournal, as well. Yes, I have a LiveJournal. Two of them, actually. Deal with it.
Anniversary Dinners and Trips
It’s been a year for my girlfriend and I. We celebrated our anniversary by going to Momofuku Ko. It was six days early, but, well, Ko is hard to get into on precisely the day you hope for, so I started trying earlier and got lucky. I’ve already done my Momofuku Ko post, and I didn’t take any photos of our meal, so there’s no lovely multimedia post here*, but I’ll nevertheless write up what I actually had.
* Shorter this paragraph: Stu is not as good of a food blogger as Rich
Our meal at Momofuku Ko
- Amuse (Chicharron, mirin soaked black pepper muffin with honey, and a corn kernel sized bit of roasted plantain).
- Fluke sashimi with buttermilk and poppyseed
- Carpaccio
- Ham Consomme with Peas
- Soft-boiled smoked Egg and Caviar with fingerling potato chips
- Orchiette with crawfish, chicken sausage and ragu
- Trout
- Shaved frozen Foie Gras with Peanut Brittle and Jellied Riesling
- Sous Vide Lamb
- Apricot Sorbet
- Panna Cotta with Root Beer Ice Cream
If you’ve gone, you’ll recognize some of them. The Foie Gras remains amazing. The ham consomme was a revelation. Root beer ice cream is something I want to start making immediately. Smoking soft-boiled eggs is something I want to learn how to do.
I wound up buying the Momofuku cookbook, and will probably try and fail to do much of the things in there. That book is as close to food porn as anything I own. Actually, it is more like actual porn than anything I own. I have found myself in the weeks since I bought it reading through it in the bathroom, holding it up sideways and admiring the oh-so-sexy lines of a thigh of chicken or a butt of pork. There is a complicated joke to be made about cooking at home being like masturbation while going out to a restaurant being like prostitution, but it never quite came together in my head, and probably wasn’t going to be funny in the first place, and sure as hell wasn’t going to be remotely insightful, so let’s just be glad that I haven’t pursued it any further.
Still to Come...
I went to Texas. A guy in Hospice care talked about my wedding. I got called a Yankee. I saw a bunch of churches, and even went to the bathroom in one. I eat a steak the size and weight of my head. Find about it all on the next exciting adventures of Post-Modern Drunkard.
