I love Ina Garten. I love her recipes, I love her soothing cooking show, I love all things Ina. Amidst my recipe hoarding collection, I have 5 Ina cookbooks and way too many of her recipes saved online.
Aside from my love of her simple yet awesomely delicious recipes, I want nothing more than to be her friend. I want to have casual lunch and garden parties at her beautiful home in the Hamptons, I want to take a stroll through her local fancy cheese shop, and I want to meet her delightfully adorable husband.
Enough with my borderline creepy admiration of Ms. Garten. Imaginary friendship aside, the Barefoot Contessa makes some fabulous food.
About two years ago I decided to cross roasting a chicken off of my recipe bucket list and stumbled upon a recipe by none other than my Food Network friend.
Behold. Garlic roast chicken, Ina style.
I followed this recipe exactly (of course) and it BLEW MY MIND. I have made this recipe dozens of times now, it is the only roast chicken I have ever braved...well except that one time I attempted straying and got creative--we won't talk about how that turned out.
That brings us to tonight. I don't know if I was getting bored of the same (AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS) roast chicken or if I was just feeling adventurous but I decided to stray. To cheat on Ina.
Hubby and I have been taking part in our local Community Supported Agriculture program. Every week we get a bundle of fresh, organic fruits and veggies. It's been great for cooking outside the box. We've gotten a few veggies that we're not familiar with and it's been a fun culinary challenge to work them into our weekly menu.
The remnants of this week's veggies. SO. MANY. POTATOES. Not pictured are two additional bags of spuds from weeks previous. Some sad looking leeks (sad because they have been in my fridge for four days-alas no fear, now is their time to shine!), and a mystery squash.
Did I mention I'm not very experienced with vegetables?
I had no idea what type of squash this was, how to cook it, if it was even edible. I figured cutting it open was a good place to start.
Upon cutting this bad boy open, I was relieved to learn it looked similar to butternut squash. Then....I had a light bulb moment.
My collection of culinary literature must have the solution! My favorite recipe reading guilty pleasure is Food Network Magazine and, in a recent edition they featured a winter squash article that identifies many a mystery squash. So between the pages I went and discovered....
drum roll please....
I am the proud parent of an absolutely adorable ACORN SQUASH.
I immediately felt silly for not knowing what this gourd was, I mean acorn squash are pretty typical, right?
Mystery solved, I continued onward in my practically recipe-less Sunday night venture.
I sliced and chopped and clobbered (I'm not very graceful with a kitchen knife, another reason I need to be friends with Ina) away at my veggies until they were all about the same size.
Then came the butter.
I was recently inspired by my dear friend Red (all the cool bloggers nickname their friends with sassy titles, I figured I can too). Red has a blog that lives here. Red is the type of chef that I'm completely jealous of...she can fling random things together, sans recipe, and end up with a feast. Last week I was lucky enough to have some of her Boursin stuffed chicken breast. She shoved some sort of delectable cheesy concoction under the skin of some chicken breasts and WHAM-O it was killer.
That got me thinking. I can cram some yummy ingredients under the skin of my roast chicken too, right?
So in an effort to spice up my Sunday dinner (pun intended), I smushed (very technical culinary jargon going on here) up some CSA dill with some butter until it looked like this....
I then proceeded to slather said dilly butter under Mr. Chicken's skin. Then all over him. Mind you, this was my first experience going under the chicken skin with anything...I was terrified I was going to either rip the skin or encounter some sort of gross under the skin chicken innards on my adventure.
Yes, I realize how unappetizing I just made this whole entry with the mention of gross under the skin chicken innards.
Alas, I managed to finish my smooshing problem free, poured my chopped veggies around my greasy chicken and ended up with something I think Ina would be proud of.
Oh yea, speaking of shoving and smooshing things, I crammed two heads of garlic (cut in half), some lemon juice and lemon olive oil inside Mr. Chicken and salted the whole thing all over.
I had to reference the original recipe for oven temps because, well let's face it, I have no idea what I'm doing in the kitchen most of the time.
So into the oven this went at 425 for an hour and a half. It came out looking a little something like this.
I took my tasty chicken out of the pan and let it sit wrapped in tin foil, splashed the veggies with some olive oil and chicken stock and threw them back in the oven to brown up some more. Ten to fifteen minutes later, we were chowing down.
So how did it all turn out, you wonder? Or maybe you're not wondering because you're still so turned off at the mention of gross under skin chicken innards.
All in all, this was pretty yummy. Not a total failure! I found the chicken breast to be a little dryer than when I make the Barefoot Contessa recipe but that could be due to the fact that this was a slightly larger chicken than I typically roast.
My hubby (let's give hubby a cute bloggy nickname too...I now pronounce him The Gamer) always ends up slathering it all in BBQ sauce anyway so he liked it. Which makes me think that the next time I cheat on Ina, I'll try to make some sort of BBQ roast chicken. Is that even possible??
Oh yea, the veggies were awesome. I had no idea how mystery squash and potatoes would even taste with dill but the dill flavor was pretty mild and roast veggies are always awesome.
Whew!
Well I guess this recipe straying mission was successful. Until next time!
Aside from my love of her simple yet awesomely delicious recipes, I want nothing more than to be her friend. I want to have casual lunch and garden parties at her beautiful home in the Hamptons, I want to take a stroll through her local fancy cheese shop, and I want to meet her delightfully adorable husband.
Enough with my borderline creepy admiration of Ms. Garten. Imaginary friendship aside, the Barefoot Contessa makes some fabulous food.
About two years ago I decided to cross roasting a chicken off of my recipe bucket list and stumbled upon a recipe by none other than my Food Network friend.
Behold. Garlic roast chicken, Ina style.
I followed this recipe exactly (of course) and it BLEW MY MIND. I have made this recipe dozens of times now, it is the only roast chicken I have ever braved...well except that one time I attempted straying and got creative--we won't talk about how that turned out.
That brings us to tonight. I don't know if I was getting bored of the same (AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS) roast chicken or if I was just feeling adventurous but I decided to stray. To cheat on Ina.
Hubby and I have been taking part in our local Community Supported Agriculture program. Every week we get a bundle of fresh, organic fruits and veggies. It's been great for cooking outside the box. We've gotten a few veggies that we're not familiar with and it's been a fun culinary challenge to work them into our weekly menu.
The remnants of this week's veggies. SO. MANY. POTATOES. Not pictured are two additional bags of spuds from weeks previous. Some sad looking leeks (sad because they have been in my fridge for four days-alas no fear, now is their time to shine!), and a mystery squash.
Did I mention I'm not very experienced with vegetables?
I had no idea what type of squash this was, how to cook it, if it was even edible. I figured cutting it open was a good place to start.
Upon cutting this bad boy open, I was relieved to learn it looked similar to butternut squash. Then....I had a light bulb moment.
My collection of culinary literature must have the solution! My favorite recipe reading guilty pleasure is Food Network Magazine and, in a recent edition they featured a winter squash article that identifies many a mystery squash. So between the pages I went and discovered....
drum roll please....
I am the proud parent of an absolutely adorable ACORN SQUASH.
I immediately felt silly for not knowing what this gourd was, I mean acorn squash are pretty typical, right?
Mystery solved, I continued onward in my practically recipe-less Sunday night venture.
I sliced and chopped and clobbered (I'm not very graceful with a kitchen knife, another reason I need to be friends with Ina) away at my veggies until they were all about the same size.
Then came the butter.
I was recently inspired by my dear friend Red (all the cool bloggers nickname their friends with sassy titles, I figured I can too). Red has a blog that lives here. Red is the type of chef that I'm completely jealous of...she can fling random things together, sans recipe, and end up with a feast. Last week I was lucky enough to have some of her Boursin stuffed chicken breast. She shoved some sort of delectable cheesy concoction under the skin of some chicken breasts and WHAM-O it was killer.
That got me thinking. I can cram some yummy ingredients under the skin of my roast chicken too, right?
So in an effort to spice up my Sunday dinner (pun intended), I smushed (very technical culinary jargon going on here) up some CSA dill with some butter until it looked like this....
I then proceeded to slather said dilly butter under Mr. Chicken's skin. Then all over him. Mind you, this was my first experience going under the chicken skin with anything...I was terrified I was going to either rip the skin or encounter some sort of gross under the skin chicken innards on my adventure.
Yes, I realize how unappetizing I just made this whole entry with the mention of gross under the skin chicken innards.
Alas, I managed to finish my smooshing problem free, poured my chopped veggies around my greasy chicken and ended up with something I think Ina would be proud of.
Oh yea, speaking of shoving and smooshing things, I crammed two heads of garlic (cut in half), some lemon juice and lemon olive oil inside Mr. Chicken and salted the whole thing all over.
I had to reference the original recipe for oven temps because, well let's face it, I have no idea what I'm doing in the kitchen most of the time.
So into the oven this went at 425 for an hour and a half. It came out looking a little something like this.
I took my tasty chicken out of the pan and let it sit wrapped in tin foil, splashed the veggies with some olive oil and chicken stock and threw them back in the oven to brown up some more. Ten to fifteen minutes later, we were chowing down.
So how did it all turn out, you wonder? Or maybe you're not wondering because you're still so turned off at the mention of gross under skin chicken innards.
All in all, this was pretty yummy. Not a total failure! I found the chicken breast to be a little dryer than when I make the Barefoot Contessa recipe but that could be due to the fact that this was a slightly larger chicken than I typically roast.
My hubby (let's give hubby a cute bloggy nickname too...I now pronounce him The Gamer) always ends up slathering it all in BBQ sauce anyway so he liked it. Which makes me think that the next time I cheat on Ina, I'll try to make some sort of BBQ roast chicken. Is that even possible??
Oh yea, the veggies were awesome. I had no idea how mystery squash and potatoes would even taste with dill but the dill flavor was pretty mild and roast veggies are always awesome.
Whew!
Well I guess this recipe straying mission was successful. Until next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment