Cooking: Homemade Tomato sauce and pasta

So, I learned a few things yesterday about cooking.

• You really need to look closely when someone leaves a note that says "1/2 the recipe" and adjust the ingredients accordingly.
  
• Home grown tomatoes and herbs just taste so much better than store-bought stuff. I will really miss these in a week or two.
• I'm close to being sick of eating stuff with tomatoes. So maybe it balances out.
• A garlic clove is a deceptively vague unit of measure, because cloves vary wildly in size. The recipe I made was apparently intended to repel vampires. I halved the amount of garlic and it was still a bit heavy for my taste.
• When you toast pine nuts, recognize that they cook incredibly quickly, even on low heat. You can't turn away for, say, 30 seconds to check something at the sink. Or you'll burn a few of them.
  
• Don't skimp on the quality of the olive oil--good olive oil is SO much better than cheap olive oil. I haven't noticed this with stuff like canola oil or corn oil. I used good olive oil and it showed.
• If you reserve half a cup or so of the water that you cooked the pasta with, you can add it to a thinner sauce and thicken it (with the starch washed off the pasta) while adding complementary flavor. In theory. Because I drained the pasta before I forgot.

The result was still pretty good. I think I would have paid a bit more attention if the sauce had some meat in it, because I would have been more excited about the meal. Pasta is pretty simple in many ways, but there are little tricks I'm still learning. And sauces have a lot of room for mistakes to be made.

Cooking: Roast Chicken

Made another one of my favorite meals last night: Roast Chicken with potatoes and carrots. This version produces a beautifully browned chicken with crispy skin while also providing very juicy breast meat and nicely flavored potatoes and carrots.

The key to this recipe is rotating the chicken in the oven so that it cooks and browns evenly and then letting it rest to collect the juices. And also butter.

1. You heat the oven to 450 F. Get a 4-5 pound whole fryer with the giblets and such removed. (Heavier is better and I've found that organic chickens have a richer flavor.) Then you melt a tablespoon or two of butter and massage it into the skin of the chicken. You can use a brush if you're afraid to get your hands greasy.

2. Chop up half an onion into a few big chunks and cut some rosemary or sage (last night I used sage from our garden) and stuff both into the cavity of the chicken.

3. Put the chicken on its side in a roasting pan and put the pan in the oven for 30 minutes.

4. Slice some small red potatoes in half (bigger potatoes may need to be quartered--I don't like mine more than an inch in thickness) and chop some carrots (or use baby carrots).

5. After the first 30 minutes, take the pan out of the oven. Turn the chicken over onto the opposite side. Baste it (I use a brush) with pan juices and some more of the melted butter. Then add the potatoes and carrots and put back in the oven for another 30 minutes.

6. After the second 30 minutes is up, turn the chicken breast side up in the pan. Baste it again and stir up the potatoes and carrots. Set the timer for 10 minutes. At the end of that ten minutes, baste again and set timer for another 10 minutes. At the end of that 10 minutes, check to see how done the chicken is--wiggling the leg to see if it is nice and loose works pretty well. You may or may not need a final 10 minutes in the oven (A 4 pound chicken is usually done after two 10 minute sessions, while a 5 pounder often takes 3 10 minute sessions.)

7. Take the chicken out of the oven. Leave the potatoes and carrots in for another 20 minutes. During this final 20 minutes, you need to put the chicken breast side down on a cutting board and tent it with foil to help keep it warm. Angle the chicken so that the back end is higher than the front. This lets the juices in the chicken drip down and infuse the breast meat, which can often get a little dry during normal roasting because it takes a bit longer for the dark meat to cook than the white meat. (Warning: you want a cutting board or surface with grooves in it to catch the chicken fat and juices that drain down, otherwise you'll have a very messy counter.

8. After the last 20 minutes, take the potatoes and carrots out of the oven. Turn the chicken right side up and carve it. Serve with the carrots and potatoes.

For our family this meal always produces leftovers that are very tasty a couple days later.

Cooking: Tomato Bisque

[This is a photo of someone else's tomato bisque, as I didn't feel like taking a photo of my own.]

Work has been wearing my wife down a bit lately, so since I'm the stay-at-home person, I recently offered to handle more of the cooking (something she normally enjoys) so that she only has to cook on the weekend. Last night I baked some salmon with lemon and thyme, baked some potatoes, and made buttermilk dressing (with my daughter's assistance) for a salad with some cherry tomatoes from our garden.

So today I made a tomato bisque from scratch, using fresh tomatoes and herbs (basil, thyme, oregano, and parsley) from our own garden (along with some stuff like mushrooms, cream, and provolone cheese from the store). This is a recipe that Lisa has had for a long time, but I think this is the first time I've made it by myself. And we've never cooked it with primarily home-grown ingredients before.

It took a little more than two hours of cooking, a bit more than an hour of that involving hands on work in the kitchen: a lot of chopping, dicing, sauteeing, and crushing (the tomatoes). Then some blending to puree the results.

The result had really good flavor but was a little bit thinner than it is normally. Everyone seemed to like it. So some success.