I'm psyched for domesticity, y'all. A while back a friend found out that I really enjoyed cooking and he told me (with a good deal of embarrassment) that I'd make a great wife. I think he thought that I'd be offended. Hell no, I'm not offended! I'm going to make a TOTALLY kick-ass wife. Sometimes when I'm cooking dinner I just think, "Damnit, this is AMAZING!" and I wish I could communicate how beautiful and enjoyable and satisfying and calming and invigorating and lovely and robust it can be. Have you ever noticed how beautiful a halved blue potato looks next to green onions or felt how cool rice flour is or smelled toasted cumin seeds or used turmeric and watched that marigold color just bloom in the pan? That kind of thing just fills me with awesome. Since I can't capture emotions, sometimes I take pictures (Joanna, here's some more food porn for you).
Last weekend I went to the farmers market and saw these guys and couldn't resist making a classic Sunday dinner: roast chicken. I'd never roasted a chicken before, but how could I say no to that tragic little carcass, looking all vulnerable and delicious?
I'm gonna wife the HELL outta this stuff.
I made some tasty lemon garlic butter to rub under the skin. This dim picture can't really do justice to the fresh, happy look of the butter, but trust me, it was summer in a bowl.
Now, in order to butterfly the chicken for roasting you have to turn it so the drumsticks are facing you, then cut along both sides of the backbone, removing the spine. Two weird things: (1) You may not realize this, but when plucked, the chicken still has a tail - a floppy, weirdly unsettling little triangle of flesh. (2) The chicken was looking coyly over it's shoulder at me.
Gaaaaah!
Let me tell you, you do NOT want something looking over it's shouler at you, WATCHING you while you grab it by the ass and slice out it's spine. You just DON'T. Once the butterflying process was done, the chicken looked decidely...relaxed. I couldn't stop laughing because it was just so limp and stretchy and pathetic.
Once cooked on a nice bed of potatoes, though, it just looked plain ol' delicious. Fortunatley it TASTED delicious, too.
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