Cooking for Alan – Dinner #1
Today marks the beginning of my adventure in using Ina Garten’s book, Cooking for Jeffrey as my inspiration for creating dinner menus and as a way to try and prepare every recipe in her book. Since the recipes I’m using are not my own, I will provide links to them. So when you see text that is highlighted in RED that’s a prompt for you to click on the words to be taken to where the recipes have been published online. I’ll also be providing links to other resources that you may find useful.
Tonight’s menu was timed out to be ready just as my husband and son returned from an afternoon of hunting snow geese in the bitter cold. Why in the world they voluntarily choose to spend time outdoors when it’s 10 degrees is something only waterfowlers really understand. So I was happy to prepare some comfort food like steamy hot cous cous and oven roasted chicken.
MENU
Arugula with Prosciutto and Burrata
Cous Cous with Pine Nuts and Mint
Skillet-Roasted Lemon Chicken
The Arugula with Prosciutto and Burrata had to be modified a bit. My local grocery store didn’t have any bags of just arugula…so I settled on a spring greens mix. Since my trip to Italy this past summer I have grown very fond of the delicate, peppery flavor of arugula, which they use in great abundance in Rome. This is a super quick salad to assemble. Aside from making a quick dressing and toasting some sliced french bread, it’s just a matter of putting it on a platter and digging in.
See my little protein shaker? Works great to whip up salad dressing and store it in the same container.
Even made my own toasted crouton rounds because of course Ina would never use prepackaged anything.
Next came the Cous Cous with Pine Nuts and Mint. If you’ve not discovered this teeny tiny pasta/grain you should. It cooks in 10 minutes and soaks up whatever flavors you put with it. It can be eaten hot, room temp and even cold. My sons ate a lot of it when they were young.
Doesn’t take many ingredients to make cous cous. Super fast…cooks in 10 minutes.
Be very careful when roasting any nuts, but especially pine nuts. Just put them in a dry skillet over low heat and baby sit them by stirring and shaking the pan for a few minutes to get the right color…if you’re not careful you can burn them easily and they’re too expensive to waste.
Just mix in fresh mint and the roasted pine nuts, drizzle with a little olive oil and serve.
Last but not least was Ina’s famous Skillet Roasted Lemon Chicken. She claims this is one of Jeffrey’s favorites and something she’s made for dinner parties countless times. It cooks amazingly fast due to an oven temp of 450 and the fact that you remove the backbone of the chicken and cook it lying flat. I usually have my guy at the meat counter remove the backbone for me to save time. But I have done it at home by myself with great success and you can too. The method is called Spatchcocking…let the giggles begin.
Use cast iron for this…you need a very heavy duty pan that withstands high oven temps. Line the skillet with a bed of sliced lemon, onion and garlic will help to create an amazing sauce.
Generously brushing both sides of your dry bird with an herb-olive oil mixture will make the skin taste amazing and crisp.
This lovely chicken is juicy and tender with a very crisp skin. When the breast meat reaches 155 degrees you can pull it from the oven and cover in foil. Let it rest for at least another 15-20 minutes. Because you’ve cooked it in a cast iron skillet (mine shown here is enamel coated) it will stay hot for a very long time – up to an hour.
And then you finally end up with this on your plate. Alan and my son gave the meal 2 thumbs up. Oh yeah, once their plates were clean they found the Devil’s Food cake I had baked yesterday and featured on my last post. Thank goodness someone is helping me finish that decadent dessert!
A nice plate of comfort food on a bitterly cold evening.
