Gnocchi with chicken and cream

Now that fall is in full swing and the temperature is continuing to drop, I've added a whole chicken to my grocery list and am enjoying the ritual of the weekly roast chicken cycle.

Roasting day is my favourite. I love preparing the bird for the oven. I take the chicken out of the fridge an hour or two ahead of time to let it come to room temperature. Then, while the oven is preheating (to 325ºF), I rinse and dry the bird, lay it in the roasting tray, and rub a wad of butter over the entire surface. The white skin feels smooth and cool, and the muscle and bone underneath is firm. I examine the fat at the tail end and remove the excess. Salt and pepper inside and out. If I'm so inclined, I'll slice half an onion or pick some thyme from the garden to insert into the cavity for extra flavour. While in the oven, the chicken roasts away slowly, eventually bubbling and sputtering, sending its delicious aroma into the air. Once finished, and having rested for a quarter hour under a tea towel, the chicken is ready to eat. This is when to enjoy the crisp, freshly roasted skin, and, my favourite bits, the wings. I eat these standing over the stove in the kitchen.

I keep the chicken in its roasting dish in the fridge, covered with plastic wrap, so that the roasting juices congeal at the bottom. Never throw these away. They are rich in flavour and nutrition and add depth to any sauce. My new favourite thing to make with leftover chicken and the juice is gnocchi with cream. This recipe is so simple, delicious, and fast with a prep time of only 10 minutes. I encourage you to try it.

Finally, the end of the chicken cycle is when all of the meat is picked away and the bones go into the stock pot. Again, glorious smells fill the house as the stock pot gurgles. I yield about a litre of stock per chicken carcass, enough to make an easy lentil soup for the next day.

GNOCCHI WITH CHICKEN AND CREAM
Serves 2

1/2 pound gnocchi
two handfuls roast chicken, torn or cut into bite-sized pieces
roasting pan juices, fat removed
1/4 c whipping cream
chopped fresh parsley (optional)
salt and pepper to taste

In boiling salted water, cook gnocchi until they rise to the surface. Drain. In the same saucepan, add the pan juices and cream, bringing to a boil. Add gnocchi and chicken, stirring to coat and heat, 30 seconds with the lid on. Remove from heat. Add parsley and season. Serve with steamed broccoli, or a side salad.

Happy Thanksgiving

I thought I'd share a few insights about preparing Thanksgiving dinner for those of you lucky enough to be doing so this weekend:

1) Go with the flow

In my eight years of preparing this feast, something has always gone wrong. Last year's error was perhaps the most spectacular: an exploding turkey. I lovingly made the most divine lemon-scented mashed potatoes and sealed the whole lot into the main cavity and neck of the bird. I was unaware that the potatoes expand in the turkey and create a heck of a lot of steam, and as such they ceremoniously squirted out of both ends and lined the bottom of my oven. Fortunately, my husband noticed this before they managed to burn and catch fire. We saved what we could, and stuffed the rest back inside the turkey. The result, despite the in-oven theatrics, was a delicious tender turkey and glorious lemony potatoes.

This year, I've already had to modify one of my recipes, since the directions printed in the cookbook resulted in something other than what was advertised. (Note to Nigella: In what universe does simmering cranberries for even a moment not result in gloopy sauce? Please revise your Cranberry and Cornbread Stuffing recipe in Feast.)

2) Simple food makes for great eating

Steamed brussels sprouts with butter, nutmeg and lemon juice. Baked yams mashed with butter and lime juice. Yukon gold potatoes mashed with cream and butter. These turkey accompaniments are not complicated yet are wonderful to eat. Their success relies only on the quality of the ingredients and your attention to make sure they aren't overcooked. Save the labour-intensive recipes – the ones with twenty steps and a thousand futsy ingredients – for when you don't have fifty other dishes to prepare at the same time.

3) Let your guests help you

Not only will some of your dinner guests – your friends and family, people who love you – offer their help out of the goodness of their hearts, but they will usually hover around you in the kitchen until you give them something to do. This is a sign: They want to help. My sister's fiancé is case in point. He's cleaned my kitchen, made the mustard for roast ham, cleaned my barbecue, and done all manner of chopping and dicing. Helping makes him feel great. Remember, there's no prize for slaving feverishly to bring a feast to table all by your lonesome, especially if you arrive at your place wilting with exhaustion. As a result, your guests will focus on your well being rather than the food and eachother, and that's just not fun.

4) Never criticize your own food

Even if you are eating not only the worst thing you've ever made but also the worst food in the history of the universe, never say so to your guests. I learned this from Julia Child and I agree with her completely. Again, the point of the meal is to be together, not to focus on your own culinary shortcomings. Of course, you're your own worst critic: What tastes terrible to you might be the best thing your guests have ever eaten.

5) Have fun

If you're not having fun, then what's the point? If you don't like cooking, then do a potluck Thanksgiving, have it catered, order Thai food, roast weenies, whatever floats your boat. There are no rules, so create a day that makes you happy. If you're happy, then your guests will be too.

I'm making my pumpkin cake again, soaking my turkey in brine overnight, and stuffing it with cornbread. I'm also doing as much as I can before the day of, so I'll have lots of energy to enjoy Thanksgiving as much as possible.

Have a great weekend!

Goodbye Gourmet

Ever since reading Ruth Reichl's fabulous memoirs, I have been comforted by the notion that she is at the helm of Gourmet magazine as editor-in-chief. She's still out there, I think to myself, connecting ideas to food and sifting through our culture's culinary habits for the meaning of life. Alas, as reported this week, Gourmet magazine is no longer; Condé Nast finally pulled the plug on what was probably a very unprofitable subscription. The Globe and Mail featured a pair of opinions (one for and the other against) by two of its food writers on the demise of this 68-year-old publication. Much is made of Condé Nast's decision to keep Bon Appétit, its other food magazine, while scrapping the veteran. The writers' comparisons of the two magazines is entertaining.

As much as I love Ruth Reichl, I never once even glanced at a copy of Gourmet under her direction. My only memory of Gourmet is of flipping through the odd issue kicking around my parents' house and marveling at the utter insanity of some of the recipes. My thought was always the same: Who really cooks like that? In the mid 90's at least, Gourmet was about bringing fine dining to our homes, teaching us how to make the dishes requiring hours and hours of preparation, like the ones we might sample at Le Cirque if we were charmed enough to dine there. I imagine the current version of Gourmet isn't much different. Perhaps the element of fantasy was always the point; by featuring food to drool over rather than recipes to add to your arsenal for quick dinners, Gourmet lifted readers out of the everyday slogging that is feeding. By comparison, I continue to buy Vogue, another Condé Nast publication, yet I will likely never dress off the pages in head-to-toe designer togs.

I feel a little funny saying farewell to a magazine I've never read, but I feel a twinge of sadness at its loss. I feel for Gourmet's devotees. I remember my own disappointment at the recent loss of Blueprint and Domino, two similar lifestyle and home decor publications targeted to a reader exactly like me, a stylish 30-something woman, cut to improve some bottom line. As will likely be the case with Gourmet, there are no magazines in print that can replace the ones lost, none to fill the void, none that match the needs of the specific reader so perfectly.

And so, I raise my keyboard first to Ruth Reichl. Thank you for being fearless in your writing about food. And to the readers of Gourmet: I hope you find what you're looking for.

Salt redux

If you haven't read the multi-part special feature on salt in the Globe and Mail, have a look. The series was first published during the summer, but is still available on their website and well worth examining.

In case we need reminding, Canadians consume on average twice the amount of salt required for a healthy diet. While we've become obsessed with monitoring our fat and sugar intake, we continue to scarf down 3,092 mg of sodium daily. Low fat and "healthy" choice prepared foods such as President's Choice Blue Menu products have up to 600 mg of sodium per serving, almost half-way to the 1,500 mg per day quota for optimal health. A diet high in sodium is particularly detrimental to individuals who have high blood pressure or are prone to hypertension. (Watch this narrated video diagram on how salt affects your body.) Clearly, if consumers were as attentive to the negative health impact of salt as they are to the effects of sugar and fat on their waistlines, manufacturers would be forced to redefine what constitutes a "healthy" choice.

The Globe feature includes a number of interesting articles. Who knew, for instance, that you can limit your salt intake by seasoning your food at the end of preparation rather than at the beginning? Apparently, we require less salt to taste when we salt previously unsalted food at the table verses food prepared with salt. Also amusing is Dave McGinn's The Sodium Diaries, a daily blog devoted to his efforts to stick to the 1,500 mg per day quota, which he fails miserably. I guess no one pointed out that if you want to stick to the daily limit, you can kiss eating prepared foods goodbye: everything from instant oatmeal to canned tuna, our ideas of "healthy" choices, contain heaps of salt.

The bottom line, as always, is that healthy living requires commitment and forethought. All we can hope for is that over time, our governments will consider excessive salt intake a national health crisis, as it did with smoking in the 1980's, and will throw its weight behind the awareness campaigns, incentives and bans this issue deserves.

Chocolate collard green pie

My next post is taking longer to write than I anticipated, so in the interim, here is something to read:

Chef Harry Eastwood has created Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache, a book of baking recipes that hide vegetables in cakes, pies and cookies and apparently taste great. This article in the The Globe and Mail is a tad misleading, suggesting that Eastwood's recipes are healthy because they replace butter and sugar for veggies. While there are lots of specific starchy vegetables (not a kale cake in sight, I'm sure) in each recipe, they are also loaded with nuts to replace the butter, and they still contain sugar. Perhaps readers, sensing that "Muscavado" sugar must be exotic and therefore healthier than the plain old, are the same people who also think "evaporated cane juice" is somehow not sugar either. Regardless, almond flour baked goods are always a treat, so it's nice to have a new recipe.

Mass vs. volume... mass wins!

At last, the perfect loaf of bread. I've been waiting a long, long time for this. I had almost given up on being able to bake a light, fluffy loaf of bread. Even my husband was starting to get a little disparaging. After chewing thoughtfully on a slice of my last loaf, he admitted: "Maybe bread just isn't something you're good at making." Oh, how I hated hearing that. But a part of me thought that he might be right.

Until today, all of my bread has been leaden. "Dense" would be a compliment for my bread, suggesting the healthiness of whole grain rather than what the loaves really were: edible door stoppers. It seemed that each loaf I made was heavier than the last. Although they all contained the same amount of flour, less and less air puffed its way into the dough, compressing more and more grain into every slice. I followed my recipe book slavishly, measuring accurately, kneading accordingly. I would wait patiently at the oven door, hoping the dough would make its final ascent in the heat and heartbroken when it didn't. All of these efforts to no avail. My bread was a failure.

Today, I put my bread book away and thought I'd try one last time. I had nothing to lose, and so I followed the simple direction given by Michael Ruhlman in his book Ratio. His bread dough ratio is so simple: five parts flour and three parts water. Add some yeast, salt for flavour and oil if you like. Knead and let rise as you please.

I used my kitchen scale and measured out 20 oz of flour (mostly white; about 1/4 whole wheat) and 12 oz of lukewarm water. I added two packages of yeast, about 1/2 Tbsp of salt, a glug glug glug of olive oil and a long squirt of honey. I also threw in a handful of whole grains (millet and Scottish oats) for some crunch. Then, I kneaded the dough for about 10 minutes and put it in a bowl, covered with plastic wrap, and set it in the stereo cabinet to rise. After about an hour, I punched the dough down, wrapped it back up, and let it rise again. After another hour or so, I took the dough to the kitchen, kneaded it for about another minute or so, cut it in half to form into two loaves, and let them rise covered with a kitchen towel for about 30 minutes. Then I baked them for 35 minutes in a 375ºF oven. Done.

I surmise that the problems I had been having with my previous breads is that my recipes had too much flour and not enough liquid. By measuring the bread to liquid ration by weight and not volume, I will be able to make bread with consistency, I hope. As you may know, the volume of flour changes dramatically over time; sifted flour, light and lofty, will take up more volume per ounce than unsifted flour. Any European cookbook I have ever read always measures baking ingredients by mass, not volume. But for some reason, North American recipes have always relied on imperial volumetric measures for dry ingredients.

All this to say that if you like fresh bread, go out to Canadian Tire and buy a kitchen scale, measure out your ingredients and have fun. It's really easy, and will surely be the best bread you have ever tasted.

Eggs and broccoli

I went for a proper brunch the other day, and by proper I mean for a meal I could never be bothered to make at home. I had eggs Florentine, a life-long favourite: poached eggs on English muffin with steamed spinach and hollandaise. Making this dish at home, though possible of course, is fraught with difficulty. While steamed spinach and toast are fairly simple to manage, the other two components are a nightmare of timing and precision.

I've made hollandaise sauce once in my life: successfully, though not without the requisite bother. Setting aside the concern of the shocking amount of butter needed to make hollandaise, the sauce also requires feats of strength and patience to complete. The mixture of butter and egg yolk, once combined in a bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water (a bain marie), must be whisked continuously to avoid separation or over cooking. In addition, hollandaise must be served immediately after it has been made, for it continues to thicken if left on the heat or separate if unattended. Unless I either hire a sous chef or grow another pair of arms, poached eggs (a task requiring an equal amount of attention and care) and hollandaise is a meal best left to professionals.

And yet, now that I've had a taste for unctuous butter mixed with the tang of lemon juice and the smoothness of egg yolk, I can't go back to plain boiled eggs for breakfast. And so, I have invented my own poached eggs hollandaise: two soft boiled eggs with butter and a squirt of lemon juice. It's cooking down to the basic ingredients, and it certainly will never replace the original. But, cooking is about making something to eat, not driving yourself crazy, so I am pleased that my minimalist version is so satisfying.

From the web
Ever wonder how long mothers have been forcing their kids to finish their broccoli? Eight thousand years, give or take. This food time line tells us at what point in human history different food items found their way onto our plates. We've been eating wheat for 10,000 years, though ravioli is a 13th century invention. Some items I've never heard of, like the emmer and einkorn grains of 17,000 and 16,000 BC, respectively. Also listed is the first cookbook, a Dutch "kitchen book" called "Good and Noble Food", published sometime in the 15th century. Given Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440, it must not have been long before someone noticed such books would be appreciated.

P.S. I took a break from Pickle Pea over the summer, as regular readers may have noticed. (Sorry for the lack of notice. Thanks for your patience!) I'm back now. Expect a return to my usual schedule of 3-4 posts/month.