First Bar Meal

Before I begin this very momentous post, in which I tackle several items on my list in one meal (multitasking win!), I must first show you this picture so you can see what I was going on about with excitement to start cooking in Maine. This kitchen makes me happy:

Island w/ barstools means cook is never lonely!

The picture was taken at night to make it more photogenic and the like, but during the day there is sunlight streaming through all of those windows and it is just delightful. 

Enough of that. I liked cooking just as much in my ridiculous kitchen in Oakland in which a new burner would stop working every day, it seemed. So, the love of cooking isn't really about the kitchen. But it can be a nice treat :).

For propriety's sake, I must point out that I did actually start my culinary bar studies with task one: how to cook an egg every way. Our first morning here, we were still on West Coast time and woke up much closer to lunch than breakfast. So, I fried two eggs over easy and we had brunchwiches on fresh sourdough bread with avocado, melted cheese, and honey turkey. I've decided brunchwiches is a new thing and plan to make more of them. BUT I don't really count this as a solid step in the direction of culinary mastery, because this method of frying eggs is something I have done a thousand times before and, to boot, I broke one of the yolks when transferring to the sandwich. So, we'll start task one afresh later, and with a bit more intention and planning. Eggs cannot be taken too lightly, after all.

Which brings us to this evening's meal and task two: roast the perfect chicken. Oh where to begin on this epic task! I read this short article by Janet A. Zimmerman about how elusive the roasted chicken can be, and how we should all just give up (like we have with cows and most other animals) and realize chickens should be cooked with their parts already separated. And yet. Master chefs everywhere (including my idol Julia Child) have been saying the perfectly roasted chicken is the mark of a good cook or restaurant for ages.  But everyone, and I mean everyone, has his or her own perfect way of doing it. If you want a brief overview of how absurd these methods can be, and how much they vary, just read Zimmerman's article.

So how was I to proceed? Well, I basically just decided at random. I wanted to grill it, and I wanted to baste it with some butter. Those were my decisions. I had to start somewhere, I figured. If this doesn't produce the perfectly roasted chicken, then so be it, I will still be one step further on my quest. 

The key to the perfectly roasted chicken is crispy, browned skin. This requires dry skin, so I took the chicken out of the packaging this morning, washed it, removed the innards, and dried it with a bunch of paper towels before dousing it with salt, covering it with more paper towels, and sticking it back in the fridge. Oh yea and I put some herbs under the skin (rosemary, thyme). Then I went on a hike. 

Many hours later, I took that baby out of the fridge, and, after having been persuaded by the internet that the best way to grill a whole chicken is by removing the backbone and butterflying it out, a technique known as spatchcock, I did just that. This is not hard.

I melted a wee bit of butter with some honey mustard for my basting liquid, heated my grill up to around 350ish range, and put the chicken down. The glory of the spatchcock is you don't have to flip it. Just let it sit there for 45mins-1hr. It came out like this:

Please excuse the split skin on the drumstick, because this was delightful.

Yum! Juicy tender, skin super crispy (as you can see, the bottom is QUITE crisp), but my family liked it that way. 


I'd say this was a fairly bold step in the fulfillment of task 2. Obviously I'll have to try some other methods just for comparison. But if something can be done on the grill, why shouldn't it be? Grilling is more fun.


Served with corn muffins and this corn-vinaigrette salad, with chives and oregano and a lot of lemon. The vinaigrette was essentially made by cooking some corn and garlic in a little bit of grapeseed oil, then adding the herbs and lemon and some red wine vinaigrette, as well as a little olive oil and S&P.  A start, but not a completion, of task sixteen: concoct most awesome salad dressing. Grapeseed oil is something to remember for future attempts, as it has a very light and fresh flavor yet doesn't separate out nearly as much as a lot of other oils. Also, I'm pretty sure corn is a great flavor for (almost?) any salad. Tossed in some spinach and mixed greens, with grape tomatoes. It was refreshing and light.


So I guess I can check off four herbs in my quest to complete task five: cook something with every herb I can find. Let's not dwell on the fact that it was four of the easiest herbs, because these four herbs were delicious and discernible in their dishes, and that ain't shabby. 

Those yellow crisps are parmesan crisps (literally just parmesan cooked in a pan for a minute or so) for the salad. 

Oh yea, and I took six mini-quizzes as part of my pre-bar class bar review. As far as I can tell the purpose of these is to convince you you know nothing so that you feel you haven't wasted a huge chunk of money on the bar review class. I'm onto them...