I have a notebook in which I have listed every ingredient to every dish needed for the cookbook project. Occasionally, my local store will stock different types of produce or meat so the book helps me to be ready if I happen to find a rare find. This week I noticed the store had some new winter vegetables including rutabagas and turnips. It's exactly what I needed to make a one dish Sunday night meal of whole roasted chicken on a bed of root vegetables.
Roasted chicken is one of the easiest dishes to make. The chicken roasts in the oven over vegetables and the juices from the chicken cook the vegetables. It's a great meal for a cold night. I have made this dish countless times but usually limit my vegetable additions to carrots, potatoes, and onions so the addition of rutabagas, leeks, and turnips sounded delicious. The one problem I always have with roasting chicken is carving the bird into legible pieces of chicken. I have tried cutting up many whole chickens, both raw and cooked and am not very good at it. I usually have a lot of trouble cutting through the bones of the chicken with my knives no matter how much I sharpen them. They make it look so easy in the illustrations in the books.
I started out by peeling the rutabagas and turnips. Rutabagas are tough to peel and cut through! I rinsed the leeks and cut them into long slivers and then added them to the turnips, rutabagas, carrots, and onion. I tossed the vegetables with a little oil, smashed garlic, and thyme. This is what the pot of vegetables looked liked before adding to the pan...
I put more smashed garlic, thyme, salt, and pepper in the cavity of the chicken and rubbed the chicken in a little oil and seasoned with more salt and pepper. The chicken rests on the vegetables in the roasting pan and is topped with a few pats of butter. This is the bird before heading to the oven...
The finished chicken and vegetables had a lot of flavor although I think I overcooked the chicken a little. The white meat dried out a little in trying to get the dark meat done. Most of the other roast chicken recipes I have tried cook at a lower temperature for a longer period of time and I think this would have made the difference. The finished plate...
I also made the Brioche recipe this weekend. This is a bread recipe that takes two days to make. I started by dissolving the yeast in water and then mixing up the dough which consists of flour, eggs, and lots of butter. I let the dough rise for a few hours and then put in the fridge overnight. I then put the dough in two loave pans and let rise again until it overlapped the pan. Watching dough rise is a neat process to me. It's a real testament to the ingredients available to us that a small package of active yeast can make nothing into something in a matter of hours.
After baking in the oven, this was the finished product. The sliced bread has been a great homemade breakfast treat in the morning. There is also a grilled cheese sandwich recipe in the book I hope to try before the bread gets too stale...we'll see how the week goes!
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