Yogadad World

Garlic. Chicken. Mashed Potatoes. Broccoli. What's not to like? Throw in a homemade pound cake from Mimi's secret recipe, and it was a little bit of heaven. Amanda was coming over for dinner so I decided to do the full-spread. She's a big mashed potato gal and likes her chicken. She'll even nibble on a few pieces of broccoli to keep her dad from growling about the lack of vegetables in her diet. Shannon provided the piece de resistance with her grandmother's pound cake.

The chicken recipe is from my friend Dave. He sent it along after our January outing to Colorado. Included in the package was a PBS special from 2001 called The Natural History of the Chicken. The recipe is a keeper. The DVD is a hoot...or maybe a cluck-cluck. We enjoyed both.

I don't have a skillet that's big enough to accomdate as much chicken at this recipe specifies. So I browned the whole, cut-up chicken in two smaller pans. Afterward, I transferred the chicken to a baking dish rather than baking in the skillet. That worked just as well.

40 cloves is a lot of garlic; I used three complete heads. By baking the dish with the chicken lying on top of the garlic, yhe garlic infuses the chicken nicely, giving the meat a kind of nutty flavor. The wine and juices from the chicken cook the cloves so that they're soft and spreadable by the time it's taken from the oven. We spread it on bread, mixed it in the potatoes, and popped it into our mouths straight. It was all good.

The recipe says you can peel the garlic or not; your choice. I peeled them for this dinner. It's a bit tedious peeling that many cloves of garlic but I didn't like the thought of all that unpeeled garlic just lying in the dish. After taking it from the oven, though, I can see quite easily that it would have worked just as well unpeeled. That would have saved quite a bit of prep time, too.

I followed Mark Bittman's guidlines for mashed potatoes in his book How to Cook Everything, and I used his vegetable gratin recipe for the broccoli. You can see that I burned the bread crumbs a bit on top of the broccoli. I left them a bit too long under the broiler. Next time I do the broccoli gratin, which we all loved, I'll put it in the oven for a bit to bake, then give it a minute or two under the broiler to crisp the breadcrumbs.

The mashed potatoes were excellent. I'm learning that the big secret to exquisite mashed potatoes is to mash them as gently as possible. Otherwise, you activate all the starch and end up with gummy potatoes and just kind of stick together. So stay away from the blender, food processor, and hand mixer. Use a ricer or hand masher. I have the latter and I was careful to press down slowly, going around the bowl several times to get as many lumps out as possible. But also not getting so vigorous that I ended up with a pasty mass. The result was a very good bowl of mashed potatoes. Add a few well done cloves of garlic and it's a heavenly dish.

We ended the meal with Shannon's pound cake. It didn't need any adornments. Amanda has long been partial to desserts. She ate this one with gusto and took much of the leftover home.

I don't get to cook for Amanda often enough and this dinner turned out to be quite the success. We all pushed back satisfied.

Ingredients
Whole chicken, cut-up & skinned
2 Tb extra virgin olive oil
40 garlic cloves, peeled or not
2 cups dry white wine
4 sprigs thyme or 1/4 tsp dried
1 sprig rosemary or 1/4 tsp dried
Salt & pepper
Chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley as garnish

Heat oil in large skillet, lay chicken in pan in a single-layer and cook over medium-high heat. Sprinkle salt & pepper evenly over chicken. Cook until golden brown, about 2 mins on each side. Remove chicken from pan & set aside.

Reduce heat to medium. Add garlic & cook 1 minute or until garlic begins to brown, stirring frequently. Arrange chicken on top of garlic. Add wine & herbs. Cover & cook in oven at 350 for 45 - 60 mins.

Serve with toasted baguette slices or crostini.

This was one of those nights when neither of us wanted to spend time in the kitchen. I arrived home later than usual from work, not feeling especially creative or energetic. Often, dinner on nights like these turn into "Let's send out for pizza." For us, it meant turning to the potato and leek soup that I had started on Sunday and stashed in the refrigerator, knowing that a night like this was likely sometime during the week.

The recipe is from Michael Field's Cooking School via my friend Dave Brunell. In mid-January, we spent a few days in Colorado skiing with Dave and his wife Susan Fayd. We had a lovely time. The weather was perfect, temperatures in the high teens and 20s during the day and lots of snow.

We arrived on a Friday, around noon. After Dave and Susan fetched us from the shuttle bus depot, we had lunch at Freshies, a little restaurant in Steamboat Springs. The menu that day featured a potato leek soup. Three of us ended up ordering it and it didn't disappoint. While we ate, Susan volunteered that Dave had a version of potato leek soup that was just as good as Freshies. I immediately demanded a recipe. Shortly after we got home, Dave obliged.

Dave's version is different from Freshies. At the restaurant the soup was a clear broth with herbs visible in the soup. This version is more like a cream of potato with leeks. It's a great soup. I'm still looking for something similar to what we had at Freshies.

I added a bit of cream during the reheat. And I added a pinch of red pepper flakes. Just enough to give it a bit of a bite. Be careful it you run the veggies through a food processor. If you give it more than a couple of pulses, you'll end up with a puree very quickly. I like the chunks of potatoes and leeks in the bowl.

Ingredients
4 cups of good chicken stock  
4 tablespoons of butter  
2 large leeks, cleaned & chopped (1-1 1/2 cups)  
1 medium onion (about 1/2 cup)  
1 small stalk of celery, finely chopped (about 1/4 cup)  
3 cups of potatoes diced  
Salt & pepper to taste  
1 cup cream (or half & half) optional
2 tablespoons chopped chives  

Melt the butter slowly in a large, heavy pan.  Add the chopped onion, celery & chopped leeks. Cook slowly for about 20 minutes until the veggies are soft & translucent. 

Transfer to a 3 or 4 quart saucepan, add the chicken stock & potatoes & bring to a boil.  Reduce the heat immediately, partially cover & keep the mixture at a simmer until the potatoes are soft. 

Put vegetables into food mill or pulse once or twice in a food processor. 

Cover the bowl of soup & chill over night, adding the cream & chives to the bowls just before serving.