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.