A friend and co-worker recently opened a cafe in a restored and re-purposed Chinese laundry on Bayou Road here in New Orleans. Pagoda Cafe is run by Dan Etheridge, who also works with Tulane City Center and helped start up the N Roman and Columbus clubhouse where the guys cook hot dogs every Tuesday. All great folks. Last week I met another community member at the cafe for a lunch meeting and had the roasted chicken, pesto and arugula sandwich. Oh so good!
So after eating chicken at a restaurant, I tsk'ed myself because I had an entire chicken in my freezer that was waiting to be eaten. It was a little intimidating, honestly, and boy did it take forever to defrost. After a hard day at work where I knew I wasn't going to be able to go in the next day, I put the chicken into the fridge to start defrosting. Twelve hours later the chicken was still a little frozen. I left it out on the counter for a few hours and decided it was finally time to get it ready, frozen or not frozen.
I Googled "how to roast a whole chicken" and found the simplest recipe possible: some salt, some pepper, some olive oil, and whatever herbs I could find (local, dried thyme and oregano with a generous sprinkling of TrueLemon). The grossest part was taking the neck out but all the other giblets were out so it wasn't so bad. (Turkey neck is also a big thing here; folks chop it up and put it in crawfish boils and it's actually pretty delicious). Also, damnit, if I'm going to eat meat, I need to be able to deal with the icky bits. And in case you're wondering, this chicken ran around and ate grass happily for the duration of its life (screw you, Tyson). I bought it from my farmer friend Nancy at the Mid-City Crescent City Farmer's Market.
Once the chicken was prepped it looked like this (with just a little ice in the cavity).
It was actually really cool to rub a chicken. I liked the way it felt in my hands. I popped the chicken into the oven and roasted it according to the recipe. The house smelled SO good. It smelled so good that once the chicken was done I started eating and carving it before I even took a picture. So here's the meat.
Mmm... meat. So much yummy meat. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. There's one drumstick and some thighs under there. What's probably going to happen is I'll freeze it; thanks to The Kitchn for their tips!
Once all the meat was off I knew I was going to use the carcass, so I Googled "how to make stock from a whole chicken" and found this recipe. Just look at those beautiful jars of stock. I'm going to have some in about an hour and a half. I didn't have a huge stock pot so I used the biggest pot I had and got it going.
The stock's currently simmering but once it's done I'm going to use it to make stuffing for Thanksgiving next week.
What's everyone planning to make for Thanksgiving?
No comments:
Post a Comment