Chicken cooking juices cooking down  to deliciousness.

I taught myself how to sew by sewing on cheap gold lame`. Those of you who know how to sew know how completely insane that previous sentence is. Lame`, especially the cheap kind, shreds like mad. Sewing machines  get cranky when forced to sew lame. 

But what did  I know? basically nothing, so I went on my merry way sewing up that awful fabric.  A local toy store had me making dress up cakes for little girls.  Those capes were my sewing school.

As I have discovered, my usual method of learning how to do things, just barging ahead, failing as I go often ends up teaching me advanced techniques very early on in my learning curve.

This seems to be true in my cooking as well. Most fancy chefs say that a roasted chicken is insanely hard to do well.  Apparently warming chicken up for hours in an oven after it has been cooked is supposed to be a disaster for the chicken. I didn't know  that.  Given that most of my chicken cooking is for Shabbat, I tend to cook the chicken early in the day and then put it back in the oven to warm just before I light candles. We usually don't eat until 8:00 pm or so. Tonight the chicken will be warming in the oven for  two and a half hours.

When we sit down to eat it, the chicken won't taste like soggy wood. It will be delicious.

So how do I manage to make it taste good when others fail??  I'm not quite sure.  This is what I do though. I cook the chicken uncovered in a roasting ban. After the chicken is cooked, I pull it out of the pan , put in a clean pan and then refrigerate the chicken. Then I add a bunch of liquid to  the chicken pan, and some additional flavors. I then boil the chicken juices and the additions down until they get syrupy. 

I cover the cooked chicken with the fortified chicken juices and then it sits in it's rich bath while it warms for our dinner.

Tonight's chicken was made with the juice and rind of four Meyer lemons, and lots of black pepper. After the chickens were cooling I added ginger, Absolute Citron, orange juice and the juice of yet another Meyer lemon to the pan and stirred up all of the burnt bits into the cooking juices.I poured the improved chicken juices over the chicken..and it will be ready to throw back into the oven just before Shabbat.

Another great activity this week, I re-glued the legs of one of my dining room chairs. I MacGuivered  clamps to hold everything in place  out of rubber bands. It's dopey looking but it worked.