Skip to main content
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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...
1 comment
Read more

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...
8 comments
Read more

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...
2 comments
Read more