Tastes Like Chicken

Dignity. Raw, plucked chickens really have none, do they? Come to think of it, cooked chickens look goofy too.

However, since I have been obsessed with various versions of roast chicken or chicken in a pot lately, there have been quite a few floppy birds passing through my kitchen, dressed in nothing but salt and pepper.

This one below, for example, had a recipe (thank you, Americ'as Test Kitchen -- a/k/a the people from Cook's Illustrated) which required it to sit in the fridge overnight with a mixture of kosher salt, pepper, and baking powder on its skin, resulting in a funky looking bird the next day.

It really did make a super-crunchy skin. I could literally hear it shatter as I cast WW protocol to the wind and ate the skin -- first. HA! I think it was worth the experiment, don't you?

And of course, my demented brain couldn't resist this shot, which came about after I was checking out how well everything had cooked and whether the juices had reabsorbed inside after resting the bird for 20 minutes, as directed. Can you see the neck opening? (And no, I decline to answer how many glasses of sauvignon blanc I had tonight.)

I do think, though, that over the past few weeks, my favorite recipe has turned out to be French Chicken in a Pot, also from the folks at Cook's. It provided a fitting inauguration of my new Mario pot, no?

It's a really straightforward recipe which yields sublimely juicy chicken, though the skin is a dead loss, since it's not crunchy at all. (On the bright side, I could save WW points by throwing it all away.) Having tried both types of birds, I have decided that the FreshDirect (antibiotic-free) bird wins over the Whole Foods chicken.

Of course, all those chicken carcasses have yielded an abundance of materials for homemade chicken broth. Yum! (More use of the Mario pot. Yay!)

And when I was recovering from my triple infection, what more could you want than chicken soup, especially one made from super-succulent chicken? Here you see the base: carrots, celery, onions, and a "gourmet mushroom mix" I bought from Fairway before I got sick.

Et, voila! My soup (some of which now resides in my freezer -- yippee!) had all of the above and some fresh spinach and scallions as well.

Tomorrow night, my sweetie and I are off to Mom's for Chinese New Year dinner. YES! (The actual new year is on February 14th, and will be The Year of the Tiger.) Sooooo much more food p*rn to come. Heheheheh...