Roast chicken with gravy and multiple sides

This meal counts as an official extravaganza* and then some. Six new recipes, five of which are from different cookbooks that I get to cross off the annual list.

But unlike some extravaganzas, which more or less put me under the table by the time I’ve got them on the table, this time I got smarter and approached it more like I would a meal if I was entertaining: I prepared as much food ahead as I could, and made sure to keep some of the courses simple. The result: I got to take a much-needed winter’s nap Sunday afternoon and still had time to make chicken broth on the side in time for use in the evening meal.

I say this not to boast of what I accomplished, but to promote my message as an evangelist for advance prep and how it can improve your life. Here’s the recipe and the game plan:

Roast chicken 101

Adapted from “The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook”

Ingredients:

1 large roasting chicken

2 tablespoons softened butter, divided

2 medium onions, sliced crosswise into thick slices

1 lemon, pricked all over with a fork

3 large garlic cloves, smashed

4 sprigs fresh thyme

1 cup chicken broth

Method:

Let chicken and butter stand for a half hour. (Just enough time to get in my belated walk on the treadmill.) Remove any giblets from chicken. Rinse chicken and pat dry. Tuck wings under body. Sprinkle chicken inside and out with salt and pepper. Insert lemon, thyme and garlic cloves into cavity. Rub outside of chicken with 1 tablespoon softened butter. Tie legs together with twine (or use a washable food loop.)

Place onion slices across the bottom of a stove-top-safe roasting pan to make a bed for the chicken. Place chicken on top. Bake for 1½ hours at 425 degrees or until done (180 degrees on thermometer). Remove the chicken from the pan and let rest while you prepare the gravy.

Try to drain off the fat. Place roasting pan over heat. Add broth to the pan, scraping up any brown bits. Cook until liquid is reduced by half. Add butter. If your aim is making traditional gravy, strain and serve. If you’re more in the market for a pan sauce, remove the lemon from inside the chicken, cut it open and strain the juice into the sauce for a tangier touch. Remove onions for another use (awesome on roast-beef-Havarti Panini).

Rating: Really basic, really tasty chicken. Easy and repeatable. Makes a fairly dark gravy, if you care.

The menu:

Roast chicken and gravy

Goat cheese mashed potatoes

Carrots with garlic persillade

Three-vinegar salad

Benne wafers with pimento cheese

The game plan:

Two days before: Start thawing chicken.

Day before: Make goat cheese mashed potatoes. Mix up benne wafers in food processor, form into a log and chill. Chop garlic and parsley for persillade.

Morning of: Bake wafers. Mix up pimento cheese. Slice carrots, steam and refrigerate.

Late afternoon: Set out chicken and butter. Slice onions for chicken. Wash and assemble chicken, put in oven.

Meanwhile: Mix up salad dressing. Slice up radicchio for salad. Bring potatoes and persillade to room temperature, mixing oil into garlic and parsley.

Take a break: Set out wafers, pimento cheese and wine. Your chopping is pretty much done by this point so it’s OK to dip in.

Shortly before: Saute carrots with remaining ingredients and add persillade. Add butter lettuce to salad and toss. Bring chicken out of oven and put in mashed potatoes at reduced temperature for 20 minutes. While potatoes cook, make gravy. 

This approach gave me time to get the resulting dishes done in stages, leaving me with a manageable stack after the final prep. Altogether, it was a reasonable meal. I wouldn’t have been horrified if there had been guests present, although then I would have had to clean the house on top of it.

*To be an official Sunday extravaganza, the meal must involve five dishes, four of which are new recipes. I know it’s silly, but I made the rules.

Goat cheese mashed potatoes

Any cookbook with the phrase “do-ahead” in the title was bound to land on my bookshelf. No woman who schedules her panics can resist such a title. I’ve only tried a handful of recipes from here so far, but all have been at least serviceable, and all were blissfully made ahead. Future self is always grateful.

Goat cheese mashed potatoes

Adapted from “Happy Holidays from the Diva of Do-Ahead,” by Diane Phillips

Ingredients:

8 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks

6 tablespoons butter, softened, divided

½ cup grated Parmesan, divided

½ cup low fat sour cream

½ cup plain nonfat yogurt

6 ounces goat cheese

Zest of 1 lemon

2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives

Method:

Cook potatoes in a pot of boiling salted water until tender. Drain and rice into large bowl. Whip potatoes with 3 tablespoons softened butter, sour cream, yogurt, goat cheese, lemon zest and chives.

Grease baking dishes with two of the remaining tablespoons of butter, including up the sides. You can bake this in one 13-by-9 pan, or divide it into smaller containers. I used a 9-by-9 and one smaller glass dish. Sprinkle dish or dishes evenly with ¼ cup Parmesan. Spread potato mixture over the top. Dot surfaces with remaining tablespoon of butter and remaining Parmesan cheese.

Do ahead: At this point you can bake the potatoes for 20 minutes at 350, or refrigerate them for a few days, or freeze and rethaw. Bring dish up to room temperature before baking.

Rating: Not too shabby. Hard to go wrong with potatoes, goat cheese or lemon zest. 

Deviations: I have to confess that the lemon zest was an accident. I bought a log of goat cheese with lemon zest and thought, why not? Why not indeed? Likewise the addition of yogurt was designed to get around the fact that I hadn't bought quite as much goat cheese as called for and wasn't coming up with quite the creamy texture I sought. And naturally I added the bit about ricing the potatoes, because how else do you achieve heaven?

Carrots with garlic persillade

I used a mix of orange and red carrots, leaving the skins on the red carrots for contrast.

If you think you don’t like cooked carrots, I understand. There are lots of cooked carrots in this world I don’t like either. Many of them are still lurking in those frozen vegetable mixes in the store, fairly flavorless orange blobs that get mushy on the outside before they get cooked on the inside. Those seem like a terrible thing to do to a formerly fresh carrot.

But after trying cooked carrots again as an adult in control of the recipe, they have their places in the food pantheon, either steamed, stir-fried to tender crisp or roasted to caramelly goodness. (Among my favorites is the Tunisian carrot salad from Jan. 1996 Bon Appetit.) This recipe was respectable, although I wondered what adding a little red pepper flakes might do ….

Fresh carrots with a garlicky persillade

Adapted from “The I Love to Cook Book” by Lauren Groveman

Ingredients:

3 pounds carrots, sliced on the bias

3 garlic cloves, minced

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

¼ cup olive oil

½ cup chicken stock or other broth

2 teaspoons brown sugar

3 tablespoons butter

Method:

Steam carrots, stopping the cooking a minute ahead of when they would be fully cooked. Drain and plunge into ice water to stop the cooking. (I used a steamer bag to cook the carrots in the microwave and just plunked the bag into the freezer right away.)

Combine minced garlic and parsley. Stir in olive oil and some salt and pepper to taste.

Heat butter, sugar, stock and carrots in a large skillet and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and simmer uncovered until the liquid evaporates, the carrots are fully cooked and you’re starting to see some color, about 10 minutes or so. Stir in persillade mixture and cook for another minute.

Rating: Fine enough. Decent counterpoint to a meat and potatoes meal.

Do ahead tips: You can mix up the persillade and steam the carrots the day before, then proceed with the skillet portion of the recipe.

Three-vinegar salad

Every extravaganza can use an easy, fast-fix palate-cleanser.  This wasn’t superlative, but it did pair nicely with roast chicken and goat cheese mashed potatoes.

Mixed salad with three vinegars

Adapted from Food & Wine’s 2001 Cookbook

Ingredients:

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

2 teaspoons red wine vinegar

1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

1 teaspoon raspberry vinegar

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 head Boston lettuce

½ a medium size radicchio

¼ cup shaved Parmesan

Method:

Mix mustard and vinegars in a serving bowl. Whisk in olive oil. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Tear lettuce into bite size pieces and add to bowl. Thinly slice radicchio and add to bowl. Toss with dressing. Top with Parmesan.

Rating:

Not as much of a wower as I might have expected given the ingredients. It was just fine. The two tones of leaves make it somewhat pretty. Maybe some chopped shallots would kick it up a notch.

Benne wafers and pimento cheese

This is a slightly fancified version of crackers and cheese spread. The crackers have a nice taste on their own. I wound up adding garlic powder and cayenne pepper to the pimento cheese to make it have more zing. I’m sure some of the leftovers will go on sandwiches quite nicely.

The recipes come from a collection of recipes from Martha’s Vineyard. This segment of the book featured the African-American settlers; hence the seemingly Southern recipe in a cookbook about a Northern island.

Benne wafers

From “The Martha’s Vineyard Cookbook” by Louise Tate King and Jean Stewart Wexler

Ingredients:

½ cup sesame seeds

1 cup flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

¼ cup butter

5 tablespoons milk

1 beaten egg

Method:

Toast sesame seeds on a baking sheet for about 5 minutes at 350 degrees. Let cool. (If you’re the sort of person who is frequently tempted to skip the roasting of nuts step, this is not one of those times you can skip and get the same results. Just as with sesame oil, the roasted version is so much more richly flavored.)

Mix flour, baking powder and salt in a food processor. Add butter, cut up into small chunks, and pulse to combine. Add milk 1 tablespoon at a time. Whir in sesame seeds just to combine.

Roll dough into a cylinder as you would slice-and-bake cookie dough. Wrap in waxed paper and chill until firm. (This is going to take at least an hour, and making it the night before is even better, because this is a much softer dough than most cracker or cookie doughs, so having it cold enough to slice well is helpful.) Slice into rounds up to ¼-inch thick. Place on parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Brush with beaten egg. Bake at 350 degrees until golden, 12-15 minutes depending on thickness.

You can make this early in the day and store at room temperature in a container.

Pimento cheese

Adapted from “The Martha’s Vineyard Cookbook”

Ingredients:

2 cups grated cheddar cheese

½ cup mayonnaise

Tabasco, three dashes or to taste

½ teaspoon garlic powder

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

Black pepper and salt to taste

4 ounces pimentos, drained

Method:

Whirr cheese and mayonnaise together in a food processor. Place in a bowl and stir in remaining ingredients. (This can be made ahead and stored in the refrigerator. Its consistency is such that it doesn’t need to come to room temperature for spreadability.)