To make midnight mushrooms

This past week, I had a thought. "I've never roasted a chicken," the thought went, "and I should do that." "Good idea, Thought," I, uh, said. "I could really go for some roast chicken." Sadly, I had plenty of leftover pasta from the last cooking night, and had to make it through that first. So it was penne for dinner, penne for lunch, and looking-at-penne-but-making-eggs-instead-because-seriously for breakfast. Finally I was out of food, and chicken could commence.

Once upon a time I had come across a recipe for chicken roasted in a crust of kosher salt, and the idea has stuck with me since then. After some searching, I settled on Jamie Oliver's Chicken in Salt with Fennel, Thyme and Lemon. This was mainly because the recipe gave me an excuse to use the newly discovered mortar and pestle; also, it measured olive oil in "lugs". But how to justify that project when there were so many recipes from Shakespeare's Kitchen I still had to get through? I came up with three reasons:

1) Making the chicken would give me an opportunity to cook one of the side dishes in the book - in this case, Sauteed Mushrooms "in the Italian Fashion." I like to pretend that the quotes aren't there because of the original source, but instead Francine Segan is acknowledging that people in Renaissance England had no frickin' idea what Italian food was actually like.

2) Presenting a dish in a crust that can be broken apart in front of guests is definitely the sort of pageantry that I associate with Early Modern and Medieval cooking.

3) Jamie Oliver is distantly related to William Shakespeare, which I can prove using this TOTALLY LEGIT FAMILY TREE.

Let us begin. As always, my cooking tends to run into problems immediately in the grocery store phase of the adventure. Things were actually going really well at Safeway (due to cost issues, I'm staying away from Whole Foods if I'm not cooking to impress) until I had to hit the produce aisle. The Sauteed Mushrooms require a half cup of endive, which was nowhere to be found. A trip to my trusty Cook's Thesaurus pointed me in the direction of radicchio, arugula, and watercress... none of which were available either. You'll get to see my clever solution later on.

First step is preparing the salt crust for the Chicken in Salt. What you're looking at here is 7 pounds of kosher salt, which is (as Michelle put it) enough to do a driveway. Cracked fennel seeds and peppercorns will provide some flavoring; eggs are for glue, and the water/lemon juice mixture is a little bit of both.

Here they are combined, pre-mixing. The idea is to get a texture like wet sand, or warm snow. Both were fairly appropriate descriptions of the final product, which would be applied...

...to this guy right here. This is my first time dealing with a whole chicken, and it was slightly less gross than I expected. I didn't really do any trimming except for a big piece of fat hanging off the back, so just a rinse and a pat down and it was basically ready to go. Oh, I was very proud of myself for removing the bag with the giblets and other bits from inside - I've encountered a few horror stories about that, so I was well prepared.

Here's the stuff that goes inside: parsley, garlic, the previously-juiced lemons, and (not pictured) all of the mortared thyme and olive oil that didn't get spread around the outside of the bird. I wish I had been smart enough to get a picture of the chicken when it was stuffed, since there was so much inside it that the breast was suddenly tilted the other way. Ah well.

Kris had been watching me prep some of this, and was doubtful that anyone could possibly use 7 pounds of salt in one recipe. Here is all of my salt in play, barely covering the chicken in a stable fashion.

The aluminum foil gets scrunched up to hold the salt in place until it hardens. Jamie Oliver mentions cutting off the excess once you scrunch it closed at the top, and I seem to have failed in reaching that point.

Additional aluminum foil to the rescue! I managed to heave this thing (the world's largest twice baked potato, weighing in at over 11.5 pounds) into a shallow roasting pan just to keep it stable while I get it into the oven.

With two hours to go, I chill out for a while and then (30 min left) prep my ingredients for the Sauteed Mushrooms. I should note that at this point, the entire apartment was smelling more delicious than it ever had before. Winner winner, chicken dinner! But back to the side. First ingredient: mushrooms. The recipe calls for 8 cups of assorted mushrooms; I went with 10 cups of baby button and cremini, since that's what I had and I'm a big believer in throwing in excess vegetables.

 Oh, and remember when I said there was no radicchio? That wasn't entirely true. Booyah!

Here are all my herbs etc. hanging out, ready to go. Parsley, radicchio, thyme, and most interestingly, mint and cinnamon. Those last two flavors come out big-time later on.

When the chicken comes out of the oven it needs to rest for fifteen minutes; that makes it the perfect time to cook up some Italianate mushrooms. They go into the pan to sautee for a minute, and you know something, maybe 10 cups is a bit too much for my pan.

Two cups come out, and everything fits much better.

Because of the measuring mishap, we're a bit over the minute mark when I add the seasoning. A quick stir, and everything gets covered to cook for two minutes. I'll spare you the picture of the covered pan, although I was tempted to just reuse the picture from the Flounder with Dried Plums.

Uncover the pan, and in goes some verjuice replacement, salt and pepper to taste, and we're done. I basically doubled the required amount of verjuice, and I think that was the right decision. And I may have checked salt on an overly salted individual mushroom, because it could have used a bit more in the final accounting. The mushrooms are good enough that, after I test one out on Kris (maybe they're poisonous!) he sneaks into the kitchen to steal a few more.

Now that the mushrooms are done, it's time to wake the chicken up from its nap. I'm looking forward to seeing whether the crust is browned or just a solid white block, but instead I'm confronted with this:

Not exactly the uniform, unbroken shell that I was hoping for. On the bright side it means that I was able to lift a lot of it off without having to break anything. On the other hand, it was pretty clear that I wasn't just going to be able to crack the shell off and brush off the excess salt. No, the salt was everywhere, and both in and on every thing. This was the opposite of all my hopes and dreams.

You'll also notice that one of the downsides to this method is that none of the skin browns or crisps, so the bird looks a little naked. I attempted to remove my naked bird from the salt, and instead of prying up a drumstick I wound up with a bone in my hand.

This is a good sign, in that it tells me that cooking-wise, the mission is a success. Here's another picture which demonstrates my camera's inability to focus on the thing that I'm actually interested in. It's sort of like when you try and point a dog at something, and instead it turns its laser-like focus and keen intellect towards hunting down your finger. But man, that bone is clean. Except for the salt.

The same thing happened when I tried to maneuver a wing out: the whole thing came off.

In fact, the bird basically sectioned itself. The breast separated from the ribs underneath, both leg bones pulled out, an both wings popped off. I was a little disappointed that the two halves of the breast didn't leap apart and slice themselves. Oh, you'll notice that the wings are missing, as well as all sorts of other little bits and pieces. That's because I was already eating everything.

And here we have both dishes in one place. These last two pictures were actually taken from my phone's camera, without flash because otherwise it looked like I was taking a picture on the set of the new Star Trek. I've decided to keep my camera's battery charger in the kitchen from now on, because let's be honest, that's where the camera gets the most use.

Verdict: variable deliciousness! The mushrooms were rather good, though I still feel like they were missing something. Maybe more verjuice or more salt, although in this instance I was glad that something on my plate was relatively salt-free. The stalks on some of the cremini were a little underdone due to their thickness, so next time I would either use one kind of mushroom across the board or toss those in for an extra minute or so before the buttons.

As for the chicken... man am I torn on this. It was delicious. It was salty. If there was a section in the dictionary where they demonstrated how etymologically unrelated words could also overlap, this chicken would be there. And not just a picture, oh no, a full-fledged and physical roast chicken leaping from the pages of Merriam-Webster like a majestic unicorn, if unicorns resembled chickens at all. By the time I was done picking at the incredibly juicy and tender bits of chicken that were falling off the bone, my tongue hurt a bit from all the salt. And I kept eating, because it was that good. Lemon and fennel are a potent combination. Almost none of the dark meat made it to the table, and absolutely none of it survived the first night. The breasts went into the fridge, and although they were a bit on the dry side when I ate them over the next two days, that was to be expected. If I were smart I would have pulled some meat off one the first night just to see what it was like. And honestly, I've run into much drier fridgechicken. In the future, I have some ideas to help the crust, including starting my work in a pan, having a thinner crust so it bakes through, and trussing the bird so that the wings and legs don't flop out through the salt. Just looking at the breakage pattern, though, it seems like the big issues were the holes at both ends of the carcass, so steam or moisture coming up might also be an issue. Not sure what to do about that.

TL;DR - There are some alterations that I need to make to these dishes, but would make both again.

Crazy surprise post coming up on Wednesday.


Well, I guess it's not a surprise anymore.

Where are the vile beginners of this fray?

To start this blog off with a bang (ye olde bange, as it would have been called), I decided to kick off this past Sunday with not one but two recipes from Shakespeare's Kitchen. Actually, that's a bit of a lie. I started off with two dishes because the entree would have been very lonely on the plate without a side, and because I was really worried about falling behind on the project right off the bat.

NOTE: The previous sentence is also entirely lies. I was so worried about falling behind in my cooking that I began with three dishes, since one of them involved ingredients cooling overnight in the fridge. Renaissance Rice Balls will be featured in the next post. For now, let's just acknowledge that I had already been slaving away for a while, turning on rice cookers and purchasing the wine I had forgotten to pick up earlier, before I actually started cooking.

For my first foray into early modern cookery, I chose Chicken with Wine, Apples, and Dried Fruit and Six Onions Simmered with Raisins, which (I kid you not) involves three onions and sauteing. The Six Onions seemed like a fairly simple dish to make, and since it takes about 17 minutes from start to finish I thought I might be able to squeeze it in during the 30 minutes of occasional stirring at the end of the Chicken. The Chicken was chosen for a number of reasons: it didn't look extremely difficult, didn't take an incredible amount of time, didn't involve kitchen tools I don't possess, and didn't serve ten people. It also didn't involve the two "ingredients" that are going to become the bane of my existence: Renaissance Stock and Renaissance Dough. Many of the recipes in the book involve these two things, which are separate recipes in and of themselves. The Stock in particular is going to be a bitch, since it's fairly labor-intensive, will use up my one big pot, and will overall be annoying to deal with. I know I can freeze it in useful quantities, but some of the recipes call for a tablespoon or two and I don't want to thaw out a cup to get a spoonful.

Let's move on to ingredient prep. This is always the thing that takes the longest when I cook, and I harbor no small amount of ill-will towards cookbooks that promise 15/30 minute recipes but fail to mention that prep time is extra. I'm also really bad at judging what I can do while the cooking is actually occurring, so I like to have everything out of the way. Prepping for the Six Onions was really simple, and mostly involved slicing onions and onion-related vegetables. The great thing about the recipe is that the ingredients are added in two batches, which makes it simple to get everything ready. Onions, leeks, and scallions in the bowl on the right; raisins, brown sugar, salt, and five-color pepper on the left.

Also, did you know this is what leeks looks like in their natural state? I did not. This is the first time I've encountered them outside of a production of Henry V.

I did run into one issue with the recipe, which was the presence of verjuice. I'd never even heard of the stuff before this week, and it turned out that my Whole Foods doesn't carry it. Some in-store internet research later, and I learned that both white wine vinegar and lemon juice could be used as substitutes. I decided to hedge my bets and use a combination of the two.

I'm already beginning to think that ingredient substitution is going to be a running theme of the blog. I couldn't find real currants for the Chicken, so I settled for Zante currants (basically small raisins from black grapes). Although, if Segan wanted currant currants, you'd think she would have specified red or black or etc.

But moving on to the Chicken. Here we have the fruits and spices and such. I learned that dates are absolutely magical, and I would like to eat them all the time.

That's cinnamon and nutmeg over everything. Interesting fact about fresh cinnamon and nutmeg: the good folks at Whole Foods are convinced that if you shake the jar really, really hard, something useful will happen. Note the plastic tops. I'm not a real chef, though, so I had to settle for a grater.

Also! I accidentally poured too much wine into the measuring cup, and there was only one good solution.

Note to self: do dishes before cooking so sink full of dishes doesn't end up on the blog. End note.

The most important thing I learned from prepping the chicken itself was that I am not cut out to be a butcher. The recipe calls for four legs with thighs, separated. I watched two videos and read three tutorials on how to do that, and in the end wound up cutting all four apart through the end of a bone rather than through the joint. Slight fail on my part. Luckily, aside from some ugly drumsticks and marrow bleeding out, there were no ill effects.

At this point, it's a little after 9pm, and I'm starving. Luckily, I have some cold leftover pizza, known in Elizabethan England alternately as "the time-traveler's special" and "what devilry is this?"

Moving on to the cooking. Step one was to brown the chicken, and I was already at a loss. I know that when I brown ground beef, I'm basically cooking it all through. But what about chicken? Was I cooking it, or just putting a crust on it? How long would it take for everything to be cooked completely? Would the 30min simmering in the wine later be enough to keep me from dying if I didn't cook the chicken all the way now? I had no idea.

Here's the chicken browning:

Deglazing with some of the white wine:

Fruit in the pan to make the sauce (can you spot my next mistake?):

Chicken back in the pan with the rest of the wine, and then set to simmer:

Cover that up, and back to the onions! Into the pan they go:

After those saute for a while, the other ingredients get tossed in. Some stirring, then the verjuice-replacement, and then they're done.

The finished product:

I had almost ten minutes to spare when that was finished, which gave me time to check on the Chicken a bit more thoroughly and drink my wine a bit more thoroughly. After determining that the chicken was actually cooked and would not kill me, I was done. 10pm, and dinner was served.

For dessert, I splurged on a pint of Goat Cheese and Cognac Fig ice cream from jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. I did not eat the whole pint. I did manage to fling a large amount of it onto the floor.

The Verdict

Everything turned out delicious! The chicken was really tender, and had a nice fruity taste. I find that a big problem with chicken (at least when you don't marinate it) is that the flavor is all concentrated in the skin. That was the case here to a certain extent, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the taste the meat picked up. The dish needed some salt, and in the future I may reduce the sauce a bit more or thicken it so that it sticks to the chicken better.

The Onions were great, but they don't exactly go with the Chicken. Combining the two in one bite was a good way to erase the Chicken completely. I had hoped that the raisins would be a flavor match with the fruit, but they don't seem to add anything to the flavor of the Onions as a whole - they're just bursts of sweetness in the middle of everything else. I was also afraid that all the strong tastes in the Onions would somehow overpower each other (I'm not sure how that works, now that I think about it), but that wasn't the case. The really interesting thing is that when I added the bootleg verjuice, the flavor of the whole dish went in a completely different direction than it seemed to be heading previously. Next time I may just stop the recipe before that step and see if it plays better with others. Interestingly, the original recipe for the Onions involves boiling and an egg tossed in with the verjuice. 

The Chicken is also good cold. The Six Onions is a great sandwich topping.

The ice cream was delicious, as was the wine.

I need to decide on a tense for this blog.