Sunday Dinner: Maple Mustard Chicken and Bleu Cheese Hasselback Potatoes

We were supposed to have company today, but I woke up feeling unwell, and we reluctantly called our friends to reschedule our get-together. But I recovered somewhat during the day, and decided to go ahead with our menu, just for us.

First the chicken. This past week we picked up ten lovely shrink-wrapped chickens from the Amish family where we get most of our poultry, and one of these became our dinner. I marinated the parts in the following:

1/2 cup real maple syrup

1/2 cup Dijon mustard

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup olive oil

4 large garlic cloves, minced

2 tsp herbs of choice, or to taste (I used thyme; the original recipe suggested rosemary)

(reserve a bit of marinade for later)

We had intended to grill the chicken, but threatening skies moved the process indoors; I baked it at 375 degrees for an hour, turning and brushing the pieces with the reserved marinade. 

Along with the chicken I made bleu cheese hasselback potatoes, which are kind of a cross between scalloped and baked potatoes. Unskinned baking potatoes are sliced partway through, creating a kind of fan; the potatoes are then placed in cold water, fanning out the slices a bit, and soaked for a few minutes, then dried off, wrapped in some waxed paper and microwaved: 5 minutes; reposition, 5 more minutes. After cooling for a bit, you transfer the potatoes to aluminum foil rectangles that will become their jackets; brush the potatoes with melted butter, opening the slices to get all that buttery goodness inside. Add some thin slices of garlic to some of the slices. Usually recipes for hasselback potatoes call for Parmesan cheese, but we wanted to try bleu cheese, so I stuffed the slices with crumbles of that. Finally, some pepper and salt into the crevices. Wrap up the potatoes and either grill or bake them for about 20 minutes. These turned out very tasty; I think bacon would be another great addition. We also roasted some asparagus to complete the feast.

We were sad that we didn't have our friends around to enjoy dinner, but I was glad we had a successful trial run of this menu...which will return to our plates, with or without guests, in the future.

Note: Speaking of slackage, as I was in the prior post -- I'm a very inconsistent photographer, which means that I'll never be the Pioneer Woman of Lutheranism. I could have taken a photo of our excellent meal...but I didn't. You'll have to imagine the shiny golden glaze on the chicken, the tantalizing promise of a baked potato fan holding treasures of cheese and garlic between each slice, the emerald green of fresh Michigan asparagus in season. Maybe next time.

Potlucks: The Original Food Rave

Today someone sent me a link to a story in the New York Times describing the phenomenon of "food raves" -- ephemerous underground restaurants, patronized via word-of-mouth, that give up-and-coming young chefs a chance to build a customer base without having to deal with the sometimes considerable licensing fees and bureaucratic hassles involved in the currently trendy pursuit of running a food cart.

My first thought, upon reading the article, was, " Good for them." My second was, "I wish we had food raves in our area." And then it occurred to me: What's another example of cooks showing off their signature dishes to a large crowd in a semi-spontaneous way?

Church potlucks.

Whoddathunk we were on the cutting edge of foodie culture?

Potlucks, at least in my state, have had to go increasingly underground because of onerous health department rules regarding advertising meals to the public; basically, if the food isn't made on premises according to state regulations, by people certified to handle food for public consumption, you can't advertise the meal outside your organization. Bulletin or newsletter blurbs are okay, for now; but mention a potluck on your church signboard or newspaper blurb and you're likely to get a frowny-faced visit from a local health department inspector. A couple of years ago our church ran press releases about our midweek Lenten worship that happened to mention a pre-service potluck, and we were promptly spanked by the Powers That Be. You can bet that schooled us.

People who know me are well aware of my liberal credentials. But these are cases where I feel real sympathy with my conservative neighbors who deeply resent this kind of nanny-ish state intrusion into what is simply a group of friends and neighbors coming together for a meal.  Especially when we all know supermarkets with perpetually sepulchral-smelling meat counters filled with irridescent steaks and gray chicken, or restaurants where we would no more order the egg salad sandwich than directly inject the salmonella into our veins, it seems inefficient, as well as petty, for local bureaucrats to make church kitchens -- at least in my lifetime experience a bastion of proud, obsessively hygienic church ladies who've never seen a church surface they didn't want to scrub with Comet, Pine-Sol or Murphy's Oil Soap, who'd likely commit hara-kiri with the ubiquitous church-kitchen electric knife if they ever inadvertently gave someone food poisoning  -- a front line of their war against food contamination.

I've worked in the public sector, engaging in what we believed was improving quality of life for citizens, catching that crusading spirit, and I truly understand how easy it is for health inspectors to see the world as one big, roiling cauldron of pathogens that they have been tasked with controlling at all costs. But -- I mean -- come on. For some reason I trust that Mrs. Tannenbaum's locally famous bratwurst potato salad isn't going to kill me. Not that I know a Mrs. Tannenbaum who makes bratwurst potato salad. Or that, if there were a Mrs. Tannenbaum, she would bring bratwurst potato salad to a potluck. Or that I know of any potlucks, anywhere, held by anyone. I'm just saying.

Frugally Foodie

I was in search of a recipe today, a recipe for applesauce pie -- my mom never made this, but we have some home-canned applesauce that I think would be mighty tasty in a pie -- so I went to my mother's battered (mostly battered by me, as a small child) "green cookbook."

The cover and first few pages have been missing for decades, so I can't tell you the title. I know that my mom got it as a wedding shower present back at the beginning of the 50's; the artwork and photos suggest that it was published a decade earlier. My mother seldom used this book -- she told me the recipes were too fussy and never worked out for her -- but she kept it all her life, with all her other recipes. And it was a big part of my childhood; I treated it first as an interesting picture book, and then later as an inspiration for my budding culinary impulses.

I never did find the applesauce pie recipe I was looking for, which involves eggs and creates a kind of appley custard. Instead, this book suggested simply pouring applesauce into a graham cracker crust, chilling well and plopping some whipped cream on top -- tah-dah: pie.

You've got to love the thrifty, silk-purse-out-of-sow's-ear ethic of the green cookbook. While it has its share of early 20th-century fancy fare like baked Alaska and intricate party canapes, it also contains lots of recipes using stale bread; odds and ends of leftover stews and roasts; wildsourced fruit and game; and what cooks delicately refer to as "variety meats." (If tripe, sweetbreads and hearts ever make a comeback, our household is hooked up with recipes, I'm telling you.)  Need a cake but only have one egg? Bake a one-egg cake. Can't afford a crown roast for a special dinner? Make a sausage "crown" filled with potato salad.  Did the milk turn sour? Make pancakes. Leaf lettuce a bit past its prime? Toss it with a hot bacon vinaigrette.

This shames me a little, as I think about our own penchant for shelling out serious money for the esoteric ingredients of one experimental recipe even as we regularly throw out literal buckets of leftovers,odd bits and Good Ideas At the Time.

Using what you have instead of wanting what you don't have -- not a bad Lenten discipline.