golden chicken

There are few things that genuinely terrify me in the kitchen. One of them is whole chicken. The first time I bought one, I didn’t let it thaw properly, then found the necessity of poking and prodding the poor chicken’s… hole… completely disgusting. As in, I danced around the kitchen shrieking until my husband came in and had a go at it. Even he joined me in (manly) shrieking after a couple seconds.

So until I screw up the courage, I’ll settle for cleaned, separated chicken parts that come in a neat little package at the supermarket. My favorite are drumsticks, which are about two bucks for five and highly appealing when roasted.

I can’t take full credit for this method; the basics come from the quirky French mind of Clothilde Dusolier, blogging doyenne of Chocolate & Zucchini, the best food blog… well, ever. The best part is, it’s easy to customize and mold to your own tastebuds.

Easy Oven Chicken

Drumsticks
S&P

Prepare meat by rubbing it with S&P, or any other spice you darn well want. Or cloak it in barbecue sauce. Or Italian dressing. Or drizzle some olive oil and tuck in a few sprigs of fresh herb and garlic cloves around it. The possibilities are endless.

Lay the meat in a glass or metal baking pan (lightly grease the bottom if you’re not using oil on the chicken). Stick in a 360-degree oven, leave it in there for an hour, and presto! Perfect, juicy, crunchy-skinned chicken.

cucumber babies

Anyone who knows me can tell you that I was surely an… odd child. I preferred reading to sweating, styled my own hair, wrote plays and forced my brothers into the boring princess roles, and generally attempted to wear as many colors as humanly possible on any given day. And though I had a couple Barbies and stuffed animals, in the summertime, my doll of choice was a cucumber.

My grandparents had a lovely, sprawling vegetable garden that produced an abundance of lovely, sprawling cucumbers. I mean, cucumbers as long as your arm and thick as a saxophone. They weren’t much good for eating or pickling, and somehow my Nanny and I decided they’d be best for playing. Cradled in the crook of my arm and wrapped with a couple of banana leaves for blankets, the cucumber took on the life of a doll after Nanny gave it a cartoonish, Sharpie face.

See? Odd, and yet, so cool.

I still love the sweet, crisp crunch of a cucumber, whether in pickle or fresh form. (I haven’t tried the former yet; that will be a future, autumnal post.) Always best when gleaned by the bag-ful from someone’s garden, these babies are delicious in a million different ways. Here are a few of my favorites:

* Chopped and tossed with fresh tomatoes, olive oil, feta cheese and garlic.
* Sliced up like chips and eaten with a coating of S&P.
* Diced and substituted for relish in tuna salad.
* Julienned and stuffed into falafel.
* Thinly sliced, on any sandwich.
* The French way: chopped and mixed with fresh mint, sea salt and a bit of plain yogurt.

Sidenote: The modern version of my cucumber baby, dubbed “Little Boonie” by my delightful Nanny, currently resides on my windowsill. It’s a comforting piece of décor.

guffaw-scrawls

Oftentimes the greatest recipes are the simplest. And there’s nothing like a warm snickerdoodle to convince you of that. That soft, pillowy texture, that creamy, buttery taste and all dusted with crystals of cinnamon and sugar… bet your mouth is watering right now.

These are my husband’s favorite cookies, and the recipe happens to be the very first cookie concoction I ever tried. Of course, chocolate chip is the classic starter for a preteen baker, but after my eyes locked on the word “snickerdoodle” in the cookbook index, there was no going back. Little did I know the recipe produced, oh, about six dozen cookies. My sugar-lovin’ dad was delighted, but I was hot and sweaty by the time I’d shoveled all the cookies off the pan.

So here is your fair warning: you’ll have cookies coming out your fridge, pantry, freezer and ears with this recipe. Totally worth it.


Snickerdoodles

3 3/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 sticks butter at room temperature
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1/4 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 cup cinnamon sugar

Stir together the first three ingredients and set aside. Cream the butter and sugar, then add the eggs, milk and vanilla and beat well. Gradually add flour mixture and beat til combined. Chill the dough for about an hour (or 20 minutes or so in the freezer). Roll dough into one-inch balls, roll around in a bunch of cinnamon and sugar, then place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 for 7-8 minutes.

pearls of wisdom

Today I was heartbroken to learn that Mississippi leads the nation in obesity. Closely followed by Tennessee and Alabama. Sigh. Texas, oh Texas, where is your fire? Until now, you always made good on your promise that everything would be bigger (and so much better) within your hallowed borders. I’m disappointed, mother land, truly disappointed.

One food item sure to tip those scales in our favor is the infamous corn-on-the-cob at our state fair. For four dollars, you can pile on all the calories you walked off among the bright lights and whirling machines with a giant ear of corn quite literally dunked in a vat of butter. (Let us all pause in reverence of the very concept: a vat of butter.) I’d imagine that baby has as many calories as five candy bars. But who’s counting?

However, lest our population dwindle because of that ever-pesky heart disease, today I proffer a beautiful, flavorful, simple way to make corn-on-the-cob that will make your mouth water and your waistband gape. I guess health really is more important than winning at everything.

And hey, we were once a full-fledged republic. Try to top that, ol’ Miss!


Perfect Corn-on-the-Cob

A couple ears of corn
Two teaspoons olive oil
S&P

Husk and clean corn. Brush each ear lightly with olive oil, sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper (or other spices - chili powder’s a good one), and wrap each ear loosely in foil, twisting the ends to seal each “packet.” Stick them in a 350-degree oven for 25 minutes, unwrap, inhale that delicious steam and immediately devour.

on love, and tomatoes

On a long, yawning Saturday, when you’ve nothing better to do than go for a swim or crack open a new book, the delicious and almighty Cheesewich stakes its culinary claim. A rather simple affair with bread, cheddar, garlic and butter, the Cheesewich exists wholly in dedication to my all-time favorite summer produce (see how deftly I avoided the fruit-vegetable argument?)… tomato.

There are a few tests to ensure that you have the right tomato for a Cheesewich. If your tomato does not fulfill all of these requirements, I say drop it into a homemade marinara and leave my precious Cheesewich be. It cannot abide a lesser specimen.

First, the tomato must utterly overtake your palm when you pick it up. If it is the size of a tangerine, laugh in its face and toss it aside. Second, the tomato must be so richly crimson that when the first slice falls off its shiny face you helplessly gasp in delight. Third, the tomato must have been gathered from your own garden or bought from a roadside stand or farmer’s market.

Once you have the crucial item in hand, nothing will make better, more immediate use of it than a Cheesewich. I don’t know what your family calls it, but we Randalls (and now Boones) dubbed this sucker a Cheesewich, and since my dad is the number-one Cheesewich chef in the world, I’m taking his word for it.


Cheesewich
(makes two)

4 slices of good bread
1 tablespoon of butter
Garlic salt
2 handfuls of cheddar
A Perfect Tomato

Brush 2 slices of bread with the melted butter and generously sprinkle garlic salt on top. Then generously sprinkle cheddar cheese on the two naked slices. Bake the bread, topping-side up, on a foil-lined baking sheet in a 375-degree oven (or broil) for about 5 minutes, until cheese is fully melted and bubbling in a mouth-watering fashion. Remove, slide onto two plates, and mound slices of fresh tomato on the cheesy side. Top with the buttery side, and eat immediately.

Sidenote: Keep a pile of napkins on hand for this one.

cobblin' genius

I trust that I’ve already convinced you of my die-hard love for Texas peaches. Now, allow me to convince you of the utter necessity of falling in love with my Nanny’s recipe for cobbler. Sure, there are hundreds, even thousands maybe, of sweet little grandmas championing their cobbler methods above all else, but to them I say, “Prepare to meet your doom.”

Those classic, crusty strips criss-crossing fruit in a Pyrex dish? My Nanny tosses her hair at them. (She might stick out her tongue, too; she was a pre-kindergarten teacher after all…) Instead, she has concocted an easy-as-pie, even-more-delicious way to fix cobbler that results in pools of buttery juice, mountains of caramelized dough and valleys of sugar-soaked fruit — and all that after about five minutes of kitchen time.

And on an occasional summer afternoon, after Daddy Tom (her husband, my grandfather) wanders out toward the four stalwart peach trees bordering the driveway in their front yard and comes back with a couple jewels in hand, she’ll whip up one of these babies with fresh peaches from their very own land, and nothing tastes sweeter.

Believe me, you don’t know how darn lucky you are that I’m sharing her recipe with you.

Nanny’s Cobbler

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter or oleo
1 cup flour
Pinch salt
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup milk
3 cups fruit (peaches!!)

Melt butter in 1 1/2-quart dish for oven. Combine flour, salt, baking powder and 1 cup sugar. Stir in milk. Pour into middle of melted butter. Place fruit in the middle of the dough. Pour 1 cup sugar on top of the fruit. DO. NOT. STIR.

Stick the whole thing into a 325-degreee oven for 50 minutes to an hour. In my immortal Nanny’s words, you’ll get a “crazy crust great tasting cobbler.”

Sidenote: Every time Nanny invites us up for dinner we hope and pray cobbler will be waiting in the wings. It usually is, and it tends to be even better with a hunk of vanilla ice cream on top.

jam session

The expanse of time after noon til suppertime in the South is usually so blistering hot it feels like a wet electric blanket has been tossed over the whole world. It’s a time best reserved for naps, mint juleps and porch swinging. Unfortunately, many corporations in our great nation do not understand this.

As a teacher, however, I thumb my nose at them and enjoy long bouts of reading and cooking in air-conditioned comfort, though gin gimlets tend to be my favorite alcoholic company.

Last week, in an effort to buck up my status as Southern housewife, I strapped on my apron and headed for the kitchen, bravely entering the realm of a cooking pastime I just knew would result in sticky, messy disaster: jam-making. I was armed only with gritted teeth, high hopes and a simple recipe I’d found on the Internet.

And while the jar sterilizing, strawberry and rhubarb chopping and bubble watching were more time-consuming than I’d figured, the whole thing ended up being a smashing success. Especially considering I’d imagined ending up with gallons and gallons of ruby-hued jam and no where to put it but Tupperware. The recipe below is tweaked a bit for clarity, but best of all, it’s manageable. You’ll end up with about 2-3 cups of homemade jam — not 87.

Berry Jam

2 1/4 cups cane sugar
2 1/2 cups crushed berries (feel free to add those deliciously tart crimson stalks, too)
A squirt of lemon juice

Start by thoroughly cleaning your jam jars by sticking them in a boiling pot of water. Remove the pot from heat, and let the jars sit in there until you’re ready to pour the jam. Clean the lids by dunking them quickly in the boiling water. The hot jam mixture works better with warm jars and lids.

Mix up the sugar, berries and lemon juice in a good-sized pot on high heat, stirring regularly until the mixture comes to a boil (this will happen faster than you think). Reduce heat to medium, and continue cooking at a slow boil (20-30 bubbles on the surface is ideal) for about 15 minutes. Mixture will still be thin but pretty as a jewel.

Fill jars immediately (funnels are a good idea here) and cap. Line them up on the windowsill so you can admire them as they cool. Once they’re about room temperature, put them in the fridge and enjoy within the hour!

Sidenote: My husband can’t stand preserves and jam, and he thought this stuff was to-die-for. There’s the true measure of success.

peachy keen

Georgia may be known across the country as a land flowing with milk and peaches, but we all know the sun shines brightest (and most hellishly) in Texas. And that means fuzzy-skinned fruit just as sweet and succulent as the ones produced by our Southern neighbors.

As soon as mid-June comes around, the skinny roads meandering through the Texan countryside play host to scores of itty bitty fruit-and-veggie stands, most of them run by overall-clad, dusty farmer’s wives or retirees with a piece of straw in their mouths. They stick signs by the side of the road with squished, painted letters promising “Shelled Peas! Melon! Jacksonville Tomatoes!” and, if you’re very lucky, one of those signs will hold the seven juiciest letters in the summer alphabet: p-e-a-c-h-e-s.

I don’t care if your wife is in labor or you’re already late for a funeral — when you see one of those signs, you pull over just as fast as you can. Take the two minutes to hand over a couple crumpled bills for that precious mound of homegrown peaches, almost always balanced in a little basket, then carefully dumped in a plastic Wal-mart bag for your enjoyment. At least when you get back in the car and time rushes you on, you can dampen its obnoxious ticking with your first bite of that gorgeous, peachy flesh.