Greetings from the Cape

Happy summer! We've been busy settling into our summer digs and visiting all our favorite haunts. I've already been to the Bass River Farmers' Market, Tuckernuck Farm to pick up our CSA basket, and Miss Scarlet's Blue Ribbon Farm to pick up 113 pounds of piggy that my in-laws purchased. We visited this property (drool), and fantasized about starting a little farm of our own here on the Cape, complete with a pony, some goats and a few chickens too. Maybe someday.

And despite the fact that we've eaten here (twice), and here (swoon), and here, and here, and here, and here....wow, that's a lot of eating out....I have also managed to cook up a few good meals! I cannot, however, fit into my pants. C'est la vie.

The first meal I made was a couple of roasted chickens from Miss Scarlet's Blue Ribbon Farm in Yarmouth Port. (Read more about her and her farm here.) Of course I made Piero's chickens. Remember Piero? He's my wealthy, aristocratic Italian boyfriend who spends half the year producing amazing wine in Argentina. He raises bees...chickens...and wee bit of hell, I suspect.

Anyway, the last 5 times I have roasted chickens, I made this recipe. The skin is burnished and the flavor is outstanding. I highly recommend it, especially if you are using locally sourced chickens and honey. From your backyard is preferable...but in a pinch, you can call on Miss Scarlet like I do.

Honey, Lemon and Soy Glazed Chickens

Printable Recipe

This chicken is rich and flavorful, both from the simple glaze and the aromatic stuffing. Serve with roasted potatoes and a green salad.

Prep time: 10 minutes

Total time: about 1 1/2 hours

Yield: serves 4-6

Ingredients:

2 three-pound chickens

6 cloves of garlic, smashed

4 sprigs of rosemary

2 lemons, one sliced and one juiced

salt and pepper

1/4 cup honey

2 tablespoons soy sauce

Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Pat both chickens dry and season inside and out with salt and pepper. Place in a large roasting pan.

2. Stuff each chicken equally with the smashed garlic, rosemary springs and lemon slices.

3. In a small bowl, whisk the honey with the soy sauce and lemon juice. Brush each chicken liberally with this mixture (about 2/3), reserving the rest for basting.

4. Roast chickens in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes. Reduce heat to 325 and brush all over the rest of the glaze. Return the chickens to the oven and continue to roast for 45 minutes longer, or until the juices run clear when the thighs are pierced (and the meat registers 170 degrees). Remove from oven and let rest for 15 minutes. Carve and serve immediately.

Roasted Baby Fingerling Potatoes

I've been obsessed with these teeny fingerling potatoes ever since my sister-in-law served them up on Easter Sunday. They are, arguably, the best roasted potatoes I've ever eaten with their exquisitely crisp exterior and tender, fluffy middle. Spiked with a hint of fragrant rosemary and pungent garlic and sprinkled with a touch of sea salt, they taste like the best french fries ever--even my uber-picky thirteen-year-old loves these (admittedly with ketchup, but whatever. He's eating a whole food, for Heaven's sake!).



Potatoes like these used to be cast-offs, tossed in the rubbish heap (or given to the help) when potato fields were harvested. Now the secret's out and folks harvest potatoes early on purpose because they are so, so wonderful and tender. Sometimes they have wee fingerlings at the farmers' market. I've also seen them at Trader Joes and Whole Foods. Regular fingerlings work well too, but you'll need to cook them a little longer.


I tossed mine with spring garlic (the early harvest kind that you don't need to peel), olive oil, rosemary, thinly sliced lemon and sea salt. I cannot describe how amazing my house smelled. But trust me, it did.


I slice the leftovers in half, brown them in butter then serve them alongside scrambled eggs for breakfast. Mmmm.

Roasted Baby Fingerling Potatoes with Rosemary, Garlic and Lemon
Printable Recipe

Prep time: 5 minutes
Total time: 35 minutes
Yield: serves 4

Ingredients:

1 pound tiny fingerling potatoes
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary
1/2 a lemon, cut into slivers
2 tablespoons olive oil
sea salt and pepper to taste

Preparation:

1. Heat oven to 450 degrees. Toss potatoes with garlic, rosemary, lemon and olive oil on a large sheet pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

2. Bake for 30 minutes, or until potatoes are golden brown and crisp on the outside and are tender when pierced with a knife.

3. Taste for seasoning and serve immediately.

Cocktail O' Clock!

Happy Friday everyone! What a fun filled week this has been...and I'm looking forward to a wonderful weekend too. Guess what? It's cocktail o'clock! Because I've been featuring lemons all week, I've decided to create a cocktail using them too. Reminiscent of a lemon drop martini, I've fancied it up a little by infusing a lemon simple syrup with rosemary.

Simple syrup really is simple to make. Usually it's equal parts water and sugar, boiled until the sugar dissolves. But in this case, the syrup is made from freshly squeezed lemon juice and sugar and is infused with a touch of rosemary, which lends a wonderful herbal note and cuts the sweetness of the sugar.





The recipe, adapted from Epicurious, is a spritzer of sorts--syrup and vodka over ice topped with a splash of club soda or seltzer. If you'd like to make a martini, just shake one part lemon syrup with 1 1/2-2 parts vodka, depending on how strong you like it. Strain it into a sugar rimmed martini glass and toast to this life. As my Danish grandfather would say, Skol!





Lemon Rosemary Fizz
Printable Recipe

This cocktail is like a sophisticated and fancy version of lemonade. The herbal notes of rosemary are the perfect counterpoint to the sweet syrup made with sugar and lemon juice, and the club soda adds just the right amount of bubbly goodness. Of course, this drink would make a wonderful mocktail too if you omit the vodka. Adapted from Epicurious.

Prep time: 5 minutes
Total time: 1 hour
Yield: makes 8 beverages

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar
1 cup lemon juice, freshly squeezed
2 rosemary sprigs
8 ounces vodka
Chilled club soda or seltzer water

Preparation:

1. Place sugar, lemon juice and rosemary sprigs in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 2 minutes, until sugar is dissolved.

2. Chill syrup for one hour in the refrigerator. Remove rosemary sprigs.

3. Pour one ounce of syrup and one ounce of vodka in eight ice filled (8 ounce) glasses. Top with club soda and garnish with a sprig of rosemary if desired. Stir and serve immediately.

**Turn this into a martini by shaking 2 ounces of lemon syrup with 2 ounces of vodka in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Strain into 4 martini glasses that have been rimmed with sugar. Top with a splash of club soda and garnish with a sprig of rosemary.

Lemon Roasted Chicken

There is something fundamentally unsexy about raw chicken--it's cold and pink and flabby. But thankfully, it's not hard to make something so unappealing absolutely delicious...especially when you've got lemons hanging around. A simple dish, fragrant with garlic, rosemary and yes, lemon, I was able to throw it together in the morning so the chicken could soak in all the lovely flavors before being roasted.

I put it in the oven before I left to take the kids to the ranch for their riding lessons, set the delay start button and headed out the door. (As an aside, the chicken sat at room temperature--in the cold oven for just under an hour. While I don't recommend that practice, desperate times call for desperate measures. I'm happy to report that we are all fine the day after...) When we returned from the ranch, not only was dinner done, but the home was filled with the scrumptious aroma of garlic and rosemary and roast chicken--which is right up there on my list of top 10 smells.....just behind horse. So yesterday, I got the best of both worlds.



Slap your chicken skin side up in a baking dish. This is a whole chicken cut into 8 pieces. Cutting up your own chicken is a great way to save a few bucks and takes only a few minutes.


Cut enough lemon slices to place on each piece. So, in this case, eight.



Smash garlic cloves with the side of a heavy knife. Then they are really easy to slip out of their skins. Use one garlic clove for each piece of chicken, and toss them on top.


Now add herbs. I always have fresh rosemary growing in my garden, so that's what I used. But this would also be work well with thyme.


I had a lemon on my counter that had been zested earlier in the week, so I squeezed the juice over the chicken for extra flavor.


Finally, drizzle the whole thing with plenty of extra virgin olive oil. Probably a few tablespoons or so. And sprinkle everything with a good pinch of sea salt and freshly ground pepper.


See, looks better already!


Cover it up and let it sit in the fridge all day, or even overnight.


Bake it at 425 degrees for about one hour. The garlic becomes tender, the lemons caramelize, and the chicken is juicy and wonderfully flavorful. Easy peasy.

This is your last chance to WIN the giveaway. Simply leave a comment here, telling me what YOU do with lemons by FIVE o'clock Friday. At that very happy hour, I will not only be mixing martinis, but I will be hitting the button to randomly select the winner of a nice bottle of FRESH Sugar Lemon Bath and Shower Gel. Wahoo!

Roast Chicken with Lemon, Garlic and Rosemary
Printable Recipe

Your home will be filled with the amazing aroma of garlic and rosemary when you make this dish. And because the chicken has been marinating all day, it is incredibly tender, juicy and flavorful.

Prep time: 10 minutes
Total time: 1 hour, plus marinating time
Yield: serves 8

Ingredients:

1 whole chicken, cut into 8 pieces
8 slices of lemon
8 cloves of garlic, smashed
1 tablespoon of chopped rosemary
Juice from one lemon
3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Preparation:

1. Place chicken in a baking dish, skin side up. Place one slice of lemon and one clove of garlic on the top of each piece. Sprinkle with rosemary and salt and pepper. Drizzle everything with the lemon juice and olive oil.

2. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 6 hours or overnight.

3. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Bake for 50 minutes, or until chicken is cooked through. (180 degrees in the thigh meat, and 165 in the breast.)

Roasted Chicken with Rosemary

It seems so unfortunate to me that autumn here in the high desert means hot, dry, and windy weather. The rest of the country is battening down the hatches, while we sweat it out, or literally combust into flames. Fall colors here come in the skies, as smoke drifts over the mountain tops in crimson and brown, obscuring the landscape and clogging our lungs. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this fire season, as we call it, is fleeting, and that cooler weather will come soon.

I have a serious case of autumn envy. I always have. So I manufacture my own fall. While the temperatures outside still say summer, my home is stubbornly decorated with the sights and smells of an east coast autumn, thanks in part to my mother-in-law who ships me goodies like bittersweet vines and Cape Cod cranberries. And as long as we open the windows early in the morning, my house stays cool all day. I am shocked when I go outside, dressed in pants and a sweater, only to be slapped with the stark reality that it really is going to be 90 degrees today.

My appetite is piqued by glossy magazine photos of steaming bowls of chili, home baked bread and roasted turkeys. Even though the weather still seems to mandate cooking outdoors, I'm as stubborn with my cooking as I am with my decorating. So I will ignore the heat, and cook foods that seem like proper autumn fare. Tonight we will enjoy roasted chicken with rosemary and potatoes. And if we eat late enough, and open the windows again, it may cool down enough to put my sweater back on.

Roasted Lemon Chicken with Rosemary and Lemon

1 3-4 pound chicken

1 lemon, cut in half

about 10 new potatoes, quartered (red or yellow are fine)

2 shallots or one yellow onion

6 cloves of garlic

6 sprigs of rosemary

salt and pepper to taste

olive oil

splash of white wine

Preheat oven to 400°

Wash and cut potatoes and place in 13/9 inch pan. Quarter shallots or onions and place in pan along with garlic cloves (you can leave the skin on). Salt and pepper generously and drizzle with olive oil. Toss gently with hands.

Remove gizzards from chicken, rinse chicken and pat dry. Push potatoes into a ring on the edges of the pan and place chicken inside it. Squeeze lemon juice from one half of the lemon on top of the chicken and place both lemon halves inside the cavity. Drizzle chicken with more olive oil and salt and pepper generously. Using scissors, snip rosemary over potatoes and on top of chicken. Place a few sprigs inside cavity and tuck one under each wing.

Place in oven and bake for 15-18 minutes per pound. Internal temperature should measure 170° in the breast and 180° in space between the body and thigh when done. Remove potatoes to serving bowl and chicken to platter to rest, covered with foil, for 15 minutes.

Place pan over flame (medium heat) and add a splash of white wine to scrape up any baked on bits. Reduce juices a bit. Drizzle over carved chicken. If you wish to thicken the sauce, make a slurry of flour and water and slowly wisk into pan juices to make a gravy. Simmer for a few minutes more until thickened.