Cooking
On recent weekends we’ve been doing some improvisational cooking. We go to one of our favorite markets, see what looks good, and make up a menu on the fly. This past weekend, we made southern-style Kale (courtesy of Landon), roast chicken with a roasted garlic and herb compound butter stuffed under the skin, roast carrots and potatoes, homemade yeast rolls, and an apple cobbler with vanilla ice cream for desert.
I’m actually doing research on dinner rolls right and testing several recipes prior to Thanksgiving. I’ll write about my findings later. The two things worth writing about now though are the compound butter used on the roast chicken and the apple cobbler.
Compound butters are pretty simple creatures. Butter + stuff. For example, butter + sun dried tomatoes is a good one, especially tasty as a basis for beurre blanc accompanying seafood. This weekend we did one that was butter + roasted garlic, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, salt, and pepper. The recipe is simple. Take one stick of room temperature butter (unsalted) and combine with an entire head of roasted garlic, 2 tsp of chopped fresh rosemary, 2 tsp of chopped fresh thyme, 2 tbsp of chopped fresh marjoram, 1/2 tsp of kosher salt, and a grind of whole black pepper. I do this in a food processor, although if the butter is at room temperature, the food processor isn’t really necessary. We stuffed this butter under the skin of a roasting chicken and rubbed it all over the bird before roasting. It’s a good idea to reserve a bit of the butter to baste the bird in the last 20 minutes of cooking.
The second recipe that we improvised this week was an apple cobbler. We had some really nice, locally-grown Fuji apples left over from last weekend, so a cobbler or pie seemed in order. Cobblers are a bit easier to make than pie. The apples can be cut a bit chunkier for cobblers than pie, so there’s less knife work. You also don’t have to make pastry for crust. The filling for the cobbler was 8 small Fuji apples cut into chunks, the zest and juice from a lemon, 1/4c of brown sugar, 1 tsp of cinammon, 1/2 of a whole nutmeg grated, 2 tbsp of Grand Marnier, 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp of kosher salt, and 1 tbsp of corn starch or Wondra. This filling would work for pie as well. For cobbler, choose your favorite cobbler topping recipe, top, and bake for about 1 hour at 350F.