On Food and Becoming a Chef: 5 weeks... Time to catch up

I'm going to try and do a quick recap of the past 5 weeks, because I had some family in town, was sick for a brief period, and haven't had a lot of access to internet all combining into a lack of attention towards the blog, but I still took photos!

Last month, I decided to start a vegetable garden. I took out an 18 square meter patch of grass and went to town.

Before

And After...

I've had to wait a few weeks to buy plants because the temperatures have still been a bit too low, but in the meantime I added about 800 liters of compost, dirt, and fertilizer. It looks like the weather is improving and I'll be adding some tomatoes, peppers, and lettuce this week. I planted some spinach, eggplant, and squash seeds last week so hopefully those will begin to germinate and do their thing and hopefully we'll see some baby plants next week!

As for food, the highlights have been a braised pork tenderloin with butter sauteed artichokes, moroccan style roasted chicken, and basque style braised chicken thighs which I made the first night my sister was in town.

The pork tenderloin was inspired by the fridge, I had a lot of vegetables that needed to be used and I just started cooking. I served the pork on top of some polenta I cooked up with a little bit of garlic, olive oil, s&p. Afterwards I kind of felt like Will Ferrell in Old School after the debate scene,

Frank: What happened? I blacked out
Dean Pritchard: That was interesting. ha ha. Thank you very much. And, uh, your rebuttal? Mr. Carville.
James Carville: Oh... It... We... have no response. That was perfect.

I have been looking for a good spot to buy spices in Granada, and I finally found one a couple weeks ago, where I bought some Ras el Hanout, some Garam Masala, and mustard seeds. I have been wanting to use Ras el Hanout for a while now, and had found an interesting Roasted Chicken with Moroccan spices recipe off of epicurious.com, link to recipe.

I first made a paste with the spices, garlic, oil, and lemon juice, substituting spanish sweet paprika instead of the hungarian paprika. I then cleaned out the chicken, rinsed under some cold water and patted it down with paper towels. I covered the bird with the paste, which was really aromatic and smelled amazing, and stuffed it with the pierced lemons, rosemary, and thyme. I surrounded the chicken with potatoes, carrots, and quartered onions, and let it roast.

Pre-Roasting

ROASTED...

The chicken was really moist, really really moist, but I think the best part for me were the roasted potatoes in the pan juices which tasted phenomenal. There's something about the lemons which gives the chicken a sort of bitter taste that I'm not crazy about, but wasn't too noticeable in this version. Next time I may try to marinate the chicken with the spice blend for at least a few hours before cooking it, to let those flavors dig deeper into the meat.

I found the next chicken recipe on food & wine and it is by Daniel Boulud. It's a "Basque Chicken and Chorizo Sauté." This dish was a big hit with the family, but because the chicken thighs I bought were so huge I had to let it cook for about 45 minutes longer than the recipe called for.

Mise en Place