Ad Hoc Buttermilk Fried Chicken

I've cooked a lot of dishes out of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home, but, until yesterday, I had not tried to make the book's signature dish, buttermilk fried chicken. I had some buttermilk leftover from a cobbler that I made last week, so the half empty carton provided the perfect excuse to give this recipe a try. It's good. In fact, this recipe produces the best fried chicken I have ever had. I can see why this is the signature dish. The key is the super lemony brine that infuses the chicken with flavor. I also really like how Keller cuts the chicken breast into quarters, so you get a better crust to meat ratio.

If you aren't afraid of deep frying (something I am reluctant to do at home since it makes the apartment smell like frying oil for a few days afterwards), try this recipe. It's been posted about a million times on other blogs and websites, so I won't repeat it here.

Crispy, braised chicken thighs with oven roasted tomatoes, olives, and garlic confit

This dish utilizes a couple staples that I like to have in my fridge at all times: garlic confit and oven roasted tomatoes. To make garlic confit, just buy a bunch of peeled garlic cloves at the grocery store, throw them in a small pot, cover with canola oil, and simmer over very low heat until the garlic cloves are very soft and a knife or fork easily slides through them. Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up a month.

For the oven roasted tomatoes, cut a bunch of roma tomatoes in half, lengthwise, place them cut side up on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and then scatter some fresh thyme over everything. Roast in the oven over very low heat (~250F) for 8 hours. Store these in an airtight container, covered in oil, for up to a month.

Now, on to this dish.

INGREDIENTS:

(2 servings)

• 4 chicken thighs, bone in, skin on.
• 8-10 oven roasted tomato halves.
• 6-8 cloves garlic confit.
• 1 cup assorted olives.
• 2 tsp sherry
• 1 Tbsp garlic oil (from the garlic confit)
• 1 shallot, minced.
• 1/2 to 1 cup white wine.
• 2 sprigs thyme
• salt and pepper.

Preheat a 10 to 12 inch skillet over medium to medium high heat and preheat the oven to 350F. Season the chicken thighs with salt and pepper. Add oil to the pan, and once the oil begins to shimmer, add the chicken, skin side down. It is important to make sure the pan and the oil are adequately preheated before adding the chicken, otherwise the skin will stick to the pan. Let the chicken cook for a few minutes. Periodically, check the chicken by seeing if you can move it around without getting any resistance. At first, the skin will stick to the pan, but once it is cooked enough, the cells in the skin contract and, magically, almost, they stop sticking to the pan. If you try moving the chicken to early, you'll get burnt skin stuck to the bottom of the pan. No good. Once the skin is nice and crispy, turn the chicken thighs and cook for another minute on the other side. Remove to a plate, drain the oil and accumulated fat, reserving about 1/2 Tbsp.

Add the shallots and garlic confit. Cook until the shallots become translucent, then add the wine, sherry, tomatoes, olives, and thyme sprigs (you can leave these whole and remove before serving). A little smoked paprika might be a nice addition to this dish as well, if you happen to have some lying around the pantry. Let this mixture simmer for a couple of minutes.

Add the chicken back to the pan along with any drippings that have collected on the plate. Place the whole thing in the oven, covered, for about 15 minutes. Remove the cover and blast the chicken under the broiler until the skin crisps up again. Alternatively, you could just leave the chicken uncovered in the oven.

This dish goes well with roasted potatoes.

Roasted chicken, carrots, spring onions, and blue potatoes

A lot of times, you hear cooks say a key to good cooking is to buy good ingredients, and try your best not to mess them up. This was one of those dinners. The farmers markets here in Chicago are in full swing, and just about everything I used in this dish except for the olive oil, butter, and lemons, came from either the local farmers market or the community garden. What I love about the farmers market is that when you buy something like a carrot, you have a huge variety to choose from. The same goes for just about every other vegetable or fruit, including the onions and potatoes I used in this dish. While roasted chicken and root vegetables are typically thought of as a fall or winter dish, the way I look at it, anything I get at the farmer's market is, by definition, seasonal cooking, and it tasted just as good on a warm summer evening as it would on a cold winter night.

Here's the recipe. It could not be more simple.

Brine the chicken (look up your favorite brine recipe online).

Remove from brine, pat dry, and let come to room temperature.

Season with salt and pepper, put a lemon wedge, herbs, and some smashed garlic cloves in the cavity.

Truss the chicken.

Toss the vegetables with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

In a 12 inch skillet, arrange the vegetables and place the chicken on top. Add a few lemon wedges to the skillet.

Drizzle a bit of olive oil over the chicken or place a couple pieces of butter on top of the chicken.

Roast in a 450 to 475F oven for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 400F and continue to roast until the chicken breast is 160F.

Remove the chicken and let it rest on the cutting board for at least 15 minutes.

In the meantime, toss the vegetables in the pan to glaze them, and add any herbs. I used a bit of dill, chives, garlic scapes, and parsley.

Coq Au Vin

I've made this dish a couple times before, but never posted it. I wouldn't say it's my favorite dish, but it's pretty good, and it's a great way to use up a lot of wine that you wouldn't otherwise drink. Abby and I had a couple half empty bottles of wine sitting around from an earlier dinner party, and, while I would normally make something like braised shortribs with the extra wine, I've already had a blog entry with shortribs, so I figured I would give this dish another spin. It's a classic French bistro preparation, and, at least in the intermediate steps, it doesn't look pretty.
See? This is what chicken looks like when its been marinated in red wine for 24 hours. Not nice. Enough on that, though. Here's the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 chicken (you can leave it whole, or cut it up. I cut it up and reserve he wing tips and back bone for stock)
• 1 carrot, chopped
• 3 carrots, tourneed (cut into football shapes)
• 1 stalk celery, chopped
• 1 onion, chopped
• bouquet garnit (bay leaf, thyme, parsley, garlic clove, and black peppercorns)
• 2-3 cloves
• 12-16 pearl onions
• 1/8 to 1/4 lb slab bacon, cut into lardons
• 1/4 to 1/2 lb button mushrooms
• red wine, about a bottle.
• butter
• olive oil
• salt, pepper
• 1 Tbsp flour
• pinch of sugar

Start by marinating the chicken in red wine with the chopped carrot, onion, celery, and cloves for 24 hours. Remove the chicken - it will look all gross and mottled like the picture above, and strain out the vegetables, reserving the wine.
Pat the chicken dry with a paper towel and season with salt and pepper. Add a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil to a large dutch oven and brown the chicekn on both sides over medium high heat. Again, it doesn't look too pretty, but it's getting better.
Remove the chicken, add the vegetables from the marinade, and cook over medium heat. After about ten minutes, stir in 1 to 1.5 T flour. Cook this for another minute or two, then add the chicken and enough red wine to cover the chicken half way...it's a braise, not a stew. Cook over low heat for about an hour, turing occassionally.
As this is simmering, turn your attention to the other ingredients: the bacon, onions, carrots, and, if you like them, the mushrooms. Traditioally, this dish has mushrooms, and not carrots, but I'm not a huge mushroom fan and I had several extra carrots in the fridge.

Start by cutting the bacon into lardons and cook until crispy. I decided to use salt pork instead because, while I love bacon, I thought that the smokey flavor it imparts would be a bit too dominant. When you're done with the bacon, remove all but about 1 Tbsp of the fat and add 1 smashed clove of garlic to the pan, let this brown for a few seconds and add the mushrooms, stemmed and halved or quartered. Cook until done and set aside.
Next, peel the onions and tournee the carrots so they are about the same size as the onions (you can kind of see the carrots in the picture below). To glaze the onions ad carrots, put them in a pot just big enough to hold them all in one layer. Add a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, and 2 Tbsp butter. Add enough water to just cover everything and cover it with a sheet of parchment paper cut to the size of the pot. Bring this to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. When the water has evaporated, remove the paper and continue cooking to slightly brown the vegetables.

Once done, remove the vegatables, add a splash of red wine and scrape up any of the fond that might have developed. By this time, the chicken should be done. Remove the chicken and strain the cooking liquid into a fat separator. Pour the separated braising liquid into the pot with the reduced red wine, turn the heat way up, and reduce the volume by half. If you want to reduce this really quickly, pour everything into a really wide pan. More surface area=more efficient evaporation=faster reduction. Return the chicken to the pan to coat in the braising liquid, then plate with the bacon, onions, carrots, and mushrooms. I think its good to serve this with polenta since (A) polenta is super easy to make, and (B) polenta is perfect for soaking up tasty braising liquid.

Classic paella

I've made paella on this blog before, but it makes another appearance for two reasons. First, Sharlene got abby and I a nice paella pan as a wedding gift, so we had to have her over and give it a spin. And, second, the last time I made paella there was definitely room for improvement. The last attempt was a sort of vegetarian version in the sense that I, used a veggie broth, cooked everything separately, and served all the meat in side dishes. This isn't the best way to do paella. What makes paella great is the flavors that the various ingredients infuse into the rice, especially the shellfish. To do this, you need to either cook the shellfish with the rice or use the broth from cooking the shellfish to flavor the rice.

I used a recipe that I got off the internet, I don't remember the link, but the ingredients were rice, onions, garlic, tomatoes, peas, saffron, chicken stock, clam juice, chicken legs, jumbo shrimp, scallops, mussels, clams, spanish chorizo, salt and pepper. Just google Paella for a more precise recipe.

Start cooking the proteins separately. You don't want to cook everything to completion since you will finish off the paella in the oven. I roast the chicken with some olive oil, salt and pepper.
And saute the shrimp, chorizo, and scallops. If you cook the this stuff in the paella pan first, you minimize the dishes that you need to clean, and all of the leftover drippings will stay in the pan and help flavor the rice. Cook the chorizo last since it will leave a red oil that will stain that shrimp and scallops. If you want to, you can also steam the mussels and clams separately. This is what I did. An advantage of this is that you can use the liquid from steaming the shellfish to flavor the rice. A drawback is that you finish the shellfish long before the rice is done, so by the time everything is complete, the clams and mussels are a little dried out. The next time I make this, I might just try adding the clams and mussels when I throw the paella in the oven and baking it long enough for the shellfish to open up.
After you are done cooking the shrimp, scallops, and chorizo, add the onions and garlic to the paella pan and saute over medium heat until translucent. Stir in the rice and tomatos until everything is coated with oil.
Meanwhile, heat up some liquid (I used a mix of chicken stock and clam juice) with a healthy pinch of saffron. Add the liquid to the rice mixture and cook, stirring occasionally until the rice is al dente. Keep adding liquid if the rice dries out. When the rice is ready, stir in the chorizo and peas and arrange the shrimp, scallops, chicken, clams, and mussels around the pan.
Finish cooking in the oven for about 10 minutes before serving.

Pollo al ajillo

This is a simple Spanish recipe. Start by seasoning bone-in skin on chicken thighs with salt and pepper and browning in a large pan with some olive oil. Once the skin is crispy, remove the chicken and pour out all but 4Tbsp of olive oil. Add an entire head of garlic (for 8 chicken thighs) and cook over medium heat. You don't want to brown the garlic, so keep an eye on it. Add a splash of white wine and lemon juice and stir in a bunch of chopped parsley. Return the chicken to the pan and cook, covered for another 15 minutes.

Blog post #100!

This weekend my blog passed a somewhat momentous milestone: 100 posts. It just so happened that Stefan wanted to have a dinner party over the weekend, and I volunteered to have it at my place. Only after the fact did I realize that I was almost at entry number 100. So, this dinner party provided the perfect way to recognize the moment.

The dinner party also gave Abby and I a chance to try out some of the new kitchen gadgets we got for our wedding. The entree for evening was smoked chicken breast with sweet potato gnocchi and roasted beets and brussels sprouts. We used a stovetop smoker that Anand and Sara gave us to make the chicken.
The smoker has a nice lid to it, but I had to replace it with foil in order to create room for all of the food inside. I smoked the chicken over relatively low heat for a little over an hour. You could tell the chicken had been smoked, but just barely. I've used this twice now and I am still trying to figure out how many woodchips to use, what heat to use, and how long to smoke something to really get some good smoke flavor.

For the gnocchi, we got to break in a nice stand mixer that some of Abby's relatives gave us. The base of the sweet potato gnocchi is a mix of roasted sweet potato passed through a ricer and ricotta cheese.

By the time we had the gnocchi dough mixed up, guests had started arriving, so we got to enlist some help in the kitchen. Here's Stefan with a batch of freshly cut gnocchi (and a smashing apron)...
...and here's Venice getting ready to boil the gnocchi.
Jon and Katrina put together a nice spread of cheese, fruit, and salami to hold us over while we finished cooking.
Here are a couple more pictures from the evening.

More home cookin' in the state of Washington

Abby, the Moys, and I were in town for a few days, so the reception dinner wasn't the only think I made. When it was just the Moys and Kinas, and not 100 guests, I was able to make a meal where I could focus on more than one dish. In addition to a simple grilled chicken, which I've made a few times this summer
I made a grilled corn salad with red onion, red bell peppers, mint, and lime
toasted orzo with artichoke hearts and almond slivers
and an appetizer of grilled toasts topped with a white bean and tuna bruscheta (I normally make this with anchovies).
For dessert, we had my mom's blackberry pie. We picked the blackberries for this from our front yard earlier that day.

Chicken and potatoes, two ways

This first one is really easy. It's a version of something Jamie Oliver did on his show a few weeks back. I just switched up ingredients according to what was in my fridge. Start by boiling a few new potatoes. While these are cooking, chop up an assortment of herbs - I just picked some oregano, rosemary, and thyme that I have growing on my back porch - and debone and cook the chicken legs. Cook the chicken skin side down with some olive oil and leave it alone for a few minutes. If you move the chicken too early, the skin will stick to the pan. As the chicken cooks, prep any other ingredients you want to throw into the mix. I used garlic, olives, capers, chorizo (cooked separately), and roasted red peppers.When the potatoes and chicken are done, toss together the potatoes, chicken, herbs, and additional ingredients with salt, pepper, olive oil and a touch of vinegar in a single dish. Cook at 350F for 20-30 min.
This next one is also pretty straight forward, but it requires a bit more attention since it isn't a one pot meal. Again, start by boiling potatoes, but you can peel them first this time. After starting the potatoes, preheat the oven to 350F, season the chicken with salt, pepper, and start cooking it skin side down over high heat with some olive oil. If the oil starts smoking, turn the flame down a little. After a few minutes, the skin will no longer stick to the pan and you can turn the chicken over. Once you turn the chicken, stick it in the oven, skin side up for 20 minutes. By this time, the potatoes should be done. When they are boiled through, drain them and cut them into halves or quarters depending on the size. Toss them in a pan over medium heat with olive oil and let them cook, turning occasionally so they brown on all sides. The potatoes and chicken don't need much attention during these last 20 minutes. So use this to make the collards. Just rinse them, cut them into strips, and saute over medium high heat with garlic and olive oil. Add a bit of salt and, if you have it on hand, let the collards simmer in a bit of chicken stock after they have cooked down. Add a little vinegar at the end to brighten up the flavors.

Stewed chickpeas

The stewed chickpeas in this dish make a nice meal on their own and provide a nice alternative to rice, pasta, or potatoes if you insist on having some sort of carb as a base of your meals. Start with a finely diced mirepoix for a base - onions, carrots, and celery - with a couple cloves of garlic. Add a drained can of chickpeas, a bit of vegetable broth, and a bay leaf and let simmer. If you have any basic tomato sauce lying around, add a bit of this for some color, then season with salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, and cumin. If you can get your hands on some smoked paprika, add this as well. If not, just use regular paprika. I served this with garlic sauted kale. The chicken was butterflied, pounded thin, seasoned with salt, pepper and ras al hanout, rolled up into cylinders, wrapped in plastic wrap gently steamed. When steamed through, brown the chicken in a saute pan and slice across to serve.

Chicken under a brick

This is a really fun way to grill chicken, and for some reason, using the bricks makes the skin perfectly crispy. It comes out a little charred, but it tastes great.

I started by cutting out the spine and flattening the carcass. To do this, you may need to crack the breast bone. Trim off the wing tips and excess fat. Fat from the chicken will render during cooking, and too much fat dripping off of the chicken and cause flare ups. Next, I mixed together a paste of chopped garlic, thyme, lemon zest, salt, pepper, and olive oil and spread this both over the surface of the chicken and in between the skin and the flesh of the chicken breast. Its good to get this step done pretty far in advance to let the flavors penetrate the meat.

To set up the grill, spread out coals over about half of the grill. This way you can move the chicken to the cooler side in case it starts to char too much. Make sure the grates are clean and well oiled, and preheat a brick wrapped in foil (use an oven mitt to move the brick around). Place the chicken skin side down and put the brick on top of the chicken. Grill for about 10 minutes over indirect heat, flip and cook for another 15 minutes skin side up, still with the brick on top. Finally, cook skin side down for 5 minutes over the coals to make sure the skin is nice and crispy. When I cooked it, I started the chicken out over the coals, but I thought the skin got a little too charred. I think shifting to indirect heat should solve that problem. Let the chicken rest for about 5 to 10 minutes before carving it up and serving.

I also made grilled potatoes and scallions to accompany the chicken.

Use the whole bird

Since their are just two of us in the house, I can usually stretch at least two meals out of one chicken. The nice thing about getting the bird whole is that you can save stuff like the wing tips and backbone in your freezer and use it to make a good chicken broth. From the rest of the chicken, you get two main cuts, the breast and the leg. With practice, breaking down the chicken is really simple. I'll post something about that later.
For the first dish, I used a Frenched chicken breast. This just means that I left the first joint from the wing in. This dish is pan roasted chicken breast with garlic confit and ras-al-hanout on a bed of garlic roasted chickpeas and braised escarole. I start by mashing the garlic confit into a paste, adding some salt and pepper, and spreading this around under the skin. Then I added some ras-al-hanout, a Moroccan spice mix that is generally used in tagines, to season the chicken, seared the chicken breast side down, with olive oil over high heat. Keep an eye on the chicken, and after about two minutes, start trying to move the chicken. After a while, the skin will stop sticking (use a non-stick pan if you want to good color). When it gets to this point, flip the chicken over and stick the pan in the oven. Cook at 350F until done (about 20 minutes). For the escarole, simply cook a head of escarole with some chicken stock until wilted. If you want to add some garlic flavor, you can start by frying a clove of minced garlic in a saute pan with some olive oil, then start adding the escarole bunch by bunch. Once everything is cooked down a little, add a bit of chicken stock and season with salt and pepper. For the chickpeas, drain well, spread out on a foil lined baking sheet, and toss with olive oil, minced garlic, salt, and pepper. Cook with the chicken.
I also made a batch of minted carrot soup. This recipe comes from the Herb Farm cookbook...I don't remember the exact recipe off hand, but what I really liked about it was the mint flavor was added. Instead of chopping up some mint and adding it to the soup, this recipe calls for making mint tea out of a bunch of mint and then using that as the base liquid for the soup. Pretty clever. Sometimes I do a similar thing when I make what I call my "Asian Risotto." I'll write an entry about this later, but basically, I replace the stock from normal risotto with green tea and trade out arborio rice for sushi rice. It makes a good base for a simmered fish dish.

After making this meal, I had the legs left over, which I used to make Basque Chicken served over a bed of saffron rice. I already have an entry with the recipe here.

Wedding tasting, round 2

Our first trip to the Food for Thought Kitchens was tasty, but none of the dishes they came up with were quite what we were looking for, so last week when Abby and I were in Chicago for a whirlwind week of wedding planing, we went back to the caterer's for another tasting. We had already picked out our salads and appetizers, so it was just main courses this time. Of the four we tried, three were fantastic candidates. Now we just have to narrow it down to the one or two dishes that we want to serve at the wedding, which will be hard since they were all so good.


First, we tried a seafood dish: Sweet Sake Roasted Wild Striped Bass with Dashi Soaked Soba Noodles, Wok Fried Vegetables, Tempura Fried Shiitake Mushrooms, and a Soy Miso Broth. This one is probably a keeper since (aside from tasting really good) we know so many pescaterians or vegaquariums or whatever you call people that make seafood the one exception to an otherwise vegetarian diet.

The next two dishes out were both chicken. As I've blogged about before, ordering the chicken dish is a good way to see how good a kitchen is. You can go to a lot of reputable restaurants and get a somewhat dry pan roasted chicken. This place, it turns out, does chicken better than most restaurants I have been to. The truffled chicken breast is outstanding.

Here's dish one:

1) Frenched Chicken Breast with Summer Truffle with Garlic-Braised Baby Bok Choy, Black Beauty Eggplant, Tri-Color Carrot, Basil Glace

2) Pan-Roasted Chicken Breast Grilled Fingerling Potato, Asparagus, Marconi Pepper Chutney, Enoki Mushrooms, Sherry-Ginger "Reduction"

Of the two chicken dishes, the first one was a better match with the flavors we were looking for.

Finally, we tried another take on braised shortrib, a dish we had tried at the initial tasting. This dish was a bit on the heavy side for a summer meal, but it was damn good and may be hard to pass up on.

Star Anise Braised Beef Short Rib with Scallion Potato Puree, Cippolini Onion, Sugar Snap Peas, Shitake Mushrooms.

Ginger Chicken Soup: Cures What Ails You

This is the perfect thing to eat when you're dealing with one of those horrible winter colds. Chicken soup has always been thought of as one of those cure-all dishes, but this version has loads of ginger and a little bit of spice. It really clears your head out.

INGREDIENTS:
2-3 cloves garlic, sliced.
~1/3 cup ginger cut into matchsticks
2 serrano peppers, chopped (seed them and cut out the inner membrane to reduce the heat)
2 stalks bok-choy
1/2 cup (or more) of chopped cilantro
2 scallions
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
chicken stock (not broth)
fish oil
rice

First, get the rice started and stick the chicken in the freezer before you start preparing everything else. Chop up the ginger, cilantro, bok choy, and serrano as shown below.

Slice up the garlic and cook in a couple tablespoons of oil until golden. Remove the garlic and cook the ginger in the garlic oil for a minute.
Add the peppers, cilantro, and bok choy, cook for a few minutes, add the stock and bring it to a simmer. I've tried substituting chicken broth instead of stock, but it doesn't work.

Take the chicken out of the freezer and very thinly slice it - sticking it into the freezer makes it easier to get thin slices of chicken. After this cooks for a couple of minutes, add a couple dashes of fish oil. Add the soup to bowls with the cooked rice and garnish with thinly sliced scallions.

Cooking With Craisins

A few weeks ago Frank Bruni, the NYTimes food critic, posted an entry about chicken on his food blog. One of the opening statements of this entry was that you could really tell a the quality of a restaurant by trying it's chicken dishes, sort of like testing a pizza place by ordering the plain cheese pizza. He then went on to describe some of the better places to get chicken in NYC. Chicken is by far the most common source of protein in the American diet (average annual chicken consumption is about 86 lbs/person) and, due to its low fat content, it is really tough to cook correctly. When done right, though, chicken is really really good. In fact, the best meal I've ever had was a roasted chicken with fries that I had in Porto seven years ago. Anyway, after reading Bruni's blog, I had a craving for a good roast chicken.

I dropped by Savenor's when I got home from work to pick up a chicken, and then got that started while trying to figure out what else to make. We ended up going with potatoes and Brussels sprouts. Turns out, the brussels sprouts were the highlight of the meal, with Craisins as the ingredient that really pushed them over the top. Who'd have thought? The final menu was a simple roasted chicken, garlic and thyme fried smashed potatoes, and roasted brussels sprouts with craisins and lardons. Here are the recipes. The execution of these dishes is pretty non-technical and it comes together fairly quickly. Try it. Its really good....probably one of the best meals I've made in quite some time.
Start by roasting the chicken. If you plan way ahead, you can brine the chicken, but you want to do that a full day ahead. One way to time things would be to brine over night and in the morning dry the chicken off with paper towels and let it air dry in the fridge all day. To get good, crispy skin - and that, after all, is the best part of roast chicken - you need it to be nice and dry. If you have a good quality free range chicken, you don't need to brine it. You should probably always go free range anyway. It doesn't cost that much more and there is really no comparison in taste. Before prepping the chicken, preheat the oven to 450F and take some potatoes (preferably smaller ones, like new potatoes), put them in a pot of cold water and place on high heat. Rinse the chicken off quickly and pat it dry with a paper towel. Truss the chicken (tuck the wings back and tie the legs together, as pictured) and generously sprinkle it with kosher salt and coarsely ground pepper. If you have a temperature probe, stick it in the chicken breast and set the alarm to go off when the internal temperature is 150F. Once the oven is up to temperature, put the chicken in and get to work on the other dishes. Make sure to turn the fan on, since 450F is well above the smoking point for the chicken fat that will render during cooking.

By the time the pot with the potatoes comes to a boil, they should be nearly done. Test by seeing if a knife slides into them easily. Once done, take them out of the water and let them cool. While the potatoes are cooling, begin prepping the sprouts. You just want to rinse them off, cut them in half lengthwise, and cut off the very ends of the stalks to clean them up. Place in a pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then roast them in the oven for about 20-30 minutes.
In the mean time, prep all the other ingredients. For the potatoes, you'll need to chop a few cloves of garlic and mince some thyme. For the sprouts, you'll need craisins and salt pork or pancetta (salt pork is preferable, but probably harder to find). Cut the pork or pancetta into cubes and saute in a large frying pan for about a minute. Add the craisins along with about 1/4 cup to 1/3 cup of water. As this cooks down, it will rehydrate the cranberrys and meld all of the flavors. Craisins are really sweet, so this step allows the saltiness of the pork to cut the sweetness from the craisins. Cook this at med-hi until the liquid is reduced to a thick syrup. When the sprouts are done roasting, just toss them in the pan with this mixture.

While the craisin mix is boiling down, start heating a heavy skillet and smash the potatoes on a cutting boared with a big pot or pan. As soon as the chicken is done, start frying up the smashed potatoes. The chicken will need about 10 minutes to rest (during this time the internal temp should rise another 10 degress to 160F), and this is about all the time you need to finish the potatoes. Place them in the skillet with a bunch of chopped garlic and thyme and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cook until they are nice and crispy on each side.

This meal should take a little over an hour to make.