The most important thing I know how to cook.

Just as there are pantry staples that every cook should have on hand-- in my case, olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic-- there are recipes that serve as the backbone for every home cook's essential repertoire. Growing up, roasted salmon was my mother's go-to dish of choice, while my friend Siri describes her dinners at home as a succession of different "baked dishes" (which I can only assume she thinks sounds better than the infamous "casserole").

These essential dishes are almost universally simple, comforting classics, and, as I think of it, usually involve the step of being thrown into the oven for some period of time. In my kitchen, my "essential dish" is the humble roast chicken. With crispy skin, and tender meat, this is a once-a-week dish at home that supplies the near entirety of the meat we consume for the week. With more than enough meat for one meal, and a carcass that can be used to make a passable homemade chicken broth, a roast chicken is a great place to start the process of learning to cook at home.

Roast Chicken

1 Whole fryer chicken (4-5 lbs)
1 Med. yellow onion
1 Whole head of garlic
4-5 Sprigs of fresh thyme
Kosher salt
Black Pepper
Olive Oil

NB: This is more of a technique than a recipe. I like onions, garlic, and thyme, but lemon chicken is always a favorite, or you could use rosemary and oregano for a more Italian-inspired chicken. Follow the idea of the recipe using what you have on hand, and experiment from there.

Preheat the Oven


Step one: Preheat your oven to 450 degrees.


Prepping the chicken

When you get the bird home, you have to do a little bit of prep-work before you can put it in the oven. The very first step, is to empty the bird of all of it's innards. That sounds horrific, especially if you've never brought a whole fryer home, but it's actually super simple. Whole fryers are sold with their livers, neck, and gizzards, in case you want to use those bits for sauces or gravy-- we'll cross that bridge at a later date. For now, unless you've got a hankering for giblets (a catch-all term for the non-familiar bits and pieces), reach into the cavity of the chicken, and you'll find a bag containing all the gooey bits that, quite frankly, almost always go immediately into my trash can.

One you've got those bits taken care of, the next step is to cut away the large pockets of fat that are located between the chicken's legs, at the back of the bird. It's easy enough, just use a carving knife and slice that excess fat away, and toss it in the bin.

Now that your bird is clean and empty, here comes the big trick to a beautifully crispy bird: pat it dry. Use paper towels, and blot the chicken, both inside and out to wick away as much of the moisture from the surface as possible. This is truly the most crucial step to a well-browned roast chicken, because if there is too much moisture, the skin will steam, rather than roast, and the chicken will never achieve the beautiful golden crust that makes roast chicken so darn appealing.

Seasoning the Chicken

It's often said that the mark of a good cook is in a well-seasoned dish, and that is very true with this roast chicken. I don't make it too fancy-- that would completely eschew the essence of a go-to meal for me-- so it's really important that it's seasoned well before it goes in the oven, so that the final roast chicken needn't much more than a knife, a fork, and (if I'm feeling especially healthy) a light mixed-green salad.

As for the salt (read: seasoning) itself, this is really a matter of personal preference, although, as a rule, I will recommend that you use WAY more salt than you think you need. For a 4 lb. chicken like I used here, I'd say I used a solid 2 Tablespoons. Just make sure that you're really covering the surface of the chicken with salt, and don't just get the breasts, be sure to salt the legs, wings and cavity, as well.

As for pepper, I am something of a pepper-monkey when it comes to my personal tastes. I always use a peppermill for this step, because I truly think that the fresh ground pepper adds SO much to the final dish. Again, using more than you think you need, I'd say that a healthy full-tablespoon is a good amount for a standard-sized fryer.

This is also the time when you can add dried herbs to the skin of the bird, if you like. I added dried thyme to this one, but you could use almost any spice or herb as a rub. Play around with flavors-- use curry powder for a tandoori-inspired chicken, or paprika and marjoram for something with Moroccan flair. Although it's often branded as bland, it's the versatility of roast chicken that makes it the centerpiece of my home-cooking.

And, finally, the olive oil. Douse the bird with a good layer of olive oil. This will also help with the browning, and (depending on the quality of the olive oil you're using**) impart the rich, briny flavor of the oil to the chicken.

*** While I really hate the thought of advocating the purchase of super pricey olive oil for roasting, I can't stress enough the importance of keeping an olive oil on hand that's of better-than-average quality. As a general rule, you can break olive oils down by price per ounce: Spend more than $1 per ounce, and you're working with what's known as a "finishing oil" which should only be used for things like finishing a plate of vegetables, or topping off a pasta. Spend less than 30-cents, and you're working with... well... I just recommend you shoot for a pantry-quality olive oil that falls in the 40 to 60-cents per ounce range.***

Stuffing the Chicken

As the chicken roasts, the salt, pepper, and olive oil are turning the skin to a lovely shade of crispy-brown (yes, in this case "crispy" is a color adjective), but there's good stuff happening on the inside as well. I keep it simple, and cut an onion into wedges, lop a head of garlic in half width-wise, and stuff some herbs into the now empty, and dry, cavity. These will roast with the chicken, and impart rich and savory flavors, as well as improving the drippings and pan juices, if you want to use it to make gravy (again, another post for another day...)

Roasting the Chicken

This is where is gets really simple. Put the bird on an oven-safe dish (no roasting rack needed-- I use an oven safe enameled ceramic dish from Ikea), and put it in your preheated oven. Keep an eye on it, and after about 25-30 minutes, it will be a really lovely shade of crispy brown. This is the step where you develop the color, so don't get impatient-- leave it in at 450 degrees until it's golden.

After it's golden (again, about 25-30 minutes) reduce the oven temp to 350 and cook for another 15 minutes. At 15 minutes, using a meat thermometer, check for doneness. I pull my chicken out of the oven when the breast meat registers 155 degrees, and the juices from the chicken run clear. At the point that it's done, temp-wise, let it rest for 10 more minutes, and admire your handiwork.

Because the roasting is where the magic happens, there are a couple tricks.

1. Don't "truss" the chicken. You'll see more than a few recipes that recommend tying up the legs and tucking in the wings, but I really don't advocate this method. If you're looking for a crispy brown bird, then you want as much of the surface of the chicken exposed to high heat as possible for maximum surface browning.

2. Start with the heat on high, then reduce to finish cooking. You've preheated your oven, to a pretty high temperature, which will help to facilitate the crispy browning objective. However, you have to keep an eye on it, because if you leave it at 450 the whole time, the skin will go well past crispy, and well into charcoal before the insides have a chance to finish.

3. The meat thermometer is your friend. I try not to get too crazy with my kitchen gadgets, and I will never EVER use a garlic press when the flat of a knife will do, but a meat thermometer is a must-have item. They're 5-bucks at the grocery store. Pick one up and save your friends from salmonella-poisoning.

Carving and Serving the Chicken

The truth of the matter, is that it's not easy to carve a chicken. It takes practice, and unless you have a photographer from a major magazine stopping by to photograph the final result, I wouldn't worry about breaking it down for a glamor shot. I can, however, suggest how to do it, based on how we learned in culinary school.

1. Slice the skin between the breast and the legs. This is the best of the crispy skin, and severing it first will ensure that it has a clean break and stays with the bit of meat it's intended for.

2. Carve the breasts from the breast bone, one at a time, by slicing along the full length of the breast bone, and then slicing the breast away from the ribcage.

3. Remove the legs, which is infinitely easier to do after roasting. The tendons have tenderized in the oven, and usually all is takes is flattening the leg away from the ribcage/hip, and the joint should pop easily. From here, it's simple enough to slice through the skin to disconnect the leg.

4. If you want, you can now separate the thigh from the drumstick, by looking for the joint between the two (it should be fairly obvious after roasting), and work your knife in to slice cleanly between the two at the joint.

5. Again, and this is optional, you can also remove the wings at the point where they join the clavicle, but I hate eating chicken wings, and I usually leave them on the carcass to throw in with rest for making broth (ah, yet ANOTHER post for another day).

And there you have it. The most important thing I know how to cook, and still, no matter how many times I make it, the dish that feels the very most like home cooking.

Rain = Fall = Soup

Growing up in Southern California, I have always romanticized the changing of the seasons. I would sing along with faux-nostalgia as Bing Crosby reminisced about his long lost White Christmases, as if I, too, had memories of crisp New England mornings, alight with the glow of sunshine reflected on a surface of new-fallen snow.

I have no New England memories, of snow or otherwise. I am a Southern California native, from a snow-averse tribe; I didn't see real snow until I was almost 13.

While we in the land year-round avocados may not have "seasons", what we do have is the transition from Summer to Fall. It's the closest thing to a seasonal change we have in a city that averages 275 days of sunshine per year, and with the change in temperatures, so arrives my annual hankering for all meals to be served from a bowl. In the first few days when the brutal heat of September begins to succumb to even the slightest hint of brisk Autumn air (read: 70 degrees instead of 95 degrees), I am immediately at the ready with my winter boots, cable-knit sweaters, and, of course, my large dutch oven for making soups.

This year, fall seemed to catch me by surprise. Perhaps it was because it was well into the 90's well past the end of September, but much to my surprise, I awoke of Monday, and the weatherlady on the radio was warning of rain. RAIN! Not just clouds, and not just sweater-weather, but actual WEATHER. I knew immediately that soup was on the menu for dinner.

So, while the weather dictated soup, the inevitable snarl of traffic between myself and the grocery store mandated that the soup du jour was one of the fridge-cleaning variety. This is yet another thing that I love about soup: More than almost any other category of meal, it is the very best way to use odds and ends that have filtered down to the bottom of your crisper drawer. In this case, I couldn't even lay claim to odds and ends-- as the only ingredient I had to speak of was a 5-pound bag of carrots from a stock-making expedition some weeks back. Although carrot soup initially smacks of V-8 in a spoon (which to me smacks of yuck), one moment's contemplation of the conditions on the road braced my resolve, and I turned to my cookbooks in search of a way to make my five pounds of carrots more palatable than the juice-bar concoctions that I so often unjustly associate with the nutrient-packed vegetable.

The salvation to my carrot-soup quandary came from an unlikely source: Cooking with Cafe Pasqual's, a cookbook from the kitchen of my husband's very favorite restaurant, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I adore this book, but I must admit that I was surprised to find a recipe for carrot soup, as Cafe Pasqual's is a restaurant renowned for its New Mexican/Southwestern cuisine. The title of the recipe was Carrot, Marsala, and Ginger Soup, and while I knew that the Marsala was a no-go in my pantry, I was excited to see that in total, it was a relatively simple recipe, and didn't even call for stock, which is often a kicker when trying to make meals from a limited pantry. So I forged ahead, substituting Tequila for Marsala, as the recipe cited the importance of the "smoky-nutty aroma and rich wood flavors", which made Tequila seem to be a natural replacement.

Reading further, I noticed that the recipe called for the juice and zest of one orange. Just as I resigned myself to having to leave it out, at the risk of compromising the finished product, I found exactly one navel orange, tucked among the odds and ends of the crisper, as though the Rain/Soup Gods were smiling down. After just enough peeling, chopping, and simmering to make me feel that I'd worked for my supper, I had a perfect fall soup that left me smiling as well.

Carrot, Tequila and Ginger Soup
Adapted from Cooking with Cafe Pasqual's

4 T unsalted butter
2 # carrots, peeled and diced
2 ea yellow onions, diced
1/2 t kosher salt
4 c water
2 ea dried arbol chilis, diced
1/2 t ground ginger
1/4 t ground white pepper*
Zest and juice of one orange
2 oz gold or anejo tequila
1 c half and half (I only had heavy whipping cream, it worked just fine, as I'm sure regular milk would, but maybe don't risk using less than 2% or it will water-down the soup)
salt to taste
(* I love white pepper. Although it's certainly possible to sub in black pepper, there's such a distinctive, almost woodsy/thyme-like quality to white pepper that makes it a great spice to add to your spice rack.)

Mise en Place

Prepping the Vegetables

Although I have yet to learn the handy trick for making a quicker task of peeling carrots, we did learn one trick in culinary school that helps very much: peel carrots onto a sheet of parchment that's on top of your cutting board. It keeps the board clean from the inevitable dirt that clings to the skins, and it makes it a snap to just bunch up the parchment and maintain a fresh cutting board. While you're at it, finish the carrots, and go ahead and remove the onion peels there, too. Now you're really ready to start slicing and dicing with the greatest of ease.

My now-denuded veggies, with the peels neatly bundled and ready for the compost bin.

Another trick for prep: Do each "type" of step together. For example, you wouldn't peel one carrot, dice one carrot, and start on another, but I'll often watch people dice one carrot at a time. It's much more efficient to break them down all together, ie; cut all of the carrots in half, then all in quarters, then dice them all together from there.

Dicing an Onion

Ah, diced onions. The smell, the tears, the inevitably misshapen "cubes" that were my eternal enemy during practical exams in culinary school. (Lets just say that an Associates Degree in Culinary Arts, illustrious though it may be, does not automatically enable the bearer to exceptional knife skills.) As such, I'd like to offer you the following tips on dicing an onion that might not win you any culinary competitions, but it will get the job done.

1. With the skin still on, cut off the top end. (This is the end that is more tapered and covered in onion skins, not the remnants of a root ball).
2. Cut the onion in half. (The above picture is for artistic reasons only, it really does help to actually cut it in half, not 3/4)
3. Peel the skin off 
4. Dice. (This is where I depart from most in my onion-dicing). There is the tried-and-true method of cutting planks, then sticks, then cutting into cubes-- if you haven't heard this method, don't worry, I hate it. (Google can help you find it on your own if you're interested). At any rate, I think it's just so much easier to cut with the radius of the onion, almost in a starburst fashion. The most important thing, however, is to cut just to the root, but not through it. Leaving the onion connected at the end keeps it all in one piece, and makes step five so much easier.
5. Slice across (diametrically) the onion, and that's it. Because of the natural construction of the onion, it will break into a dice whose size is determined by the distance between the longitudinal cuts made in step 4.

There are drawbacks to this method. The first being that they're not going to all be exactly the same size, so if for some reason they would be on display as a major component of a dish (a mignonette for oysters comes to mind) then maybe take the time to follow the rules for a "perfect" dice, but if you're like me, not only does a perfect dice not matter, you might just think that the idea of a "perfect dice" is a little obnoxious. But we move on.

Making the Soup

1. Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed pot.

(Any recipe that starts with melting a half-stick of butter has me at, "hello.")

 I use an enameled cast-iron pot that I got for $30 at Target for all of my soup/stew needs, which in the dead of "winter" (remember, I'm in California, it's a relative term) can be considerable. Most everyone knows that Le Creuset is the Gold Standard of these bad boys, but unless you've got $300 or an occasion that warrants a registry, both Cook's Illustrated and I will tell you that the Chef's Choice version from Target is a pretty spot-on, budget-friendly sub.

2. Add the onions and carrots.

Add the kosher salt, and saute over medium-high heat until the onions are translucent.

 NB: Salt here is really important. Patricia Wells once said (and I paraphrase from an episode of Barefoot Contessa I saw years ago) that food salted during cooking tastes well seasoned, food seasoned at the end tastes salty. This has stuck with me, and if I were to write my personal 10 Food Commandments, this would be, like, two. (Right behind, "More Butter, More Better".)

3. Add the chili, ginger, and white pepper.

4. Add the water, allow to come to a simmer, and cook the carrots until fork-tender.

5. Once the carrots are soft, turn the heat down to low, and slowly add the half and half, cream, or milk.

It's really, really important that once you're ready for the cream that (a) the soup isn't boiling hot, and (b) you don't bring it back up to a boil again. This can cause the milk to curdle, thereby ruining all that hard work you did to peel, slice, and dice. A simmer is OK. (A simmer means tiny bubbles around the edge closest to the pot, maybe an occasional "glub" from the center) A boil is not OK. (I'm hoping that if you care enough to read this, you know what a boil looks like.)

6. Puree the soup to as smooth a consistency as you like.

Again, another product plug. If you are a person who likes soup, I cannot recommend the Cuisinart Stick Immersion Blender highly enough. For $100-and-something bucks, you get a stick blender that makes the above image possible. You'll also get an attachment that's like a mini food processor, a mini motorized whisk, and a few other handy tools that fit in one compact box.

If you don't have one of these, you can process the soup in batches in a real food processor, or even do the carrots through a food mill (although I sincerely doubt that the food-mill crowd is my target audience here...) Worst case scenario: put it in the blender. The good news: It will be smoother. The bad news: It won't ever get as smooth as it would with an immersion blender, and it will take a million batches, and it will most likely splatter and be/make a mess. Seriously. Save up. I cannot use the Cuisinart set too much.

7. Garnish with paprika (if you're feeling artsy).

Eat.

As we curled up on the couch to eat our soup, and catch up on the last few weeks of Mad Men, I remembered that this is exactly why people should learn to cook at home.