Pocket Pause

October 18, 2012

Eat, Make, Grow: Blog Hop #12

Welcome to this week’s Eat Make Grow Blog Hop where you share what you have been eating with your family, growing in your garden or making with all your creative impulses. Eat Make Grow is a collective link party that is shared across three blogs and runs every Thursday-Tuesday. Whichever blog that you choose to link up your post, it will show up on all three sites! Eat Make Grow is a way to share with many people posts about your domestic doings, whether that’s growing veggies, hosting parties, sewing, mixing up cleaning supplies, or trying out a new recipe. We want to learn about it! Every week, we will feature the most popular link, and one chosen by the the host. This week, your host is me!

Your Hosts:

Miranda from Pocket Pause
Marigold from Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky!
Foy from Garden. Cook. Write. Repeat.

We’re not big fans of rules so there are just two of them:
No big corporation or business advertising or promotional posts. Let’s not dilute Eat Make Grow with junky posts. We don’t mind helping out the little home grown businesses of independent bloggers or handmade merchants (Etsy, etc.). (Spammy posts will be removed)
Please link your posts back to one of the hosting blogs. This is a common blog hop courtesy. This link helps build the Eat Make Grow community by sending your readers to all of the other participant’s posts. We will feature two posts each week and we will only consider posts that have a link back. A text link is fine, or you can grab this button and put it anywhere on your blog:

Grab the code from my sidebar!

Woo hoo- today’s hop gets us to a full dozen hops! Too bad it’s not Easter, or i’d make some stupid pun about bunnies or plastic eggs or something…. Instead i’ll send out a spooky THANK YOU to all the great bloggers and readers who have helped make Eat Make Grow totally awesome. I found a bunch of really cool blogs to visit this past week, many of them featuring the ingredient of the season: pumpkin! I love pumpkin in all its squashy forms from acorn to delicata (though i do not trust spaghetti) and i love cooking with pumpkin because it’s so versatile. From healthy harvest bread to naughty whoopie pies, pumpkin was the star of last week’s hop.
And here are the stars from last week’s bloggers:

Okay, okay – our most popular post did not actually include pumpkin as an ingredient… but the color scheme fits! Real Food Forager shared her gorgeous poached pears with us, along with some great nutritional info on the worthiness of pears in our diet. I think the spiced syrup she used would be delish on some roasted pumpkin, too!

Just look at that bread, would you? Moist, appley and just plain drool-worthy. In my opinion, anyway. I picked Wholemade Goodness’s Autumn Harvest Bread as my favorite post from last week’s hop. I was even inspired to make a loaf of my own! I actually tweaked the recipe quite a bit, (ommitting the bananas as i’m pretty sure bananas do not grow anywhere near Philomath, and that’s just how i roll) and added some local hazelnuts, but i still thank this photo for the inspiration to get out the loaf pan. I hope you will too!

Is one of these featured posts yours? Grab our “Featured Blogger” button to post on your blog and show off how cool you are. You can also visit our Pinterest Eat Make Grow Featured Bloggers pin board to see some of our past favorites.

Grab the code from my Sidebar!

And as a reminder, PLEASE remember to add a text link or button for Eat Make Grow to your blog when you link up. We’ve had to pass up lots of great posts to feature because of not having a backlink

4 Comments

Filed under Eat Make Grow - Blog Hop

Tagged as blog hop, eat make grow, pumpkin, squash

October 16, 2012

Splayed Chicken – Roast Chicken in 1 Hour

Home after flyball practice around 6:30 – Do i have time to roast a chicken? After a quick scour of the internet on a hunch that there’s some technique using 500 degrees and cast iron, i found a great recipe from the NY Times for “splayed chicken.” I skipped the 45 minutes of brining and bringing the chicken to room temp, but i got the jist of the recipe. It worked! It was delicious! It reminded me why i always quarter and de-fat/de-skin chicken: full roast chicken is SO decadent. I used 1 portabella, a leek and some squash but you could also use ramps, garlic scapes or any other veggie tucked in around the edges.

Splayed Roasted Chicken

If you have time to plan ahead, remove chicken from the refrigerator about an hour before cooking. Rinse, pat dry and salt liberally inside and out. Allow to rest on the counter to bring to room temp while the oven is preheating.

Preheat oven to 500 degrees with a large, well seasoned cast iron pan on a center rack. Preheat at least 10 minutes, preferably 20. Meanwhile, chop veggies to roast with the chicken. Avoid heavy root vegetables like potatoes that may stick to the pan or extend cooking time. I used 1 zucchini, 1 leek (well washed), 1 portabella mushroom and a hot pepper.

Prepare chicken: Cut the skin between the thigh and the breast-side of body and splay backwards until the joint pops. Place a few lemon wedges inside the carcass (or in my case the husk of what remains of my last two Meyer lemons after being juiced and zested) and some dried herbs like sage and rosemary. Carefully remove the pan from the oven and place on the stove top or other heatproof surface. Place the chicken back side down/breast side up into the pan and press down so that the legs sear against the pan. Roast for 25 minutes. Remove pan from oven again and tuck the veggies around the sides, stirring with the pan juices if possible. Stir every 10 to 15 minutes or so and continue to roast until the chicken is cooked through (to at least 160 degrees) and the drumsticks separate easily. Total cooking time for me was about one hour because my chicken was still cold. Total cooking time should be 40-50 minutes.

I served the breast with the wing on, slathered with the delicious pan juices and carmelized veggies. You could add a side of mashed potatoes or maybe some baked yam for a full on feast. I used the thighs for chicken salad for the next day’s lunch and cooked the carcass down all day to make some lentil stew for dinner. Whole roasted chicken is a fun treat, but man – those pan juices are decadent!

Bookmark this recipe for a fast roast for entertaining, weeknight dinners or a Sunday feast. You gotta love versatility!

What’s your favorite way to cook chicken: skinless/bonless healthy saute or roasted in decadent pan juices?

2 Comments

Filed under Cast Iron, Chicken, Cooking, Dinner

Tagged as 1 hour chicken, 1 hour roasted chicken, 500 degrees, cast iron chicken, chicken recipe, roast chicken, roasted splayed chicken in cast iron, splayed chicken

October 15, 2012

Planting Garlic

By all the recent posts from my favorite bloggers, i’d say it’s time to plant some garlic! Honestly, it’s a bit late here in the Willamette valley. It’s best to work the soil before it’s been dampened, and great to get things planted in time to be rained in. The rains have begun, but you really are safe planting garlic in this climate between mid September and very early November – with mid-October being your goal. Two years ago, I planted garlic during a waning moon phase on the first of October, in Austin TX. This year i STILL have no garden, but i did get to plant some garlic with a group of teenagers in their garden in Corvallis OR last year. I had no idea if the moon was waxing or waning, but i think we did a pretty fine job of it. Since i have no garden this time around, i’ll re-post last year’s documentation:

We first prepared the beds by tilling them well, then working in some fish meal and raking the beds smooth. I purchased about 6 varieties of garlic from local vendors at the Corvallis Farmer’s Market including Chinese Pink, Music, Medechi, and California Late White: a mix of softnecks and hardnecks that should be good for their Spring farmer’s market sales next year. The planting went well (while i was there at least). Here’s how we did it.

Break the bulbs and lay out the cloves 6-8 inches apart. I like to lay out the cloves first, THEN plant – helps to prevent the ole’ did i plant one here yet or not? quandary. Label the bed well! (And remember to label your harvested garlic well in the Spring!)

Once we laid them out, we used skinny trowels to poke down about 2 inches, sprinkle in a mixture of bone and blood meal, drop the cloves in sideways or sprout-side-up then cover loosely with dirt.

Once all the bulbs were planted and covered we put down a nice layer of compost followed by a thick layer of mulch (hay, mint compost, use whatever you’ve got but NOT walnut leaves) Voila! Thanks to Kayla for being such a great hand model – though i’m still not sure why y’all insist on wearing those surgical gloves for gardening. I prefer dirty fingernails, myself 😉

Do you enjoy teaching others how to plant things?

6 Comments

Filed under Gardening

Tagged as gardening, gardening garlic, garlic, garlic ammendments, garlic planting tips, growing garlic, how to plant garlic, plant garlic in oregon, planting garlic, when to plant garlic