Friday Hodgepodge

Four 28 Interesting Recipes

Occasionally, I kill two birds with one stone by blogging parts of my weekly review on Friday. This week, it was time to look at interesting recipes I heard about that I might want to try. Here are four links to recipes that turned up.

Most online recipes already take too long to get to the point, so here we go...

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1. I'm much more likely to fry my chicken or incorporate it into jambalaya or a gumbo than to roast it, but the words easy and moist in an article about this recipe for cold-oven roasted chicken got my attention:

The recipe comes from Paris Picnic Club, a lovely new cookbook by Shaheen Peerbhai and Jennie Levitt, and goes like this: You start the chicken -- plopped on a twiggy bed of herb sprigs, whole garlic cloves, and lemon zest strips -- in a lidded pot, in a cold oven. (Then turn it on.) As the heat rises, the flesh cooks through gently, drinking in garlicky-herby steam and staying astonishingly moist. [link omitted]

I'll try this with dry spices first, because (a) I am not a snob, and (b) I value my time too much to have to either waste an hour at the store on the day I cook, or be forced to make something on the day I go to the store. (That said, I might go ahead and get garlic cloves for this one.)

2. When I ran across this recipe for shakshuka, I had to refresh my memory on what, exactly, that is:

(in North African and Israeli cooking) a dish consisting of eggs poached in a spicy sauce of tomatoes and other vegetables.

Poached eggs? Say no more.

3. When I said I tend to fry my chicken, I fibbed a little. I like fried chicken, and I have a good recipe -- which is a hybrid of Popeye's and KFC knock-off recipes.

But frying chicken in oil is troublesome enough that I almost always just head to Popeye's or KFC if I'm in the mood for fried chicken.

Since I saute chicken a lot, and I don't have a deep fryer, it will be some time before I get around to making these Italian rice balls.

But I loved them when I was a student in Rome for a semester, and since I have yet to find them stateside, I will eventually do this.

4. This last is not a single recipe, but more of a reminder to myself to go through this list of 25 Foil Packet Dinners for Your Next Grill Out.

It's always grilling season here in Florida, and I might want to add a few of these to the rotation.

-- CAV