Disin' your Chick'n

Shoving a beer can up a (dead) chicken's butt is no way to treat a poor fowl with respect. But it sure does result in a tasty chicken.

Look! I'm a chicken and I'm sitting on a beer can!

I realized that I in my last post I let the delicious Beer Can Chicken that Sarah made go un-explained. Beer Can Chicken is the only way I'll roast chicken any more. I used to roast a chicken the normal way, inside the house in my oven. But ever time I did I triggered all the smoke alarms, ended up having to put the oven on cleaning cycle because the chicken spattered fat all over the place, and also had to deal with the smell of roast chicken for the next few days. I like the smell before I've eaten the chicken, but afterwards, and say, the next morning while I'm drinking my coffee, I'd prefer to breathe something else.

So Beer Can Chicken has the outside factor going for it--less clean up, no smoke inside the house, no heat being generated inside in the summer time when it is all you can do to keep the house at a tolerable temperature. But all these benefits would be negligible if it didn't turn out such a damn fine chicken. The beer steams the chicken from the inside and the grill crisps up the skin on the outside: a perfect roast chicken.

For those of you who have never experienced the dining pleasures of supremely undignified poultry allow me to clarify the technique. You take a whole raw chicken, rub in with your favorite dry rub, pop open a can of some cheapish beer, drink half the can of beer and then punch a few more holes in the can. My current favorite dry rub is equal parts kosher salt, black pepper, brown sugar and smoked Spanish paprika. You can get creative, put slivered garlic and lemon under the skin or any wild and wacky herbs and spices you like. Some people put some of the dry rub or garlic in the beer too. Next take hold of that half empty can of cheap beer with your delicate princess hand and shove it up the chicken's butt. Ta da! You made your own little chicken stand! Light half of the burners on a gas grill (or if you are a charcoal griller you heap the coals to one side of the grill). Then you put your perched chicken on the un-lit side of the grill: it'll make a tripod leaning on its drumsticks. Shut the lid to the grill and leave the chicken for a half hour. Then rotate it so the other side is facing the lit part of the grill and close the lid again. If you want, you can turn the lit side of the gas grill down to medium now, or you can leave it on high. I have a pretty cheap gas grill (only two burners) so I usually leave it on high but friends with classier grills turn theirs down. Leave it for another 1-1.5 hours (depending on the size of your chicken). If you are doing this in the middle of winter (as I have done), extend the cooking time to compensate for the temperature of the great outdoors. Do the normal stuff to check if it is done--use a meat thermometer if you have one; if you don't, cut into the thigh where it joins to the body and make sure nothing looks bloody in there.

Now for the only hard part of the recipe--separating the cooked chicken from the can of boiling beer. There are numerous recipes for Beer Can Chicken on the web but I have never found one that explains this important, and potentially dangerous, step. Nor can I say I've ever really figured out a graceful way to do this. I suppose having a pair of beer and grease-proof oven mitts designated just for chicken wrestling would be one way, but I'm too cheap. Instead I use two pairs of tongs, one that I shove down the neck to grasp the chicken from the top and one to hold the beer can from the bottom. Then I try to pull them apart. Sometimes the chicken is an accommodating bird and slides right off. Sometimes it decides to fight like the dickens and stick to its can. One thing you don't want to do is tip the chicken upside down and drench it with the left-over hot beer (though that would be an easy way to get the can out). And whatever you do, don't drop the chicken!

I've never maximized the humor potential when serving Beer Can Chicken to others. The lid is down while it's cooking, so you don't get to see it then, and when it is done, I'm too anxious that I'll pour boiling beer on one of my friends to invite them to witness the de-canning process. But more significantly, Beer Can Chicken has gone from a novelty cooking technique (like say, the Surreal Gourmet's Salmon cooked in your dishwasher) to my standard recipe for roast chicken. I'm sure that a more creative host could come up with a terrific chicken-butt-themed party--if you do, I'd love an invitation.

How to Relax on a Friday night with the Family

1. Get a friend who is a wonderful cook to invite your clan over for dinner.
2. Let the Dad's take charge of feeding the sprogs.
3. Take your lovely plate of food and glass of wine onto a nice deck with a view.
4. Purchase, rather than make, your contribution to the meal.

All four of the above took place yesterday evening and what a nice evening it was for me! Sarah made Beer-Can Chicken, Deviled Potatoes, and a lovely Arugula salad (picked moments before from her copious garden). There was a good bottle of Sangiovese that I seemed to be the only one consuming (everyone else was in a Bell's Oberon mood).

This was my dinner and my view.

And just inside the sliding glass doors there was this dining chaos that I didn't have to deal with:

The kid's table (from left going clockwise): Fiona, Ian, Brian, Kevin, Mike, Maeve, Nicholaus

And hovering just out of photo range were (the other) Brian and Sarah. Eventually, I lured Sarah out to the peace of the deck and we let the Dad's do things like chicken-containment, hotdog holding, and fork-technique lessons, though I did miss seeing Maeve prove her adventurous 3-year-old palate when she ate her arugula salad.

After dinner we went down to the backyard for dessert and kid playtime and we managed to demolish the box of cakes I bought at Shatila bakery.

Ian gave the double chocolate cake his full-face-stamp of approval.

Thanks to a sharp knife and a little sneaky slicing, I managed to taste quite a few of the variety of cakes. My favorite was the least visually impressive: the coconut cake. Just plain moist cake, white not-too-sweet frosting and loads of unsweetened coconut.

Some weekend soon, I'll need to reciprocate and do the hosting so Sarah can enjoy the experience of ending a Friday relaxed well-fed, and with a tired kid who is more than willing to go to bed.

A more gratifying trip to Dearborn

I took the kids and my mom to Dearborn today to visit Greenfield Village. Despite the fact that I didn't get to gorge on my beloved Sheik Mashi at Cedarland, it was still gratifying because I managed to fulfill two obsessions on one trip (and did not have to do endless train-related stuff). Of course, we did have to go on one trip round the Village by old steam engine, but instead of spending hours in the Roundhouse, we saw some other parts of the village including the beautiful new facilities for the craftworks: printing, pottery, tin punching, glass blowing, wool carding and weaving. It was the last two that I was most interested in, though Ian was really fascinated by the pottery works and had to be pried away from watching the master potter at his wheel.

In the Carding Works, we watched how they took this stinky fleece:

and ran it through this carding machine (they also showed us the old fashioned way to hand card. All I gotta say is those frontier women sure had strong forearms.):

And out came soft fluffy roving that could be spun into yarn like this:

They didn't actually have anyone spinning while I was there though I did spot a number of drop spindles. But I didn't really feel the need to watch spinning since I can go visit Lynne-the-intrepid-spinner any time and she often gives me nice snacks too. I didn't take any impressive photos of the weaving but the interpreter did a great demonstration of the 4 different machines (starting in the late 1600's).

And when we were done visiting the craftworks, I rewarded the kids for surprisingly good behavior by taking them to Shatila bakery for ice cream. Saveur magazine listed Shatila as one of the 12 best places to go for ice cream in the US. Pretty impressive, eh? Here was our line up (from front to back): Pistachio, Apricot and Lemon.

Other than the rather lurid color of the lemon ice cream, I heap praise upon them. The lemon really was extraordinary--sour and creamy at the same time, refreshing, but with a kick of richness. The pistachio was jam-packed with nuts and didn't have the excessive, cloying almond-extract taste that some pistachio ice creams rely upon. The apricot was supremely floral with chunks of dried apricots adding a deeper punch. I can't wait to go back and try the Mango, Rosewater and Cantaloupe flavors. And by the looks of it, Fiona can't wait to go back either:

That's my girl! A dedicated bowl licker!

I also couldn't resist leaving without a little something. Or a lot of somethings...

Left row (from front to back): coconut cake, chocolate mousse cake, cheesecake, and two double chocolate slices. Right row (from front to back): casino cake, strawberry chocolate cake, vanilla pistachio cake and chocolate roll.

Can you believe this whole box of goodies cost $7? That's less that $1 a piece! I don't actually know what the Casino cake is (front row right), but since it looks like a pressed strawberry roll on top of something insanely creamy and some yellow cake, how bad can it be? I've never actually tried their French-style pastries before because I always buy a big tray of baklava and mamoul. They have fabulous mamoul--try the date-filled kind. Wait, no, try the walnut, or the pistachio. Oh hell, try them all. But the cakes I bought today remind me of my sorely missed Swedish Bakery in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood (rather than the wall of middle eastern filo-based treats at Shatila, the Swedish Bakery has an equivalent wall of Scandinavian style cookies and breads). I'll be sure to report back whether they measure up to the Swedish Bakery's high standards of sin.

Recovery

I have two intense kids. This became immediately apparent when, 20 minutes after they came home and Brian retired upstairs for a well-deserved nap, they had me running around trying to satisfy their many needs. I had to stop while filling drinks orders and take a deep breath and reassert control over the landscape. One thing to work on with the kids this summer is patience--theirs, not mine.

I'm pleased with the results of the writing weekend; the scene map did not get finished, nor did the character definitions, but I think they are the kind of thing I could work on in the odd hour without needing to be in touch with the creative muse. They are homework, and one doesn't need inspiration or excessive quantities of caffeine to accomplish them.

My next task is to hit up the two grannies for regular writing time. My mom isn't working this summer (though she seems to have a tennis game scheduled every other day) so I'm going to suggest a regular morning date with her grandchildren. Depending on her response, I will then approach Granny Kathy with the suggestion too and see how much writing time I can guilt them into providing me.

Round 2 of Greek composition grading is about to begin. Comp grading seriously cuts into my fiction reading time, so I am making sure to really enjoy my time with a novel before I have to ration fiction-time to the hour or so before bed. I'm on a Shields kick after loving The Stone Diaries. I'm about 1/3 of the way through her last novel, Unless. So far, what I most admire about this book is Shields' ability to avoid sentimentality; it reminds me a little of Atwood, but is less acidic and more sympathetic, yet still very sharp. This story could easily slide into mush territory due to the subject matter (lost daughter told from the mother's perspective), but at least once on each page (and sometimes more often) she has her narrator make some observation that pulls it back from the edge.

Here is an example from Page 47, at the end of the chapter titled "Wherein":
I want. I want. I want.
I don't actually say these last words; I just bump along on their short, stubbed feet, their little dead declarative syllables--while buttoning up my coat and making my way home.

A more sentimental writer would have ended the chapter with "I want. I want. I want." And it would have been a pretty damn good way to end the chapter too, but that isn't Shields--she pulls you back into her character's self-consciousness about her own tendency to dramatize the situation and has her comment on it.

And for those of you wondering about the office color--I bought a gallon of blue. The peach was fine, really nothing wrong with it, but it didn't feel right for the space. And it occurred to me that I have wanted a blue room since I was 7 years old and my father vetoed the idea and made me paint my North-facing bedroom yellow. Yup, yet another pathetic little grudge I hold. So finally I'll get to satisfy my little 7 year-old self and have a blue-room of my very own.