Month: January 2012

Awesome Roast Garlic Chicken

Binder clips - not just for papers anymore

This isn’t mine – I found this one over at The Fork Left Behind.

I tried this recipe and followed it to the letter – which I don’t usually do. I salted the bird and let it sit in the fridge for 3 hours, then let it sit covered on the counter top cover for another hour. Did the garlic bit and sealed it up with office binder clips (I didn’t have toothpicks). This was as *awesome* as the author described.

My wife asked why I just didn’t buy one of the roast birds at the store – and then she tasted it. My daughters loved it as well, my older one saying: “I don’t usually like chicken, but I like this chicken.”

Do yourself a favor and try this recipe – it is going to become a go-to recipe for me, certainly.

Check it out. This recipe ruined the notion of a store-bought roast chicken forever.

UPDATE: I asked the blog author if I could post the recipe verbatim here, and she generously agreed. Please don’t make that an excuse not to visit her blog – she’s got some interesting things cooking that are low carb-friendly – and some interesting posts as well.

Crispy Garlicky Roasted Chicken

  •  One 3-4lb chicken
  • 1.5 tsp sea salt
  • 1 tsp pepper
  • 1 bulb of garlic, cloves separated but left unpeeled
  1. Salt and pepper chicken as soon as you think of roasting on – sometime between 2 and 24 hours before. Return salted chicken to the refrigerator.
  2. Remove chicken 1 hour before ready to cook and allow to come to room temperature, more or less.
  3. Preheat oven to 400F and fill cavity with garlic cloves and seal cavity closed using a toothpick.
  4. Using a small* roasting pan or dish, add a little olive oil to the pan and then add the chicken breast side up. Roast 20 minutes.
  5. Turn chicken breast side down and continue to roast another 20 minutes.
  6. Flip chicken once more and roast breast side up for the final 20 minutes.
  7. Allow chicken to rest for 20 minutes so that juices can redistribute. Remove roasted garlic from cavity and serve alongside chicken.

*It is essential to use a roasting pan or dish or even pie plate approximately the same size of your chicken. This will ensure that the juices and fat that come from the chicken don’t burn.

It is extremely important to note that my wife specifically asked me to make this. I probably have 100 different recipes here – she’s asked me to make maybe 3 or 4 of them (the kale soup is one I remember offhand).

Kitchen Experiment – Low Carb Kale and Bacon Crustless Quiche

Inspired by a Quiche that Lee Kirsten posted on her blog, I decided to make one, so I riffed off her recipe a bit, using what I had at hand:

  • 5 oz. package of baby kale the wife bought on sale and I could imagine no one eating
  • 5 strips of bacon leftover from some other experiment
  • 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
  • 1 small zucchini, grated
  • 1/2 cup of Argentine parmesan cheese (similar in flavor to the authentic stuff but softer) – feel free to substitute here
  • 6 eggs
  • 1-7oz container Fage whole Fat plain Yogurt
  • 4 tablespoons butter
  • Salt and pepper
    Continue reading “Kitchen Experiment – Low Carb Kale and Bacon Crustless Quiche” →

Kitchen Experiment: Low Carb Cauliflower Soup

Here’s what I tried when I wanted to make a simple soup great for a cold winter day.

  • 1 large head of cauliflower
  • 2 whole bunches of scallions – yes – bunches
  • salt
  • 4 cups of water
  • pepper
  • 1 cup heavy cream

In a deep cooking pot, place the chopped scallions and the chopped up cauliflower head in 4 cups of water and bring to a boil, then simmer for a half hour. Continue reading “Kitchen Experiment: Low Carb Cauliflower Soup” →

Do Low Carb Diets Fail Partly Because of Social Pressure?

The other day, before the start of yet another meeting at work, someone brought up Dr. Oz. One person said: “I always used to think that drinking skim milk was good for you, but Dr. Oz said you should drink 2%.” It was said as a revelation, a shock.

I couldn’t help myself: “You know, fat isn’t necessarily bad for you. In fact, fat can actually help you lose weight.”

I got either nervous giggles or blank stares. I fell for it again. I shouldn’t have bothered and just kept my mouth shut. I learned long ago that while my coworkers seem to like me, those that know something about my predilection toward low carb tend to think I’m something of a loony. Continue reading “Do Low Carb Diets Fail Partly Because of Social Pressure?” →

Italian Chili – My Recipe for Beating the Cravings of Pasta and Pizza

Last night I made this, it came out quite good, and I thought I would share.

This is yet another variation on what I’ve done before. It provides a meat and vegetable-filled dish similar to a chili or stew in consistency, and, covered in grated parmesan cheese, it not only awesome, but fills that hole left by foregoing both pasta and traditional pizza on a low carb diet.

This is more a technique than a hard and fast recipe. The basis of this for me is usually grass-fed ground beef. A pound of this, bought directly from the farmer, is expensive – $8.00/lb., but I also comes with a high degree of probability that the stuff is the real deal. The problem with food in general is that if you want ‘organic’, the good stuff looks pretty much like the cheap stuff, and fraud is an issue. Less so if you know the farmer himself – and see his kids at the market. Continue reading “Italian Chili – My Recipe for Beating the Cravings of Pasta and Pizza” →

Great News, America! It Appears We Can’t Possibly Get Fatter Than We Are

The Wall Street Journal reported that, for some reason, America’s rising obesity rate stopped rising in 2003.

Actually, it’s not just the good ‘ol USA that this is happening in, but the entire world.

Researchers don’t know why, exactly, so they trot this out – at least this is the summary from the reporter:

The reasons for the leveling off — like the sharp increase that preceded it — aren’t precisely clear, the papers say. Flegal and her colleagues cite the usual array of presumed factors: an expansion of the food supply, energy imbalance, the possible effect of environmental endocrine disruptors. But they say more research is needed into the factors causing the sharp rise, as well as the plateau now.

Coincidentally, 2003 coincides with the beginning of the Atkins low carb craze.

Just sayin…

 

Kitchen Experiment FAIL: Low Carb Crock Pot Chicken Curry

I was WAY out of familiar territory here, and now have a pot full of food sitting in the fridge I know no one will go near. I can’t even begin to pretend that this one has any redeeming qualities. Experiments sometimes lead to failure – and this one was a big failure.

This was inspired by a green chicken curry meal with coconut milk I had on vacation which was very good. I ordered it because it was something I would never order – I just wanted to try something different, and it was a wonderful mix of spicy and cool with citrus notes.

I wanted to try to come up with something using curry spices reminiscent of that vacation meal.

Silly me. Continue reading “Kitchen Experiment FAIL: Low Carb Crock Pot Chicken Curry” →

Kitchen Experiment: Low Carb Coconunt Pumpkin Muffins with Stevia

This is one of my go-to recipes since conjuring it up in October, 2011. I’ve made it no less than a half-dozen times.

Now, however, I have made a resolution for the year to ditch artificial sweeteners, and have done well – but this recipe, I think, does need some sweet.

A reader recommended stevia, which I had heard of, but had heard some worrisome studies had come out about possible health effects. ‘Natural’ does not always mean safe, after all. I did a bit of research, however, and found this was based on some early, flawed studies – and I wasn’t going to be using a LOT of the stuff – the only thing I can think of at present I’d use it in is the pumpkin muffins.

Continue reading “Kitchen Experiment: Low Carb Coconunt Pumpkin Muffins with Stevia” →

Thank You, Anthony Bourdain: It’s About the Food

I am an idiot. I only have a slight edge over some other idiots in that I am open to discovering that I am an idiot, so that I might actually learn something new, or discover, sometimes to my horror, how something I thought I knew was so blindingly wrong.

For the past month, I have been in an immersive course of Anthony Bourdain and his writing, as well as had the experience of cuisine of another country while on vacation. Not just as a tourist eating at the hotel restaurants, but more like a food anthropologist, spending a good portion of our time in the Caribbean in grocery stores, looking at what the locals eat, inspecting each aisle of the store, fumbling with packages in French, and trying to figure out what the hell was in them due to my not knowing the language.

And never, to my recollection, eating at a ‘touristy’ restaurant. It was either casual French-inspired dining, or simple local fare.

It has been illuminating, to say the least. Continue reading “Thank You, Anthony Bourdain: It’s About the Food” →

Why I Don’t Buy Supermarket Ground Beef Anymore

There’s a wonderful/horrible chapter about hamburgers in Anthony Bourdain’s book ‘Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook‘, a brutally, if not violently,  honest and profane look at himself, food, the business of cooking and resturants, and a host of other things surrounding the world of food.

If you don’t mind frequent use of profanity and occasionally raunchy material, he’s screamingly funny.

His chapter on hamburger in America – and how it is made, that is angry and eloquent, is classic.

I wish I could write half – no, one tenth – as good as he does.

I’d recommend his book for this chapter alone. Get it from Amazon here, or your library, or just hang out at your local bookstore and read it (before it goes out of business).

Not going to do that? Check out this link from a review of the book that details – and lifts a number of quotes from – this particular chapter of his book.  A few selections:

“I believe that, as an American, I should be able to walk into any restaurant in America and order my hamburger – that most American of foods – medium fxxxing rare. I don’t believe my hamburger should have to come with a warning to cook it well done to kill off any potential contaminants or bacteria.”

“I believe that I shouldn’t have to be advised to thoroughly clean and wash up immediately after preparing a hamburger.”

“I believe I should be able to treat my hamburger like food, not like infectious fxxxing medical waste.”

“I believe the worlds ‘meat’ and ‘treated with ammonia’ should never occur in the same paragraph – much less the same sentence.”

It explains nicely part of the reason that I don’t buy supermarket hamburger anymore, and on the very rare occasion I do, it’s cooked to ‘well-done’.