Down home decadence

One of the resolutions for the new year is to buy, cook and discard more wisely. This all involves a SERIOUS amount of planning that is sometimes enjoyable, occasionally onerous. Sunday, I beer roasted a chicken and fried up some kale, whilst Chris rocked the roasted potatoes and maple-mustard glazed parsnips. As usual, I tore off all the chicken from the carcass (a very fun and messy endeavor), and simmered the bones with veg and herbs for stock all night long.

Chris has taken a New Orleans tradition of Red Beans and Rice on Monday and adapted it to London because I'm out late with class. So we were left with a small bowl full of chicken and a vat of stock. Michael Ruhlman posted a recipe for chicken and dumplings on his blog back in January that caught my eye, as a cheap and easy way to reuse roast chicken. So that went up on the weekly meal plan (followed by roast pork tenderloin tomorrow, dinner with Lib Dem Vince Cable on Thursday and tacos on Friday - see? It does involve hella planning).

Oh. My. God. Delicious. Decadent. Scrumptious. And every other word that describes amazing food.

http://blog.ruhlman.com/2010/01/chicken-and-dumplings.html

The tarragon added a refined element and enriched the dish even more by invoking the flavor of hollandaise, and the lemon gave the dish a necessary acidic kick at the end. Being a house full of hot sauce, we added Dave's Roasted Garlic hot sauce at the very end to spice it up a bit. Perfection :)

Dinner and an essay

Tonight I must write an essay. I'm getting there - slowly but surely - about 1/4 done at this point. But this isn't about the pompous sentences recently recorded on paper, but rather the food that fed them.

This evening I needed a quick meal that also satisfied my need for culinary therapy after a long day. Ran over to Tescos (I know! No time for the market this afternoon, or my beloved Waitrose), grabbed cherry tomatoes and basil and ducked home. While the water slowly heated for linguine, I sautéed half a thinly sliced onion, the remainder of a red pepper and 4 cloves of garlice in a dash of olive oil. Chris is out drinking the night away, so I didn't need to spice it up at all - a welcome change, I must admit. Once soft, I threw in the the cherry tomatoes and left to simmer. As the tomatoes broke down I splashed in some of the reisling I happended to have in a wine glass and a squirt of tomato paste, leaving to simmer and melt together. When the linguine was nearly finished, I tore up about 10 basil leaves into the sauce and tossed the pasta in to finish it off. Served with a quick salad of rocket and tomato and the remainder of the wine, it took all of 30 minutes to prepare. Leaving me plenty of time to procrastinate writing my paper...