Late Night Dinner

It's a Monday night, just got out of work around 830. Traversed the 8 minute drive home, opened the door to the palatial estate, then the door to the fridge...What's for dinner?... At the store on Sundays I usually grab a pound of lunch meat and some cheese. This week it happened to be Virginia Ham, but as a reach for the standard complimentary sack of American, I noticed the leftovers from a block of smoked cheddar. Ham and smoked cheddar what could be better? (I assess 3 bonus points for the rhyme).....Keep reading...

I usually purchase some form of bagel at Kroger as well, I find their brand is not only cheaper, but the texture is softer, and yet more complex, a little more to my liking. I often grab the Everything variety, because it is good for just about that. With a "fresh" half dozen in hand my belly and my brain began immediate and laborious efforts to hatch and amazing plan for gastro gratification.

My little brother currently attends Miami University, and when I am in town for a night of debauchery we are always sure to stop at the Bagel & Deli located uptown. While their website isn't much to behold, their soft, steamy satisfying bagel sandwiches certainly are. I find that satisfaction at Bagel & Deli is most easily achieved by telling one of the friendly "bagelwich artists" what sort of protein you would like and letting their imagination take over. Otherwise you could be there for hours just contemplating the menu. All their works are an excellent beginning to any plan that involves mitigating the effects of tomorrow's hangover.... Now, totally immersed in my Jack Skelington-esque Eureka! moment, it was time to cook. First I built my sandwich:

• One Everything bagel
• Both sides slathered in mayonnaise
• Four slices of smoked cheddar
• Four slices of Virginia Ham
• Two Slices of tomato
• Some shredded romaine
• My wife likes to throw a couple crunchy potato chips in the middle (something they do at Bagel & Deli, but an addition based on personal preference)
  

Build your bagel with cheese closest to the bagel for maximum adhesion. Condiments and veg in the middle. Now to replicate the magical cooking process that makes normal bagels into delectable morsels of steamy goodness:

• Fill your dutch oven with about 1/4" of water
• Set over high heat
• Place you colander into the oven make sure it hovers above the water line
• Wrap your sandwich in foil and place into colander
• Put lid on pot (it won't be a perfect fit but it will be enough to achieve the desired result)
• Steam sandwich for about 10 mins
  

The resulting dish is an amalgam of smokey ham, melty cheddar, palate-cleansing veggies and the bagel oy vey the bagel. The sauna from which you just extracted your creation transformed the bagel into a hot, chewy, intensely flavorful ring of starch. You have successfully recreated the power of the bagel steamer thingy in your own house. Wield this power responsibly.

Roasted Chicken AKA 2 Hour Thanksgiving Dinner

So the majority of the time when I cook something, I see a show or read an article or see an ingredient somewhere that I want to try making. Its only a few days before Thanksgiving and my Mom and cousins will be handling the cooking on that day, which is cool cuz then I just get to enjoy the meal and the 6 hours of prep time outside the kitchen. Lucky for me I caught this bit with Eric Ripert on the Today show and was instantly inspired to roast a whole chicken. Something I have done many times, but when you hear Eric talk about it you contemplate immediately hopping in your semi-dependable '01 VW Jetta and navigating morning rush hour gridlock down to the local butcher for an organic free range clucker. Eric Ripert is the kind of humble, knowledgeable, highly successful chef who makes me think even I could bear the mantle of multiple Michelin Stars. He knows more about cooking than I could ever find on Wikipedia, but communicates it in a way that is (no pun intended) easy to digest. I could never live up to Eric's bird so I decided to take it a new direction.

Roasting a chicken in a Reynold's Oven Bag is more than likely considered sacrilege by not only Mr. Ripert but everyone from the home of the Eiffel Tower and Champagne. Well parlez-vous David?....that's what I did, hold on to your stars Eric.

Monsieur Ripert's stuffing recipe is probably out of this world, but as I took stock of my kitchen I realized I would have to truck down to Kroger just for the ingredients he used. I did notice celery, onions, and half a loaf of week old bread, that was gonna be Sunday's French toast, and I figured I better just throw together something easy. I based my recipe on this simple one I found on about.com.

TOTAL PREP TIME: 35 minutes
TOTAL COOK TIME: Around 1.5 hours for a 5 lb. Chicken

• 8 slices of old bread cut into 1/2" pieces
• 3 stalks of celery diced
• 1 small onion diced
• 1/3 cup butter (little over 5 tbsp cut from the stick)
• garlic powder
• fresh ground pepper
• dried thyme
• fresh rosemary (had it in the fridge)
• 2 eggs
• splash of chicken broth
• Sea Salt

• 1. Melt butter in skillet
• 2. Saute onions and celery to soften
• 3. Mix veg/butter with bread chunks in a large bowl
• 4. Add seasonings, couple tsps garlic powder, equal parts thyme and rosemary, ample salt and fresh cracked pepper, beat eggs separately and incorporate
• 5. Add enough chx broth to keep the mix moist, but not too much to mushify the bread

Set aside and clean up those ingredients if you are anal retentive about your space like I am.

If Eric Ripert's chicken is the Mona Lisa mine is a color by numbers from Highlights magazine I used to read as a kid. It goes a little something like this...

• Pre Heat Oven to 350
• 5 tbsps butter
• 2-3 tablespoons of Mrs Dash Chicken
• kitchen twine
• 1 Reynolds Oven Bag
• fresh ground pepper
• sea salt

• 1. Soften up the butter in the microwave
• 2. Mash the Mrs Dash into the butter (I love Mrs Dash in general because unlike other seasonings whose first ingredient is always salt, Mrs Dash has no sodium which allows you to control exactly how much salt you would like to add)
• 3. Rub the butter mixture UNDER the skin of the chicken as well as over the legs and wings
• 4. Stuff the cavity with all the stuffing you can possibly cram in there
• 5. Truss the bird thusly.
• 6. Cover every buttery inch with salt and pepper

Place in prepared bird into oven bag, tie, and slit the top of the bag a few times. Plop your delicious bag o poultry in a Pyrex baking dish and roast in oven 18 mins per pound.

I steamed up some green beans to serve as my side dish. Choose asparagus, maybe some squash, or even some fresh beets to accompany your little birdy on the journey down to your stomach.

This chicken will come out so juicy and flavorful that if you are anything like me you will only require a utensil for the stuffing and you mouth will perform double service as a wet nap (excuse my manners Mr. Ripert). The stuffing is also amazing, with the right amount of chicken broth in the mix it comes out a lot like a savory bread pudding. The sweetness of the wheat bread's simple carbs blend perfectly with the herbs, salt and pepper.

My wife said "This is good, but it could use some gravy.....or something." ARRGGGGGH, not everything needs sauce, dear. She summarizes the meal like this, "put that in the chicken, put it in the bag, put IT in the oven, then eat."

But there are certainly plenty of juice and drippings in the bag to prepare a simple gravy; thickened up in a saucepan with a rue made with equal parts flour and butter.

Think of this meal as an NFL preseason game, with all the important stuff happening in about half the time, and preparing your stomach for the culinary SuperBowl that is Thanksgiving.

My First Post

Did you see what I did there? Huh, Huh, did ya? The title of this blog....yeah I know it's pretty creative, but beyond that it seems appropriate. For one I love to eat food and one of the greatest things about food is its a vehicle for salt. But secondly you should take the opinions I share here as just that. Patronize the restaurants I sample, make drastic changes to the recipes I publish and always clean your plate (makes my grandma happy). You should always eat for yourself, cook for others, and read this blog often for me. Thanks in advance.

A little more on sodium chloride. Salt has been many things, from flavor to currency but, most of all... its freakin' awesome. Have you ever licked the salt off the top of a perfectly hexagonal Skyline oyster cracker and then tossed it back in the bowl? Or practically sucked the husk off a "hot salty nut" during a sweltering summer evening watching Joey Votto and the Cincinnati Reds dismantle the Cardinals at GABP. Or better yet heavily moistened your index finger with a dollop of saliva and then plunged it into the bottom of a pretzel bag creating a sort of Saltsicle best followed by a gulp of frosty Coke?

I claim to be some sort of computer techie, at least that's how my occupation is described at my employer. That being said this blog will be my first attempt to express myself in a digital manner. I have no personal website, no youtube account (yet), and I don't tweet. So I guess I'm kind of old school for a 27 year old.

Thanks to my cousin Patrick Hildebrandt (phildebrandt.com) for encouraging me to do this. Up to this point I have used my facebook page to chronicle a few of my culinary adventures and photograph several of my creations. But this blog will be full on dedicated to the concoction and consumption of food.