This weekend's Greenmarket purchases (= $37):
-one 3-pound chicken (feet attached!)
-a dozen eggs
-2 red bell peppers
-2 zucchini
-a butternut squash
-small red potatoes
-thyme
-cilantro
-leeks
-some onions
-carrots
-15 apples (red delicious, johnamac, and mutsu)
Could that possibly be all? I am trying to keep better track of where the food money goes.
Having decided that it was time to try the famous Zuni Cafe roast chicken with warm bread salad, Saturday night I salted my chicken, whose terrifying claws I could not lop off because I had taken my only real knife in to be sharpened. It had to be laid in the bowl curled up in the fetal position, otherwise the legs would have poked wantonly straight up in the air.
Strolling back from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to the subway on Sunday, Andrew and I passed an adorable food store with bread in the window. We went in to buy a loaf of bread and left with coffee, cheese, crackers, olive oil, and white wine vinegar. It was hard not to buy more because everything was so beautifully, temptingly displayed. They had the Italian bouillons for which I vainly searched uptown and down when Nigella was my bible. It is called Blue Apron Foods, it is on Union Street just above Seventh Avenue, and it makes me wish I still lived in Park Slope.
Back home, I roasted the chicken and made the bread salad, a nice, lazy Sunday night meal. I think I like Ina Garten's chicken with croutons just as well (because of those onions that cook under the chicken!), but I did like the results of the pre-salting method here. As Judy Rogers suggests, I roasted it in a preheated cast iron skillet instead of a roasting pan, and I used the convection feature on my oven for the first time--perhaps these also contributed to the lovely crispness of the skin.
I'll get you, my pretty!
