June 26

I am feeling profoundly (or, as my fingers tried to put it, "feely profounding") inarticulate today in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage. I keep thinking of my uncle Jerry, the first gay person I ever knew, whose death to AIDS in 1988 spurred me to activism as a young kid with moussed bangs and a Silence=Death sweatshirt, and in whose memory June carries one of her middle names. I wonder what he would say today. I'm grateful, relieved, elated, and beyond, that June will grow up in a world that's very different from what I knew in 1980s Oklahoma.

It also feels like a fitting time to reread John Birdsall's whip-smart Lucky Peach piece, "America, Your Food Is So Gay," which was originally published a couple of years ago, I think.

And given that it's a Friday in late June, it would also be a fitting time to make watermelon popsicles.

June would eat popsicles, also known within our house as "popsissles," for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and in truth, I can't argue with that, especially if I exercise my parental privilege to decide what goes into said popsissles.

In this case, I used David Lebovitz's simple and brilliant watermelon sorbetto recipe as a template. It starts with watermelon juice - just watermelon, zizzed in a food processor until liquefies - and then you take a little of that juice and warm it with sugar to make a watermelon simple syrup. [So smart, David! So smart.] That syrup then gets stirred into the remaining watermelon juice, along with lime juice and, if you want, a tiny splash of vodka, to help make the popsicles less ice-y. (I skipped the vodka, because I didn't have any, and if you don't want to use it, don't.) In any case, the mixture was bright and big-flavored, and I was halfway inclined to pour it over a glass of ice and down it. But June's breakfast, lunch, and dinner needs prevailed. We made popsicles.

Happy weekend.

Watermelon Pops
Adapted from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop

These popsicles will only taste as good as the watermelon you start with, so start with a sweet, flavorful one. Oh, and you can omit the vodka, if you want.

A roughly 3-pound (1.5-kg) chunk of watermelon
½ cup (100 grams) sugar
Big pinch of kosher salt
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice, or to taste
1 to 2 tablespoons vodka (optional)

Cut away and discard the rind of the watermelon, and cut the flesh into cubes. Chuck the cubes into a blender or food processor, and process until liquefied. Pour through a strainer (to remove seeds) into a large measuring cup. You should have about 3 cups (750 ml) of watermelon juice. (If you have more, well, drink up! Or freeze for future use.)

In a small, nonreactive saucepan, warm about ½ cup (125 ml) of the watermelon juice with the sugar and then salt, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from the heat, and stir this syrup into the remaining 2 ½ cups (625 ml) watermelon juice. Mix in the lime juice and vodka, if using. Taste, and add more lime juice, if you want, or more salt. You shouldn’t taste the salt; it’s just there to intensify the watermelon flavor.

Chill the mixture thoroughly - if the watermelon was refrigerator-cold when you started the process, this won't take long - and then pour it into your popsicle mold of choice. (I used this.) If you have more mixture than will fit in your popsicle molds, drink it, or for mini-pops(!) and other fun stuff, freeze it in ice-cube trays.

Yield: about 10 pops

One Tuesday, late-morning

I come to you today, June 13th, a fine summer’s day on which you probably have no desire to turn on the oven, to talk about roasted chicken. More specifically, I want to talk about Thomas Keller’s Favorite Simple Roast Chicken, which I prefer to call TK’s Hot Buttered Chicken.

I have long been a devotee of the Zuni Cafe recipe for roasted chicken. I imagine many of you feel the same way. Zuni’s recipe, which Judy Rodgers wrote with a rare and reverential thoroughness - may she rest in peace, and may more cookbooks be written like hers - relies on three things: using a small-ish bird, salting it a day ahead, and cooking in a crackling hot oven, first breast-up and then flipped breast-down and then breast-up again. It was the first roasted chicken I ever made, and when I get all the elements right, it is the best roasted chicken I will ever make. However. I forget to salt the bird ahead. Or I put it off, because getting involved with raw chicken takes resolve. Or I don’t plan dinner until the afternoon of, and then it’s too late for advance salting. Or maybe I manage the advance salting, but then I don’t feel like messing with the beast once it’s in the oven - remembering to flip it and flip it again, dodging splatters of hot fat, etc. Roasting a chicken the Zuni way is not hard, but sometimes I want to make easy things easier.

Thomas Keller’s chicken recipe has been floating around for more than a decade, but I first tried it only last month, after two different friends in two different cities happened to mention it to me within a week of one another. Both are energetic cooks, not likely to balk at a complicated recipe, so when they recommended something so straightforward, so lazy, even, I went out and bought a chicken.

Like Rodgers, Keller calls for a small-ish bird, two to three pounds, and he too cranks up the oven. But he salts the chicken just before cooking, and once it’s cooking, he leaves it alone. And when it’s done, he slathers the meat with butter and serves it forth, with Dijon mustard* on the side. Slathers it with butter and serves it with mustard! SLATHERS IT WITH BUTTER! SERVES IT WITH MUSTARD! I will make TK’s Hot Buttered Chicken.

I’m rarely at home for lunch, and if I am, I’m a sandwich-or-leftovers-lunch cook. I am not a hot-lunch cook. But one Tuesday, late-morning - because Tuesday is my Sunday - I salted a chicken, TK-style, and put it in the oven. While it quietly roasted - so independent, this chicken! - I managed to yank up a bunch of weeds in the yard-slash-jungle out front, and June played in the car, her favorite activity, flicking switches and turning nobs and stealing the emergency animal crackers I keep in the glove compartment, eating half of three of them, and hiding the remains in the console. When the timer went off, we went inside, and I carved and buttered the chicken. I steamed some broccoli and squeezed a lemon over it, and we sat down to lunch.

The chicken was golden and taut-skinned, juicy and glistening. June picked at it, because that’s what she's doing this week - toddlers! Always doing toddler things! I scooped mustard onto my plate, and we sat and talked, eating and not eating**, and one of us sang, because when you’re not eating, you sing. I wiped up the last smear of butter with a fingertip, cleared our plates, and then Tuesday was already halfway over, easy, and there were leftovers for tomorrow.

* Any mention of mustard always reminds me of this. And while we’re on the topic of Karl Lagerfeld, this this THIS.

** Talking, and not talking...


TK's Hot Buttered Chicken
Adapted from Thomas Keller, Bouchon, and Epicurious

One 2- to 3-pound chicken, at room temperature for an hour or so, if possible
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper (optional)
2 teaspoons minced thyme (optional)
Unsalted butter
Dijon mustard

Preheat the oven to 450°F.

Dry the chicken very well with paper towels, inside and out. Salt and pepper the cavity, then truss the bird with twine. Trussing is not hard, and you really can wing it - or you can watch the videos here, or elsewhere on the Web. In any case, the idea is that the wings and legs stay close to the body, and the meaty part of the drumsticks cover the top of the breast and keep it from drying out. I am not a pro trusser, but as long as I tie the legs together and keep them tucked up tight, I figure I’m fine.

Now, salt the chicken. Thomas Keller likes to "rain" the salt over the bird, so that it has a nice uniform coating that will result in a crisp, salty, flavorful skin. He uses about 1 tablespoon of kosher salt. I didn’t measure mine. You should use enough that, when it’s cooked, you should still be able to make out the salt baked onto the crisp skin. Season to taste with pepper, if you want. I don’t usually pepper my roasted chickens.

Place the chicken breast-up in a sauté pan or roasting pan. Slide it into the oven. Keller says to leave it alone — no basting, no added fat. Roast it until a thermometer stuck in the meatiest part of the thigh registers 165°F, 40 to 60 minutes. (I use a Thermapen: not cheap, but a little bit life-changing.) Remove it from the oven, and add the thyme, if using, to the pan. Spoon the juices and thyme over the chicken, and let it rest for 15 minutes on a cutting board.

Remove the twine. Carve or cut into pieces, however you like. The preparation is not meant to be fancy. Slather the still-hot meat with butter. Serve with mustard on the side.

Yield: enough for 2 to 4 people

Here was an opportunity

One evening last week, my friend Sarah sent me a sudden text that said only, "Yotam Ottolenghi. Carrot and Mung Bean Salad from Plenty More. Just do it!" These kinds of vital communications are why humans need one another: so that we know what to eat next.

I was skeptical about the mung beans: I know they’re used to great effect in many cuisines, I know, I know, but a certain aura of patchouli and tie dye hangs over them. Still, I was willing to reconsider. I took down my copy of Plenty More from the top of the refrigerator, where my favorite and most-used cookbooks live. (Hey: another time when I mentioned this fridge-top collection, one of you asked if I would consider writing a post about the books I keep there. Does that still interest you? I’d forgotten about that request until now, but really, I’d be very happy to do it. Update: I am an idiot. I forgot about this post on Serious Eats! That said, the top of the fridge looks quite different today, with new books coming out, and I would be happy to tell you about it.) I turned the book over and flipped to the index, looked up the page number (169) for the recipe, and proceeded to thumb backward toward it, but I overshot the mark and found myself on page 163 instead, looking at a recipe for Honey-Roasted Carrots with Tahini Yogurt.

I paused long enough to skim through the ingredients. I had everything, as it happened, including a fresh bag of carrots and a newly opened container of tahini left over from another recipe and now waiting to be finished. I am famous within the four walls of my house for buying tahini, using approximately two tablespoons, and then entombing the remainder at the back of the fridge for a couple of years. Here was an opportunity to do something different. The mung beans could wait. (They’re still waiting, and waiting, and waaaaaaaaiting...)

You do not need me to tell you how smart, how good, and how necessary Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty More is. Plenty was seminal, and I think Plenty More is even more important. This particular recipe reminds me a lot of Casa Moro’s Warm Butternut and Chickpea Salad with Tahini, but maybe better. Ottolenghi uses carrots instead of squash and, instead of allspice, freshly toasted coriander and cumin seeds. His spicing feels more special as a result, more fragrant and beguiling, and the carrots get sticky-slick with honey, and the yogurt in the tahini sauce gives it both lightness and heft. To be totally honest, Ottolenghi did call for a little too much coriander for me - coriander seed, like marjoram, can start to taste the way potpourri smells - so I scaled it back when I typed up the recipe below, and I think it’s just right. Next time, I might add chickpeas and red onion, à la Casa Moro, and make a great thing greater.

In any case, I made it for lunch on a day when I had the house all to myself - and had celebrated having the house all to myself by eating a gigantic slice of cinnamon-custard twist from Larsen's for breakfast - and it was exactly what I wanted. It’s more than the sum of its parts, by far: one of those things that you can zap together without a trip to the grocery store and, afterward, makes you feel like putting on the Chariots of Fire theme and taking a victory lap around the table. That night, Brandon and I ate the leftover carrots and sauce with hot Italian sausages and a cucumber salad, and he liked the tahini-yogurt sauce so much that, after we’d eaten all the carrots, he went to the cupboard, took down a box of Triscuits, and used the crackers to scoop up the last of the sauce from his plate and then the jar I’d made it in.


Honey-and-Spice Roasted Carrots with Tahini Yogurt
Adapted from Plenty More

This recipe halves easily, and I’ll bet it also doubles well. And if you use a scale to measure the ingredients by weight, it comes together very, very fast. Oh, and though the original version calls for Greek yogurt, I prefer regular plain yogurt, so that’s what I keep around, and it worked just fine.

To toast the coriander and cumin seeds, put a small skillet over medium heat, add the seeds (only one type at a time; they’ll probably toast at different rates), and stay nearby, shaking the pan occasionally. They’re ready when they smell fragrant. Remove them from the heat immediately, and crush them coarsely in a mortar and pestle or under the side of a knife. Repeat with the other type of seeds.

For yogurt sauce:
Scant 3 tablespoons (40 grams) tahini, such as Joyva brand
2/3 cup (130 grams) plain whole-milk yogurt or Greek yogurt
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 garlic clove, crushed
Generous pinch of kosher salt, such as Diamond Crystal brand

For carrots:
Scant 3 tablespoons (60 grams) honey
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 ½ teaspoons coriander seeds, toasted and lightly crushed
1 ½ teaspoons cumin seeds, toasted and lightly crushed
Leaves from 2 sprigs fresh thyme, or a generous pinch of dried thyme
3 pounds (1.3 kilograms) carrots, peeled and cut into index-finger-sized batons
1 ½ tablespoons cilantro leaves, chopped or not
Kosher salt
Black pepper

Preheat the oven to 425°F, and line a large rimmed sheet pan with parchment paper.

Combine the sauce ingredients in a small bowl, and whisk well. Set aside while you roast the carrots.

Combine the honey, oil, coriander and cumin seeds, and thyme in a large bowl. Add 1 teaspoon kosher salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Whisk as well as you can; the honey might make it pretty goopy. Add the carrots, and mix until well coated. (I found it easiest to do this with my hands, since the honey wanted to clump instead of coat the carrots.) Dump the carrots onto the prepared sheet pan, and arrange them evenly in a single layer. Roast, stirring gently once or twice, until they are cooked through and glazed, 30 to 40 minutes.

Serve the carrots warm or at room temperature, with a good spoonful of sauce on top or smeared on the plate underneath them. Scatter with cilantro.

Yield: 4 servings