For the past couple of years, I’ve enjoyed reading posts from One Local Summer, a local foods challenge in which bloggers prepare one completely local-food dinner each week. This year, I signed up for the challenge, which is now being hosted by Farm to Philly.
We eat local foods much of the time, so I had to decide on a meal to kick off the beginning of One Local Summer. I settled on our simple Friday night supper: roasted chicken with roasted cauliflower.
When asked to describe the flavor of an unusual meat to someone who hasn’t tasted it, a clichéd description is that it “tastes like chicken”. Sadly, I don’t think people who’ve eaten only poultry-industry chickens know what chicken really tastes like. The first chicken that I bought from Skagit River Ranch was a revelation to me, the meat more flavorful and muscular than other chicken I’d eaten.
I’ve roasted chickens rubbed with butter, oil or spices, chickens stuffed with aromatic herbs or boiled lemons. This chicken was roasted according to Thomas Keller’s recipe from Bouchon, in which a smallish chicken is seasoned with salt and pepper, then roasted at 450 degrees for a little under an hour. No rubbing, no stuffing, no basting. Since we don’t cook with salt, I seasoned the chicken only with pepper. A two-ingredient chicken. As you can see, the finished bird was a beautiful, golden brown. And it was delicious: the flesh juicy and full-flavored, the skin wonderfully crispy.
To go with the chicken, I roasted a head of cauliflower from Nash’s Organic Produce in Sequim, Washington. Sequim (pronounced “skwim”) is on the northern edge of the Olympic peninsula, in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. As the climate is sunnier and warmer than much of western Washington, Nash’s cauliflowers are the first to arrive at our farmers’ markets.
Recently, I’ve been roasting cauliflower sliced thin and slathered with mustard, lemon and butter. As I haven’t yet found local butter (or made my own again) or mustard, and lemons don’t grow here in western Washington, I roasted this cauliflower tossed with olive oil, black pepper, and a finely chopped head of green garlic. The garlic accentuated the sweetness of the cauliflower.
While the cauliflower was roasting, I mixed up a simple egg custard (similar to this one). Eggs from Skagit River Ranch, raw milk from Sea Breeze Farm, Rockridge Orchards honey to sweeten, and cardamom and vanilla to spice. When the cauliflower was done, I put the custard in to bake. When the custard came out of the oven, we were no longer hungry, so I put in it the refrigerator to chill. Custard for breakfast on Saturday morning? I recommend it highly.
Tags: Eat Local · One Local Summer3 Comments
3 responses so far ↓
We are so much on the same wave length! We’ve begun our weekly walk to Chicago Green City Market and this weekend we had this very same chicken! With just salt and pepper. And you are so right- they taste nothing like the chicken most of America eats. And my favorite potato grower had one bushel of fingerling potatoes left- and they were still wonderful, with an almost sweet flavor. I sliced them thin, skins on and made a potatoes Anna with some cream and butter- ever so slimming. And we also had roasted bell peppers that weren’t local- I grew them in Florida and Rich drove them home with the cats.
Soon, all the greens will be coming in and rhubarb is up and everything is just starting to come to the market- a wonderful time of the year!
I like the new look! I got cauliflower from Nash’s this week, too. And spinach. As you might imagine, Nash’s is one of our favorites ’round these parts.
We have had an unusually cool spring… our local farmer’s market is still not open for the season. But the strawberries have been amazing this year… local ones sweet and huge! The annual “Strawberry Festival” was just two weeks ago.
This has certainly made me feel hungry!