Anyone can cook. Yes, anyone.  Can you follow directions?  Check.  Do you have a pulse and possession of your sense of smell and taste?  Check.  Feeling a flutter of nervous excitement that comes with trying something new?  Check.

For proof that anyone can cook, look no further than yours truly. I come from one of those stereotypical late 20th Century suburban households — the one where mom comes home from work to make dinner for the kids, usually by adding water to something that came from a box.  Not to fault my mother, but that approach to cooking gave me a skewed view on just how easy it is to make real food.  And by real I mean totally 100% homemade food made from raw ingredients purchased from the local store.

So, if I can do it, you can do it.  Take my hand as we learn to cook a basic winter meal that will in turn feed the creation of other delicious meals.

Menu and Shopping List:

Whole Roast Chicken with Fresh Herbs

• 1 whole chicken (2.5 lb serves two people).
• Whatever fresh herbs you can find. Flat leaf parsley is cheap and easy. Rosemary, sage, or thyme will be better if you can find it.
• Butter.
• Salt (preferably sea or kosher salt).
• Fresh black pepper.

Roasted Potatoes

• 1/2 lb of potatoes for roasting (Yukon gold, red, fingerling).
• Olive oil.

Braised Red Cabbage
(Recipe courtesy of Jamie Oliver.)

• 1 melon sized head of red cabbage.
• Bacon.
• Fennel seeds.
• 1 apple.
• 1 onion.
• Balsamic vinegar.
• Flat leaf parsley.
  

Step One: Buying the Chicken

I know — whole poultry in a world of plastic-wrapped frozen chicken breasts can be a little intimidating. Take a deep breath if you need to and then head to your local store that, hopefully, has a selection of whole organic (and preferably, pasture-raised) chickens.  For example, my local co-op had three options for a certified organic bird.

Wise whole chicken at $4.99 a lb.
Eberly whole chicken at $4.99 a lb.
Coleman whole chicken at $2.99 a lb.

Trust your instincts when selecting your chicken.  Price will obviously be a factor, but an ethically and humanely raised bird will make for a more delicious dinner. I chose a chicken from Eberly, which is located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Step Two: Putting it All Together

When you get your chicken home, preheat your oven to 425 degrees F.  You’ll need a roasting pan for the chicken — a Pyrex dish or cast iron pot works too.  Remove the plastic wrap from the chicken and give it a little rinse in the sink.  Be sure to remove the packet of giblets, if they are there, from inside the bird and discard (or consider using them for gravy).

Place your chicken in the roasting pan you’ve selected and give it a pat dry with a paper towel and then sprinkle with salt.

Take whatever fresh herbs you’ve bought and chop up about 2 tbls worth and set aside.  Then take 2 tbls of room temperature butter and spread over the chicken making sure to get in between the skin and the meat and into all the crevices.  The butter gives the bird a wonderful golden color as it roasts and by separating the skin from the meat, the butter will make the skin crispy, too.  Then sprinkle the fresh herbs all over the bird, mixing it in with the butter.

The final step, before it goes into the oven, is to truss the chicken by tying the legs together.  Chow.com has a good video on how to do this.  If you don’t have anything with which to tie the legs together, such as butchers’ string, I suggest forgoing the trussing.  It won’t make a huge difference in the end.

Place the chicken in the oven.  It will roast at 425 degrees F for about an hour.  Keep an eye on it during the last half hour.

Three indicators that your bird is done: One, the color will be deeply golden.  Two, the juices run clear when you make a test incision into the thickest part of the bird.  Three, when you wiggle the drumstick, it will easily start to separate from the rest of the chicken.

Once the bird is roasting, slice up your potatoes into even sized wedges, toss with olive oil and any remaining chopped herbs, and stick into an oven-safe dish to cook along side the chicken.  They’ll cook almost as long the bird.

Then it’s time to make the braised red cabbage, following the recipe from Jamie Oliver’s website.  I should note that this recipe makes a huge amount, so best to halve it for two people.

By the time the cabbage has finished braising, the chicken should be ready along with the potatoes.

Serve to yourself and loved ones and bask in the glow of a well made meal!

In our next post, I’ll tell you how to take your left over chicken carcass and make it into homemade chicken stock, which can be used to make such things as risotto or soup.

To recap, the challenge, which ran last week on Kim’s A Mighty Apetite, was “[a] week-long kitchen challenge of abstaining from food shopping, and using up what’s in the fridge, freezer and kitchen cabinets.” Okay, I can do that, or rather I already adhere to this practice on some level. Leftovers are taken to work for lunch and I make a concerted effort to use what’s in the fridge and buy only what I need. Being a smidge cavalier with food safety, I’ve even been known to scrape mold from cheese, much to the disgust of my partner.

“You can’t eat that, it’s gone bad!” she scolded.

“Cheese is already bad! It’s spoiled milk!”

But I digress.

On the first day of the challenge, I took stock of my fridge, making note of its contents from slow-to-perish foods like cabbage and potatoes to items with sell-by dates such as heavy cream, as well as fresh herbs and vegetables for cooking. I seemed well-stocked enough between dried penne pasta in the pantry and meats in the freezer. And that night I pan-fried flour-coated chicken breasts and served them with sautéed shredded red cabbage and mashed potatoes made with some leftover cream.

However as the week went on, it wasn’t my ability to eat down the fridge that was being challenged, but rather my shopping habits as an urban resident. Living in a large city without a car, you learn to make frequent trips to grocery stores, which ensures that food doesn’t have as much of a chance to go bad. Even though I had full intention of playing by the rules, I quickly discovered that I had a regrettable inability to do so. I walked to the store to pick up tortillas one night and then another I found myself making an emergency Brussels sprout purchase.

Although I bent the rules, my heart was still in trying to reduce waste and I realized I was already doing so by keeping a well stocked fridge of foods that keep long, saving my shopping for strategic purchases that I could pick up on the way home from work and ensuring resourcefulness in uncertain economic times.

Long before cities, ready made meals, and take-out, we humans lived by the natural cycles of agriculture. September and October, for instance, not only brought shorter days and cooler nights, but apple trees heavy with fruit and crops ready for the scythe. People celebrated the bounty of the harvest while hoping that the following year would be just as plentiful.

Fast forward to the 21st century and it may seem sentimental to imagine our ancestors celebrating their yields, but harvest festivals rooted them to the land and fostered community bonds. And while agriculture has gone through radical shifts during the last fifty years, people around the world still celebrate the harvest. Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture will host one such celebration on October 4th with farm demonstrations, workshops, and hay rides. Nearby Added Value Farm will host the Red Hook Harvest Festival on October 18th featuring local food, farm tours, and music.

If you don’t live in the New York area (and we realize that some of you don’t), check out the Food & Farming events calendar for events in your region.