Saturday Night Cooking

Gluten-free apple cinnamon cake, corn chowder soup and roast chicken with rosemary, thyme, onion and garlic. M* and I didn't set out to spend a few hours in the kitchen, but after a trip to the Whole Foods-like Waitrose, we felt inspired with our bags of high quality groceries.

First, the GF apple cinnamon cake. This recipe was actually for muffins, but we don't have muffin tins here and couldn't bring myself to spend $38 on a 12 count muffin tin. The recipe was from the cookbook "Gluten-Free Baking Classics" by Annalise G. Roberts. Gourmet magazine published a few of her recipes and her brown rice flour mix in November 2005. Thanks to her, I made irresistible chocolate chip cookies that people didn't realize were not made with wheat flour and thin-crust pizza that a friend said was the best pizza she had tasted in Los Angeles-she moved to LA from NY about 18 years ago. So how was the apple cinnamon cake? I'll let the photos tell the story.

(Sat night left, Sun night right)

With M* no longer in classes (he's still finishing a few projects), he took a break and made his yummy corn and bacon chowder. The recipe calls for two cans of cream corn, but no one at Waitrose had heard of it before. They do sell it in the UK, but maybe Waitrose is too upscale. M* just pureed some corn in the blender instead. Other ingredients include potatoes, bay leaves, celery and celery leaves, vegetable broth, chili pepper, milk frozen corn, onion. Simple recipe with pleasing results.

Roasting chicken in the oven is pretty basic, and I have taken the CI recommendation to rotate the chicken from one wing side up to the other wing side up and finally to the breast up. Having a v-rack is recommended to keep the chicken off the bottom of the pan, but I've just been approximating this effect by making an aluminum foil grid on the bottom of the pan. I didn't have time to brine the chicken, so I just created a rosemary, thyme and garlic paste and rubbed into under the skin. I also put a bit of onion and rosemary inside the chicken. Chicken was really yummy, and it made great chicken broth when we cooked it down the next day.

I still have to master using the thermometer. After the chicken had been in the recommended time, I tested the temperature, and it was certainly above the suggested level. However, I thought the chicken could have really used another 10-15 minutes. I hate cutting into a dish, only to have to have to put it back in the over. I'm still not sure if it was my temperature-taking technique or the super-cheap Tesco thermometer that was the problem.