Bad Ideas

Though I have greatly improved as a cook over the past couple of years, I still royally screw up a recipe now and then. I find it frustrating when people say they can't cook - of course you can! Follow a recipe! If you can read, you can cook. Such smugness has come back to haunt me when I follow a recipe to a T, or, worse yet, when I try to "customize" it to my own tastes, and end up with barely edible mush.

Since acquiring a dutch oven for Christmas, my stew-and-braise finger (hand?) has been itchy. Last weekend, for its inaugural run, we made beef stew from a Barefoot Contessa recipe. The resulting flavors were suitably deep and nuanced, the texture palatable, the leftovers short-lived. Bursting with dutch oven-related confidence, and in possession of a whole chicken, I took to the Internet for a recipe that married the two. I chose "French Chicken in a Pot," found in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, originally from Cook's Illustrated. What could go wrong?

In a word, my judgment. This fuck-up was all me.

This simple recipe calls for browning the chicken in olive oil with onions, celery and a bay leaf, then cooking it in a low oven for an hour or two, depending on the size of the bird. Two things were the crux of this recipe's downfall. One, I think I miscalculated the size of the chicken. I'd bought it at what can charitably be described as a meat free-for-all the weekend before. My receipt listed two chickens totaling about six pounds. In my fantasy world, this means the chickens weighed three pounds each. A three pound bird was supposed to cook for an hour. After an hour, the bird was still rare. And for some reason, rare chicken hasn't quite caught on yet here in the States. I left it in for another 20 minutes... then another 20... then another! Two hours in, the chicken was barely done. Even if the bird was bigger than three pounds, this still didn't make sense, as the recipe called for a 4-5 pound chicken to cook for two hours.

Crux of the downfall part two: I put POTATOES in the pot. Back in my fantasy world, I see the chicken and potatoes hanging out like best buds (or best spuds?!?!), cooking in harmony until it is time for them to take a wild ride to my stomach. What I didn't bank on was more stuff in the pot = longer cooking time. Even worse than waiting an extra hour for dinner is when that dinner emerges from the oven soggy, flavorless and gamey. The potatoes created so much steam in the pot, the chicken was basically soaked, the skin gray and floppy. Heueueueu. We ate it, but it was not pleasant.

The saving grace of the evening was discovering this tiny green bean on the cutting board.