Roasting

I love making roast chicken, especially when it's cold outside. It looks gorgeous and it makes my apartment smell yummy. And you can do plenty of stuff with the chicken, including making stock. I got a chicken at the Christmas farmer's market yesterday. This is my first local chicken. I've been buying the organic free range chickens at the grocery store, even though it's a little more expensive, but considering I get like 4 or 5 meals out of it, it seems worthwhile to start with better quality chicken.

I rubbed the inside and outside of my little chicken with salt and sat it in my fridge all day. I rubbed it with canola oil and roasted it at 425, upside down for half an hour, then flipped back over for 15 minutes.

I also love roasting vegetables. Someone reminded me that, maybe a few months ago, I said cauliflower was the last thing I had yet to developed a taste for. I love roasting cauliflower; I love the browned, slightly caramelized outside that brings out that nuttiness. At the farmer's market, there was a spread of broccoli, white cauliflower and purple cauliflower. I am a sucker for heirloom-y, different looking vegetables. In the summer, this mostly concerns tomatoes- I love the wonky looking ones with weird protrusions and stripes. But i absolutely had to get a little of each, so I'd have a pile of green, white and purple roasted veggies. Thanks to my P.O.S oven, they ended up a little more roasted than planned. Still delicious, still kind of awesome looking-


I mean, seriously! That purple is insane! I was worried the color wouldn't be vibrant and awesone after blasting the shit out of it in a 450 degree oven, but that weird Cauliflower From Neptune color just got better.

(Random aside- on Top Chef, four teams had to prepare dishes based on "Old", "New", "Borrowed" or "Blue". Obviously blue is the hardest. How bad ass would it have been if they'd found piles of purple cauliflower and made some blue-violet cauliflower puree, and maybe a blue-cheese stuffed piece of meat? Really, they should have called me)