Man With a Pan Read Online Free PDF Page B

gets lost when translated into the stenography of a recipe. Like crispy celery leaves.

    “When did our relationship move from the bedroom to the kitchen?”
    Recipe File
    Really Good Chicken
    For years, chicken was a sometime thing for me. Maybe the meat was fully cooked. Maybe the skin was tasty. Maybe the meat was moist. Here’s what you get after half a lifetime of trial and error.
1. Get a kosher chicken or brine a nonkosher chicken. (A lot of folks now mock brining—ignore them. It’s a basic thing, like marinating lamb chops in red wine to get rid of the gamy odor.) Preheat the oven to 500°F. Meanwhile, pat the chicken dry. Then push ½ teaspoon of butter (or garlic butter or rosemary butter) under the skin over each breast. Then mash it around with a spoon.
2. Take a lemon or a lime. Stab a bunch of holes in it with a knife, all around.
3. Stick some rosemary in the holes if you can. If not, stuff the chicken cavity with a generous mix of rosemary, tarragon, and marjoram. And anything else you might like: garlic paste, chopped-up onions. (The idea is that once the high temperature hits the goods in the cavity, the lemon juice will evaporate, taking the flavors around it directly into the flesh of the bird; so whatever you stuff around the lemon or lime will become a slight flavoring in the meat.) Sew the cavity shut with butcher’s string; otherwise the flavors fly out into the oven.
4. Place the chicken on a roasting pan, breast side down, and put in the 500°F oven for 20 minutes.
5. Turn it over, breast side up, and return to 500°F oven for 10 minutes.
6. Lower the temperature to 350°F for 30 minutes (10 minutes longer if the bird is huge) or until that little white thing pops up (an instant-read thermometer inserted in the thigh should read 165°F).
7. Let cool for 10 minutes before attempting to slice.
    On the Shelf
    Near a Thousand Tables, Felipe Fernández-Armesto. A wild man who’s a blast to read.
    American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat; and Third Helpings, Calvin Trillin. No one can write about what we eat and somehow answer why we do better than Trillin.
    The Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer. My first cookbook, and I still use it. Her occasional remarks scattered among her endless recipes are genius. (“A pig resembles a saint in that he is more honored after death than during life.”)
    IN THE TRENCHES
    Glen Payne lives in Hermosa Beach, California. A forty-one-year-old high-yield debt trader, he’s out of the house by 4:00 a.m. each day to prepare for the opening of the markets in New York City. He’s back at home by 4:30 in the afternoon to cook for his wife and two daughters, ages five and one.
    If you segment the two hemispheres of the brain, you might say one is creative and the other is analytic; I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but just suppose it is. The work I do is extremely analytic. It’s an intense environment where you’re constantly negotiating and dealing with large sums of money. But in the kitchen I get to put together whatever my creativity can dream up.
    I grew up on a fifteen-thousand-acre cattle ranch in New Mexico, and I inherited a love of eating and cooking from my mother and grandmother, who were constantly preparing food and planning for the appetites of the men (mostly me and my brothers) who worked on the ranch. From eating the unique cuisine of New Mexican chefs (definitely not your run-of-the-mill Mexican food, and worth the trip to New Mexico if you haven’t visited), I also developed a craving for all things spicy, which doesn’t work particularly well for either my wife or my kids, though I still try to incorporate spiciness into my day-to-day cooking.
    My oldest daughter is one of the more finicky eaters I’ve ever found. After she was born, I eagerly awaited the day that she would start eating baby food, and I jumped right into making my own baby food. She rejected all of it. And that was just an early sign of what kind of eater she would be. Now