The recipe is from Café Zuni, which is just over the bay, but it’s a pretty expensive joint, and doing it yourself is not too hard. Smitten Kitchen’s summary (which is what I linked above) suffices here, except I will make the following notes: (1) I only had 10 hours to salt the chicken, though 1-3 days is the recommended salting time (it still turned out quite good and I’ll do it right when I inevitably repeat this recipe someday). (2) It was very difficult to find a chicken quite small enough. To be fair, I only had time to look in one store (see the first note) but I went to Andronico’s which has fairly good meat selection. I managed to find a 3.68 pound free-range chicken, so that’s what I used. (3) Once in the oven (which you start at a whopping 475˚F) the chicken was very good at hissing and spitting and getting chicken fat all over the oven’s heating coil (oh how I wish we had a gas range) which led to a lot of smoke; long story short I ended up removing the batteries from our smoke detector.

As you can see, I served it with the bread salad (recipe also in the above link). For dessert, Brandon (my guinea pig for this dinner) and I had poached pears, also a first!

Pears poached in spiced vin santo

• 2 small pears (pref. d’Anjou) peeled, but not cored or stemmed
• 1 750 mL bottle of Italian dessert wine such as vin santo or marsala
• 1/2 cup of water
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cinnamon stick, broken in two (this is harder than it sounds to do)
• 1 tbsp vanilla bean paste (or a real vanilla bean)
• 1/2 inch ginger root, peeled and finely chopped
• for serving: whipped cream or 1/2 cup mascarpone cheese, honey and powdered cinnamon to taste

Combine the wine, water, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and ginger in the smallest (but still deep) saucepan you can find. Bring to a boil on medium, then reduce to right below a simmer and add the pears (position them so that the liquid covers as much of the pear as possible). Cook for 20-30 minutes or until tender (so that it yields to a fork), rotating them occasionally so that they pears poach evenly. Once they are soft, remove the pears to a serving dish and reduce the remaining poaching liquid by half. Serve the pears standing up (you might have to slice off the bottom to make them stand) covered with the poaching liquid/syrup (strained, of course), and with a small dollop of whipped cream or honeyed mascarpone.

Anyway, now I have a leftover chicken carcass and poaching liquid. Probably I will turn the chicken into chicken stock and also chicken-and-barley stew. The poaching liquid will probably get added to hot apple cider to create INSTANT HOLIDAY CHEER. Science!

What you see in the foreground here is tea.  To be specific, puer tea harvested from wild, natural growing tea trees that are poetically described as 千年古树 (1000 year old ancient trees).  What many people don’t realize is that the tea plant, camellia sinensis, grows as a tree in the wild.  It’s cultivated as a bush at tea plantations for convenience of picking. 

The background is the rest of our dinner.  Nice and classy.

I’ve been experimenting with various combinations of putting fruits and nuts in my salads.  This one is bits of almond and green raisins.  The larger chunks are cucumbers, tomatoes, and chinese pear, all on a bed of lettuce.  The balsamic vinaigrette that I later poured over it was perhaps not the best dressing to use… something more like an Italian vinaigrette might have been better.

The bread crust was not especially crunchy or hard, the way I like it.  Still, it was slightly nutty with bits of raisins in it, which made it go very very well with the wine and the others.

The wine was a Yering Station 2007 Chardonnay, from the Mornington Peninsula in Australia.  I once spent an afternoon helping put netting over a friend’s wine grapes on the Mornington Peninsula.  Learned quite a bit about the process of wine-making.  I quite like Australian wines.  They’re well made, cheap at the price, and without the pretention of French wine.

And the coup de grace: Liver paté, a simple olive oil dipping sauce, and Denmark Havarti cheese with jalapeno.  

This brought to you courtesy of being bored.