Greek Salad

The big Greek Salad is a delicious dinner. With warm, crusty bread and a heap of feta cheese, it is really very satistfying. My recipe for the dressing is from Fine Cooking #51. It calls for your basic olive oil, red wine vinegar, and lemon juice. It also says to mash some feta up in the dressing before tossing with the greens.

Spatchcocked Chicken

To Spatchcock a chicken means to remove the backbone and flatten it out for cooking. This technique exposes more of the chicken to the dry hot oven and gives you more crispy skin while cooking the chicken quickly. Here, the bird is rubbed with a chile-cinnamon rub and an herb-garlic oil. It is from Fine Cooking issue #47, a recipe from chef Stephen Pyles. The rub and oil are also applied under the chicken skin to flavor the meat. I served mine with a corn bread pudding (from Alton Brown) and some broccoli. The corn pudding is a delicious but very rich.

Stuffed mushrooms

If you have mushroom stuffing in the freezer, you can put together a lovely lunch for one without much effort. These are stuffed with sauteed spinach and topped with a bread crumb stuffing. They're from Fine Cooking issue #63, but I changed the recipe quite a bit to make them closer in taste to my family's recipe, MORE GARLIC.

A Mushroom thing...

I'm going through a mushroom phase right now. I just can't get enough of them. Deborah Madison's books really inspire me to make a mushrooms the center-point of the meal. She's got some great ideas. Here's one. It is an open-faced mushroom sandwich. Specifically, it is a herb and garlic roasted Portabella mushroom stuffed with sauteed greens (chard or spinach) and topped with FRESH mozzarella cheese. This whole concoction is then melted together and served on top of garlic toast. I added some slow-roasted cherry tomatoes and a dusting of parmesan to the mix because they go well with all the other ingredients. It tastes great and is very satisfying. The toast is an important component.