[Sca-cooks] { was Nothing} supper ideas for summer?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jul 22, 2005, at 9:21 PM, Johnna Holloway wrote:

> We've been doing cold cuts and easy things like rice in the
> rice cooker. We also did the order in pizza route the other
> night when we didn't want to turn the oven on to bake one
> here. The husband and teen-ager are heavily into ice cream
> in the evenings. (You know it's hot when they quit baking
> evening cookies or brownies.) When I have grilled, I have done  
> enough for
> the evening meal and then left-overs. Ah, microwave.....

I've been having inordinate amounts of fun revisiting sorta retro  
chicken, tuna, egg, potato, and shredded carrot salads, and finding  
that these are, in fact, quite edible when made by hand with real  
ingredients.

The other night was pan bagnat night (this is a sort of juicy tuna  
hoagie, grinder, sub -- in NYC these are known as heroes -- it's also  
been described as a salade nicoise sandwich).

Tonight, I used a cast iron grill pan to mark the skin side of a  
butterflied, whole chicken (split down the back with shears and  
opened up like a triptych, also known as a spatchcock), with fresh  
rosemary twigs (the denuded twigs) slipped between the bars of the  
grill pan. When it was nicely browned and cross-hatch-marked, I  
flipped it over, lowered the heat and let it finish under the cover  
from a cast iron dutch oven, which also just happened to fit the  
grill pan nicely.

I also seem to be preparing to write a cookbook entitled "1001 Ways  
to Serve Cucumbers", if my past couple of weeks is any indication.

Adamantius




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04