Keeping it simple.

I mostly just want to pop in and say a little something, even though I don't have any big news or cool new recipes to share. My life is on crack right now. This week I have to do the following: remake my organization's financial system in its entirety, move my life out of a 900 square foot home and into a 12x12 room, go to the doctor about my train wreck of a digestive system, and then the usual training for a marathon and being a grad student, bla bla bla. SO, that is not to say "please feel sorry for me" because I'm sure that most anyone who is reading this is probably like "oh yeah well listen to my crazy week." We're all busy. It's the American way. My point is really just to share the way that I try to maintain my sanity by eating well even when I don't have all the time in the world to cook. Most people I know who don't cook but would really like to cite lack of time as their biggest dilemma. In an attempt to maintain my sanity this week, I decided to cook a bunch of food yesterday that would allow me to eat well without a lot of effort. They aren't big crazy dishes that required a lot of time, in fact it's all stuff that I can throw in the oven with little prep time and just leave in there while I do other stuff. The past year of my life has been a bit of a whirlwind in general so these are dishes that I learned would feed me well and I wanted to share the little bit of food wisdom I have. Enjoy!

Roast Chicken

Roast chicken is probably one of my favorite things to make. It makes a tasty but simple meal to feed other people or to have a bunch of lean protein around for the week, requires little prep time, can be varied in flavor with minor changes, and can be made into yummy homemade stock (again, with little effort). I should say now that I didn't come up with this idea on my own. Alicia Lynn Carrier over at Bread and Honey (who is both hilarious and has awesome taste in food and draws really cool drawings that you can see here.) is sort of my role model when it comes to using food as a center point for sanity. She blogged about how much more cost effective it is to buy a whole chicken and how great homemade stock is and I just did it because she made it sound so good. Here is what I do:

1. Preheat the oven to 400.

2. Rub the outside and inside the cavity of a whole chicken with a tablespoon or two of olive oil.

3. Put your spices into a small dish so you don't have to touch your spice containers with nasty chicken hands. I do about 2 teaspoons of salt and a teaspoon or pepper. Other good spices include Old Bay (the most amazing spice mix on the planet. Most Marylanders will agree with me on that point. Side note: I make it a hobby to see just how many dishes I can put Old Bay into. Last week I put it on a salad!), lemon and dill is a great combo, garam masala...you get the point. You can put whatever the heck you want to on the chicken. Just rub it on there and inside the cavity after you get the olive oil on it. Oh, and you can also put onion, carrot and celery inside the cavity for flavor or cut slits in the skin and stick garlic cloves into them, or fresh herbs.

4. If the bird isn't trussed, you may want to tie it's little legs together with some twine. It's not necessary but makes for a juicier bird.
5. Put it in a roasting pan on a rack or just in whatever sort of baking dish you have. The glass kind you use for lasagna work. My roasting pan is kind of deep and I need to get a rack for it because keeping it up off the pan makes for a crispier skin. Otherwise it kinda steams in there.

6. Put the chicken in the 400 degree oven for 15 minutes and then turn the heat down to 325. It will take about 20 minutes per pound. I usually get a 4-5 lb. bird so it takes about an hour, maybe a little more.

7. You can baste, or not. The salt on the outside helps it keep the juices in so you will end up with a pretty moist chicken even if you don't baste. I like basting though so I usually do. Bake until a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the thigh reads 170. Let cool on a plate before putting it in the fridge if you can. And make sure you eat at least some while it's still hot because it is flippin' delicious.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes are perfect. End of story. They can be made into amazing things like pie and waffles. But they are also great in very simple preparations. The following can be made with just sweet potatoes but is also good for making nearly any root vegetables like other potatoes, beets, parsnips, celeriac. The trick is to dice them so that they cook kinda fast and get the crispy outside/soft inside kinda thing going on.

Preheat oven to 350.
1. Dice two medium size sweet potatoes into 1/2 inch dice. I ended up with about 2.5 cups of potatoes.
2. Dice about a cup of red onion.
3. Toss onions and potatoes in a bowl with 2 T olive oil, 1 T apple cide vinegar, 1 t. salt and 1 t pepper.
4. Spread in a glass baking dish or a cookie sheet if that's what you have and throw it in the oven for about half an hour. Just keep an eye on them and pull them out when they reach the doneness that you prefer. Easy as pie (or a piece of cake, if you like cake better than pie. I like both of those things equally so I could go either way.)

Roasted (seeing a pattern here?) Spaghetti Squash

I recenly decided to stop eating gluten for a little while in an attempt to figure out my crazy tummy issues. So when I saw a post on Tastespotting about using spaghetti squash instead of spaghetti, I was in. Back in the summer I posted about using shredded yellow squash to take the place of spaghetti noodles and it never even ocurred to me to use spaghetti squash to do that. Sometimes I'm slow to recognize the obvious. Last week I made some black eyed peas and ate them over roasted spaghetti squash. It's seriously the best compliment to almost anything. It's got enough of it's own flavor to be good with just salt and pepper but not so strong that you can't pair it with other flavors. I like to roast a whole squash, scrape out the inside, and just keep it in a container in the fridge to eat with whatever. It's lower calorie than noodles, obviously, but has a lot of nutrients. Don't ask me which ones cause I don't know. May I suggest Google? Here's what I do:

1. Cut a spaghetti squash in half. You'll need a sharp knife for this because those bad boys have thick skin. Scrape out the yucky guts and seeds. Lightly oil and salt the cut side and put in a bakign dish, cut side down. Put a little bit of water in the bottom, like a quarter inch.
2. Bake on 350. It will start to get soft after about 15 - 20 minutes. At this point, I like to flip it over, add little water if it's all cooked off, and let it cook like that until the meat it fork tender all the way through.
3. When it's done you can just pull it out, let it cool, and scrape the inside into a container or onto your plate. The skin is really thick so if you wanted to do stuffed squash, like with a risotto or quinoa or something like that, this is a good squash for that.