18, Mar 2007
roasted chicken and vegetables with green rice

an impromptu dinner party for six: two roasted chickens, roasted carrots, parsnips, fennel, celery root and onion with bacon, green rice, and spicy chocolate ice cream.


Roasted Vegetables with Bacon
Fairly simple. Chop the vegetables and put them in the bottom of the roasting pan. Dice some bacon (we used five strips for a fairly large pile of vegetables) and saute it in a skillet, until starting to brown but not all the way cooked. Toss the vegetables with the bacon, black pepper, and olive oil. Add some chicken stock (depth of maybe 1/2 inch in the pan). Put the roasting rack over the vegetables and add the chickens (I’m not sure how E prepared them). Cook until the chickens are done. The vegetables need around an hour, so if the bird is going to go a lot longer, it’s better to separate them.
Green Rice
Chop up bunches of basil, italian parsley, and fennel greens (the original recipe involved parsley, cilantro, and mint, but we made subsitutions). Heat 1:1 water and chicken stock in a pot. Process the greens in a blender or food processor with some of the liquid, adding the rest gradually, until it’s as smooth as you can get it. Rinse the pot and heat olive oil in it. Saute a red onion and some ground toasted fennel seeds (which we didn’t have) in the oil. Add the rice and toss to coat, then add the green slurry. Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer on low for about 20 minutes. (obviously, the rice/water proportions and time depend on the type of rice you use; we used basmati).
Spicy Chocolate Ice Cream
We followed a chocolate ice cream recipe and added a fair bit of cinnamon, some cayenne pepper, some white and black pepper, ginger, and a diced hot pepper (strain it out), to taste.
Verdict
Everything was good, especially for an impromptu dinner party. The bacon with the vegetables was great. The rice was pretty good, though for how green the slurry was I was hoping for greener rice — it came out a nice pale green. I also would probably try that recipe with a thicker stickier sushi-type rice, because I prefer that consistency to basmati. The chickens were perfect. The ice cream was very good, with a bit of a burn that built up over multiple bites. The initial flavor was fairly mild; I’d prefer to have it be a little sharper at first without the afterburn, but we experimented a bit and couldn’t figure it out.