Saturday 15 September
It was a perfect blue and gold
late summer Saturday, the sort that Cincinnati provides only in late summer and
early fall. We nosed around Findlay
Market trolling for finds: a couple of Asian eggplants from the young farmers, a beautiful bouquet of golden beets with their fresh greens from
Madison's, and a couple of chickens from Charles Bare.
We've had an urge to fire up our
little charcoal and chip smoker for a while, but the heat and the mosquitoes
had been discouraging us. Now was the
perfect day. Normally we'd smoke a duck,
but the only kind we could get would have taken the whole day to defrost. Instead, we got these two fresh fryers at half
the price of one duck - after all, if you're going to all the trouble of
running the smoker, you might as well smoke extra (yes, you guessed it: smoke
'em if you got 'em).
The two little chickens got
intertwined on the middle rack, and since there was room we sliced up the
eggplant and threw it on the top rack.
They smoked slowly over mesquite chips all afternoon, and then we
brought them in and finished the chicken in the oven.
So dinner was two of the smoked
chicken breasts, plus those crisp beet greens sautéed with diced garlic and shallots and set aside to simmer with a shot of wine. Amazing.
No comments:
Post a Comment