Well it was another week of delicious cooking for me. The first thing that I cooked is a recipe that I have done before with just one addition. The other thing that I cooked was the first recipe that I used out of my brand new copy of The Joy Of Cooking.
The first thing I cooked this week was my pasta sauce that I cooked back on Christmas with the addition of some cooked ground turkey. Growing up a lot of the time my mom would substitute ground turkey for ground beef, and to be honest, I like the turkey better than the beef in some recipes because of how much lighter it is.
Added the turkey to a hot pan, with some vegetable oil, I always cook this kind of ground turkey with some oil, because it is very lean and the oil will help it cook through quicker as well as preventing it from burning.
As it hit the pan I used a spatula to chop it up into small pieces, you can chop it into different sized pieces depending on the uses, if this was going to go into a soup, I would leave it a little bit bigger, but for my sauce I want smaller pieces.
As the turkey cooks I chopped the turkey up finer and finer, as well as flipping it over to make sure every piece cooks all the way through.
In this picture you can see even more of the pink cooking out with just a little bit of it remaining at this point.
The last shot of the turkey, cooked all the way though, what I did was I pull it from the heat and I drained off any remaining liquid, as I don't need any additional liquids being added to my sauce.
While the turkey was cooking I was able to prepare the other other ingredients, I like to get the prep work done ahead of time or if I know I will have down time while something is cooking, I will do it then. This is one medium onion, one head of garlic, and one package of basil with the stems removed. I minced the onion finer than normal as I did not want bigger chunks of onion in the sauce, I also sliced the basil into small ribbons.
A few tablespoons of olive oil heated in a pan and then I added the onion to sweat a little bit.
Adding salt when sweating vegetables helps them release more of the liquid within them, it also helps make sure that the dish is well seasoned.
After the onion had been sweating a little while, I added all of the garlic to the pan as well and allow that an the onion to meld together.
The onion and garlic after it had finished cooking. translucent with just the lightest hint of color to it.
I added the cooked and drained the onion and garlic mixture, and stirred to combine everything together.
Added one 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes to the mixture and stirred everything together.
After all of the ingredients had been combined.
Added my fresh basil and some dried oregano to the pot and cooked everything together to for about half an hour to let the flavors combine, I also added a little more salt and some red pepper flake. The cooking would also cook off just a little bit of the water in the tomatoes to thicken the sauce some.
After the sauce had a chance to simmer together and cook down a little, I added some mixed Italian cheeses to the sauce and stirred til it all melted together.
The sauce when it was finished cooking and everything had melted together.
To go under the sauce I boiled up some thin spaghetti, although a tube or corkscrew pasta would have been preferable, the thing spaghetti just happened to be on sale this week.
To go along with the pasta and the sauce I also bought some grocery store garlic bread, it might not be the best, but it is cheap and I enjoy it quite a lot.
So from The Joy of Cooking I had selected to cook was 40 clove chicken, which is something that I had never gotten around to making, but had wanted to for some time. The first thing I did with my whole chickens was to thaw them, drain them, and rinse them to get a little bit more of the salt out of them.
I chopped up some fresh rosemary and mixed it with some Italian seasoning to go onto the chickens.
Per the recipe, I sliced up some lemons and stuffed the chickens with quartered lemons, I was actually surprised that each chicken could take a whole lemon inside.
I rubbed each chicken down with butter and massaged the herbs into the chickens, then I wrapped the whole an in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge overnight, for about 16 hours total, the recipe said anywhere between 2-24 hours.
After cooling for a while, I pulled the chickens out, drained any juices that had accumulated, and and lined the bottom of the pan with a lot of cloves of garlic.
Added chicken stock to the pan per the recipe.
Added a few remaining sprigs of rosemary, and started heating on the stovetop. Once the stock boiled, I covered the pan in foil and baked for 25 minutes.
After removing the foil, I increased the temperature and baked for about 45 minutes uncovered to get the skin nice and crispy.
This was the finished chicken, it was perfectly cooked through with crispy skin. I let it cool down before doing anything with it.
I removed the chickens from the pan and set them aside, I then ran the juices in the bottom through a sieve, the pan has the juices and the bowl has all of the roasted garlic that was made in the process.
It was a bit of a sticky job, but I squeezed this much of the garlic out of the skin. It was quite a bit, but what I did was I mashed it up in with the drippings and made a great roasted garlic sauce.
This is what would remain after I picked both chickens apart, It was a lot of meat that I pulled right from the bone, it was all perfectly cooked through. This was my first time working with whole chickens so I had a fear of somehow undercooking the birds.
I didn't feel like boring everyone with going through the other recipes again, but this is smashed cauliflower, topped with pieces of the chicken, topped with some of the garlic sauce, along with some over roasted broccoli.
I will say this is the best chicken I have ever prepared, although I haven't done all that many things with chicken in the past. I will say the roasted garlic and my digestive system have combined to create one of the most horrific smells known to man, so if you make something like this, beware of what might happen.
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