Food, Cooking and Having Company Over

This is a very typical dinner around the White Rock Kitchen. Roast chicken. I can take, in this case, a 6lb whole chicken and have it on the table in less than an hour. Not bad when you consider that I walked through the door at about 6:30pm. We do tend to eat a little late in the evening at White Rock Kitchen, but we do eat together most nights. I like having dinner with the family.

Here’s the chicken at the start:

Here I’ve cut the backbone and the keel bone out of the bird:

Because I didn’t plan ahead, this will have a white trash aspect to it. I next rubbed the bird down with some olive oil and seasoned it with regular ol’ Lemon Pepper Seasoning. We have this in the large container you can get from Sam’s. Here’s the chicken ready for the oven:

Notice that I’ve cut the knuckles off the drumsticks and have also taken off the wing tips.

Don’t forget to slash the bird at the wing joint:

And between the leg and thigh:

I put this in a 400 degree oven.

You can see my cast iron skillet that I use to cook the bird. The cast iron was put into the oven empty and was preheated along with the oven.

You will have a hard time overcooking the bird. I sometimes use a temperature probe and cook the bird to 160 degrees internal temperature in the large part of the breast. Sometimes I just look at it. Sometimes I get involved in something else and it will come out of the oven kind of shriveled up. It has always tasted good. It has never turned out dry. With the skin and fat left on the bird, the meat will remain nice an moist.

Here it is straight from the oven:

It fell apart when I took it from the skillet to cool:

After resting for a few minutes, here it is cut up:

It was delicious.

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Chris McCandless Starved to Death

Tuesday, April 21st, 2015

I was reminded of the troubled Chris McCandless over at Sailer’s place, where he has a post about the writer John Krakauer.

This post by a guy named Samuel Thayer, makes solid points about McCandless starving to death:

I like to measure my food in calorie-days—the number of days of my full caloric requirement that the food represents. I calculated Chris’s calorie requirement as 3,300 per day based on his age, gender, a body weight of 145 pounds, and heavy physical activity, using guidelines from Grodner et al. (1996). This estimate is rough, and the true figure would depend on many unknowable variables. Still, my point is easily demonstrated: McCandless didn’t have nearly enough food. He began his journey on April 28 with a ten pound bag of rice—which constituted less than five calorie-days. By May 9, he had only killed one grouse and had written “4^th day famine” in his journal. The rice was already long gone.

And:

The squirrels that McCandless was eating (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) typically weigh five to nine ounces (Whitaker, 1996). Using seven ounces as an average, and realizing that after subtracting the skin, tail, head, bones, feet, and entrails, the edible flesh would constitute about 40 percent of that weight, or 2.8 ounces of meat per squirrel. This means that he would have needed to eat about twenty-five squirrels per day to meet his caloric requirement. If he carefully removed and ate the liver, kidneys, kidney fat, heart, lungs, and brain of each squirrel, he would have about doubled the calories that he received from each animal. Since he probably did this to some extent, I estimate that he needed roughly sixteen squirrels to equal a calorie-day.

Go read the whole post, it is fascinating. Thayer says McCandless, if he was eating just wild berries alone, would have to eat something on the order of thirteen pounds of blueberries to meet his daily caloric needs. I can’t even begin to imagine eating that much fruit in one day.

Tags:Chris McCandless, Starvation, That's a Lot of Berries
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Chicken for Dinner

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014

Here’s the chicken at the start:

Here I’ve cut the backbone and the keel bone out of the bird:

Notice that I’ve cut the knuckles off the drumsticks and have also taken off the wing tips.

Don’t forget to slash the bird at the wing joint:

And between the leg and thigh:

I put this in a 400 degree oven.

You can see my cast iron skillet that I use to cook the bird. The cast iron was put into the oven empty and was preheated along with the oven.

Here it is straight from the oven:

It fell apart when I took it from the skillet to cool:

After resting for a few minutes, here it is cut up:

It was delicious.

Tags:Chicken for Dinner, Is that a dirty word?, Spatchcock
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Cooking your Turkey

Monday, November 24th, 2014

This woman has the right idea:

“Just put the turkey in the fucking oven.”

Again, the hat tip goes to Gerard.

Really, as someone that has cooked the turkey for family gatherings for over 20 years, it won’t turn out perfect and, because it’s turkey, it will taste like cardboard. The drinks are the key to the whole thing. We are having a smoked turkey. To go with that we are going to have afternoon cocktails (during the Cowboy game) that will include cranberry margaritas. I’m also going to do a leg of lamb, so we’ll also have red wine and tasty beer with dinner. The key to a good Thanksgiving dinner is managing your guest’s alcohol consumption.

Update for 2014: We are probably going to have a more conventional Thanksgiving menu this year. Last year’s was great, but we do have to mix things up a little. No mashed potatoes though. I’m going to grill slices of polenta instead.

Tags:Thanksgiving, Tukey
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