intro: Molly!

First off: Thank you to you two ladies for introducing yourselves! I'm pleased to be blogging alongside y'all.

This Monday afternoon, after my therapy session, I strolled into Open Mind Music over on Market street for a little smoochin' and some vinyl purchasing. I decided to choose three records I'd never heard of before and had no idea about. Rummaging through, I found about eight, some of which I had heard of (like Genesis, when Peter Gabriel was still in the band) and some of which I hadn't. One of the latter is on the turntable right now: Dave Edmunds, belting out, in urgency: "Falling in love, again, again, falling in love again!"

I love rock and roll. Yep.

I'm coming to you having just finished giving therapy to women in the northern part of the East Bay. I came home from intense and personal sessions, threw on some rad records (Beach Boys "Holland" absolutely rules), roasted an heirloom chicken French-style, and hung a few photographs taken by my good friend Jeremy Harris.

I read this recipe last night in Cook's Illustrated Magazine which I knew I had to try. After all, I'd just bought an heirloom chicken called Yardbird and wanted to find a way to roast her up some delicious new way. Here's the scoop:

In a large dutch oven, I heated some oil just before the smoking point, added my s&p'd Yardbird breast-side down to the sizzling oil along with some chopped onions, fennel, and shiitakes. That sealed in all the lovely juices! Then, sprinkle some sage, halved garlic cloves, a couple of bay leaves around the bird, flip after 8 mins, and seal the top with some tinfoil and throw into a preheated 250 oven for 55 minutes or until the thigh reads 170: PRESTO. Deliciousness in a one-pot-stop. You even get the gravy/jus from the drippings all in the pot. I separated the jus from the vegetables, and put the veggies onto a spinach & feta salad and cooked down the jus till it was dark brown. The jus made a rad dressing for both the salad and the chicken.

I'd opened an Australian cabernet the other day, so finished off the bottle with the chicken. 20% of the grapes in this cab were done Amarone-style, which is an old Italian tradition for sweetening the wine and giving it a fuller body. The winemaker will take the grapes and dry them out on mats, which increases the sugar and "raisinates" them, making the resulting wine a little sweeter, a little jammier, and more full-bodied than usual. I could taste the minerality of the Aussie terroir-- a little sparkle on my tongue, an exciting finish that lingered for a while--but decided to open an Argentinian cab as a better pairing. Mmmm, well, by now I've had too much wine to comment on my experience.

So, that's me, generally speaking. I give therapy, get therapy, sell cheese and wine (its own kind of therapy, in a way), listen to lots of records, smooch guys, love cooking up tasty and sumptuous meals, and writing about these things on a little blog doll YA!