Roast chicken with lemon

A cold, rainy spring day seemed like just the right time for this classic recipe from Marcella Hazan. I'd forgotten how simple it is -- and how delicious. I used a 4-lb kosher chicken from WF with the additional step of letting it air in the fridge for a while before roasting it.

Otherwise I followed her instructions -- massage salt and pepper into the chicken inside and out, roll two lemons and puncture them (20x) with a toothpick, stuff them into the cavity, close the cavity with toothpicks and tie the legs together, put in a 350 oven breast side down for 15 minutes, turn it over for 20 minutes, increase heat to 400 for another 15 minutes. Since my 4-pounder was bigger than the 2.5 lbs in the recipe, I allowed a little longer for each phase and tested the temperature for 165. As she says, the chicken is self-basting and has no need of additional fat.

Fir0002/Flagstaffotos via Wikimedia Commons

The result was a very moist and wonderfully tasty chicken with reasonably crispy skin. It was exquisite, filling the kitchen with that roast chicken aroma and rewarding your taste buds with that unadulterated chicken taste.

I felt like lentils on a rainy day and had a small piece of guanciale I wanted to use up, so I googled "lentils pancetta" and got a great little recipe from Mario Batali courtesy of ABC's Chew. This entailed covering a 1/2 lb of lentils with water, bringing to a simmer, adding a halved onion, halved carrot, halved celery, 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard, and 2 ounces of pancetta/guanciale cut into strips. After cooking 20 minutes till tender, drain the lentils, saving a little of the cooking liquid, discard the vegetables, coarsely chop the pancetta and add that back to the lentils with just enough liquid to moisten the lentils. Dress with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, salt and pepper, and serve warm or let come to room temperature -- which Batali rightly says allows the flavors to come out.

Add a salad of baby arugula and a grenache from Spain and you've got a really great meal for a weekday -- plus plenty of leftover roast chicken!

Bonavita

Photo by Bonavita

With super-premium small-batch coffees like Ceremony in Annapolis selling for $15 for 12 ounces, I realized it was time to move on from my dinky little Mr. Coffee coffeemaker. I've been so happy with my Capresso conical burr grinder after a Sur La Table sales assistant recommended it, I decided to follow their advice on the coffeemaker as well and plunked down the hefty purchase price for Bonavita.

This German-engineered appliance gets a lot of praise on the Web as well. It heats the water a little hotter, getting it in the 195-05-degree range considered ideal for making coffee. It has a great spray nozzle that covers the whole filter. One of my problems with the Mr. Coffee was that it wasn't reaching all of the coffee, which was simply too expensive for that kind of neglect. I've found that I use much less coffee with the Bonavita, and of course it tastes much, much better.

Other features I like are that the thermal carafe is lined with glass -- which conserves the heat much better than the all-metal thermal carafe in my old Krups. Also, the carafe has no lid during the brewing process. One of my issues with the Krups was the brewed coffee had to go through the little opening created by the pressure of the lid against the filter bottom, and I felt it got gummed up with old coffee that affected the taste.

So there's no drip-stop function to take the pot out earlier if you're in a hurry, but the whole brewing process is just 6 to 8 minutes. Bonavita is serious in other respects, too. There's no timer. Serious coffee drinkers don't load up their coffee the night before so it can get stale overnight and be there when the timer goes off.

Truly serious coffee drinkers don't believe in any automatic coffeemaker. They insist on pour-over or French press (or Turkish). I've had experience with all these, including the Chemex pour-over. I will probably get a small porcelain filter-holder and kettle to brew individual cups of coffee in the afternoon. Bonavita wants you to make at least 6 cups to get the best result and I don't want two 6-cup pots of coffee a day.