At the start of the week - a rare Sunday to myself with no where to be but home, finally - again I took advice from Men's Health and roasted a chicken. In response to a reader who wrote he was sick of turkey sandwiches for lunch every day, the magazine suggested roasting a chicken on Sunday then eating boosted-up chicken salad for lunch, mixing the meat with spinach, apples, salad dressing, nuts, and berries. Brilliant, I thought!
So, post-Farmer's Market, I stopped by the Super Fresh on Charles Street (a sham of a grocery) and picked the most-organic, most-antibiotic and hormone free bird I could find - the Purdue Oven Stuffer Roaster. A few hours and little effort later, I had a cooked bird sitting on my counter.
I got one meal out of it before I was so grossed out I had to toss the picked meat. This chicken - seasoned only with salt, pepper, and olive oil - had a strange, unappetizing taste. I'm very sensitive to additives, so I wonder if, despite technical promises of "all natural," these birds are pumped with additives that make them taste bad.
Thoughts? Anyone else trying to roast chickens but having success?
2 comments:
Alright, I need a tutorial in food. On many levels. (Also, I need a fancier way to say "tutorial in food" like lessons in cuisine or something).
First: as someone with a blossoming interest in cooking, cookware, new recipes and making things the best way possible, where would you suggest I go for inspiration? i.e. what kinds of cookbooks do you use, where are good places to look? I subscribe to Cook's Illustrated online now and I am in love.
Second: I am recently noticing an aversion to preservatives, additives and various other ingredients that are hard to pronounce. How did you narrow down that it's the additives that bother you and what do you do about it? Just make a lot of things yourself and avoid highly preserved, quick to serve, processed foods?
How about your "Personal Gastronomic Exploration"? I try to cook as much as possible - although this blog is proof that's not a lot - and eat as little processed food as possible. Of course, time, cash, and the cost-benefit analysis matrix all factor in - so I usually end up eating very, very simple dishes. For me, finding recipes happens best in "Cooking Light" - a magazine you can grab at the super market checkout, and on allrecipes.com - a website where people and companies upload recipes, and then others comment and score the recipes after they try them. That's helpful to me because it gives a first-hand account of the recipe's difficulty and what flavors could be upped or downed, depending on taste. Happy cooking! Few things, in my mind, are more rewarding that creating a healthy, delicious, and caring meal for people you love!
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