Monday, July 25, 2011

Honey Mustard Baked Chicken and Steamed Vegetables


All right! Doesn't that look good?

Today's (or this week's) meal was a lot of fun to experiment with. Before making this one I had never done a baked glaze, nor really baked poultry aside from roasting chicken.

This is a really nice cool evening meal, the tang of the glaze cleansing your palate like a glass of lemonade.

Click "read more" for the production photos.

This is another recipe from the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.



I started with 4 pounds of chicken halves, skin-on. They're so big, they look like shanks of mutton. Lining the broiling pan with aluminum foil was a good idea and made cleanup a lot easier. Quite a bit of fat and some of the glaze dripped through and baked itself to the foil on the bottom.



Then brush room-temperature butter over the skin and season with salt and pepper. The butter should be room temperature, so that it is pliable, but not runny. The temperature of fats in cooking is a very important thing to be mindful of, and I will go into more detail about that in a later post.

The chicken will actually be baked twice; once to cook the chicken and crisp the skin, and a second time to set the glaze.



Now to the glaze. Would it surprise you that honey mustard can be made with just honey, and mustard? That'll be one way to save money. Add a teaspoon of brown sugar to help it carmelize during the baking process.



Here's the glaze all mixed up to a uniform consistency. The mustard dissolves into the honey pretty readily, so there's not a lot of mashing or intense mixing that your need to do.



The chicken is cooked through, and now we paint on the glaze. If you've ever painted a room or helped a friend paint a room, you know how to glaze. Just like the wall, you start at the highest point, only in this case the extra liquid will flow down in all directions. Don't put too much glaze on the brush and you'll be fine.



And there we are, fresh out of the oven. The glaze is shiny, and the mustard is aromatic. It's been almost a year since I made this recipe and took these pictures, and now I want to make it again!



The vegetables are carrots and broccoli from the St. Paul Farmer's Market. I didn't bother peeling the carrots because they're not grown in dirt laced with pesticides and other crap that would be leached into the skin.




About a half an hour later in the steamer, and they're soft and cooked. Having a steamer is handy, because it lets you put it together and then go do something else. These cooked while the chicken was baking.

So that's that for this recipe. If you're not a fan of carrots or broccoli, just about any other vegetable would go nicely with this dish: corn, green beans, peas, a salad, etc. Poultry is a pretty versatile meat, it goes well with just about any side dish.

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