the easy way to roast a moist, flavorful turkey

Alrightey, ya turkeys– I’m excited to finally start heading down Thanksgiving road! At this point I’m going to need to run down Thanksgiving road in order to share all the recipes we tried at our Fake Thanksgiving dinner before the real thing, but for now let’s just focus on first things first. The turkey!

kitchen basics: how to roast fresh chiles

As the weather cools down, we all find ourselves drawn to more warming foods. Lately we’ve been making things like chiles rellenos casserole and burritos, as well as tossing strips of roasted peps into stews and other warming Mexican dishes, and consequently I’ve found myself roasting up anaheims and poblanos more often than usual! Roasty pepper strips are actually pretty versatile (try topping a burger or sandwich with them!), so I thought I’d share a little basics post to document the ropes. If you have any favorite recipes using roasted chiles, let me know in the comments, and I hope to share our recipe for baked chiles rellenos soon!

kitchen basics: quick roasting a bone-in, skin-on chicken breast

I’d better start by admitting that I am kind of squeamish when it comes to chicken. I like eating it, but I’m kind of a baby when it comes to handling the raw stuff. Partly my mom has always instilled in me a fear of chicken germs, so I always visualize salmonella coating every surface of the kitchen, and partly it’s taken me some time to fully recover from my adolescent meat-eating policy of not eating anything that looks like it actually came from an animal. As much as I try not to let them, slimy, bony, covered-with-skin chicken breasts sometimes make me cringe. But recently I’ve been making some significant progress towards being less of a chicken-phobe and this is the simplest and best way I’ve learned to use a chicken breast to its fullest!

kitchen firsts: steaming an artichoke

I grew up in a house where artichokes did not set foot. As a fairly picky child (slash adolescent…) I always thought they were weird looking and definitely not something I was interested in eating. As I have become less picky, I sometimes deign to eat the occasional artichoke heart on a pizza, or spinach and artichoke dip, but not that enthusiastically, and until now, I had never dared buy and eat an actual fresh, real artichoke– I was hardly even aware that such a thing was possible. But then Stephen came along and explained to me that it was not only possible, but enjoyable and, what’s more, an excuse to dip something in butter! Oh dear.

Over the last year (or three), artichoke season has rolled around and then passed me by a few times, and I’ve ignored Stephen’s ever-more beggy urgings to buy one and cook it up so I could experience it!  So, now that artichoke season is starting up again, I decided to just go get one and cook it up and see!