I just finished reading Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw, so I have been getting an eye-full of his anti-Food Network views (as well as his various hate-ons for celeb chefs and villainous food writers). Having never actually tried any of their recipes, however, I decided to hit one up and see if his complaints of dumbing it down for the uneducated (and possibly also unwashed) masses held any water.
Or are these, in fact, just tried-and-true classics?
The challenger: Food Network Magazine’s recipe for Roast Chicken With Spring Vegetables. Please note that I have not chosen a recipe purportedly created by any of Tony’s specific arch-nemeses—especially Sandra Lee (I mean, does “Semi-Homemade” really even count as cooking?)—so, instead, what you see here will either be an indictment or vindication of the Network’s Magazine. Who comes up with these recipes, and for what purpose? Hard to say. But in any event, this recipe was one of their spring suggestions. Hankering for some vegetables amidst the never-ending meat parade, I found this one most appealing.
Here’s their photo, for reference purposes:
Roast Chicken With Spring Vegetables (photo courtesy of Food Network Magazine)
And here’s how you should tweak this recipe, if you want your food to be delicious:
- GARLIC. (Or, in the words of Bourdain’s number-one nemesis, Emeril: GAH-LIC.) How can you roast anything without garlic? It’s unthinkable, really. This recipe doesn’t have any. It should. A lot, if you like garlic, which I do. Chunk in a whole bulb of the stuff, scattered throughout, and let it roast into deliciously soft lumps that can be smashed and squirted onto bits of your food as you eat. Yum.
- SHALLOTS. Almost always paired with garlic in my house, the shallot is the sexy cousin of the onion. Sure, there are a few scallions in this recipe, and they taste pretty good, but the shallot is the Crown Prince of all onions. Fling him in there, let him mix it up with the commoners, and get this party started.
- FORGET THE DILL. Hey, if you dig dill, then go for the gusto. Personally, I couldn’t even find the stuff at my (shitty) local grocer, and had to omit it. No big loss, if you ask me, as roasting stuff in olive oil is pretty tasty and adding salt will bring out most of the desired flavors of the meat and veggies anyway (and dude, FYI: roasted radishes are way more awesome than the cold ones you usually get in a salad). Instead of dill, I think rosemary is pretty keen, but even just sticking with salt, pepper, shallots and garlic should pretty well knock your socks off, especially if you can score nice fresh veggies from some type of farmer’s market.
- SPRING VEGGIES = ASPARAGUS. Leaving asparagus out of a “spring vegetables” dish is criminal. Asparagus is, by far, my favorite spring veggie, and honestly I can’t get enough of ‘em. Put ‘em in everything until the season ends! Or at least have ‘em as an appetizer, while you’re waiting for this damn thing to cook for 35 minutes when you’re starving to death at 8 o’clock at night. Fry them in butter, season with salt. Keep it simple, sweetie.
So those are my suggestions for a more succulent Roast Chicken with Spring Veggies. The Food Network isn’t exactly showing itself to be a total waste of time here, but then again, roasting isn’t exactly rocket science. You put shit in a pan, you drizzle with olive oil, you salt and pepper, you jam it in a hot oven for a while, and then you take it out and eat it.
Someone who can screw up roasting is someone who doesn’t know much about cooking at all (or is someone who likes to “set it and forget it,” and ends up charring everything when they walk out of the kitchen). In that sense, I can feel Bourdain’s pain when he says these are recipes we should all already know how to cook. This is a pretty straightforward technique, and for a chef to claim he or she invented it would be absurd. It’s just a basic cooking method.
Do you really even need them to tell you what vegetables to put in there? Not really, because you could substitute any you like. You could make a roast chicken with “winter” vegetables, and it’d be almost the same thing (potatoes and carrots being the type of veggies that grow year-round, although technically real baby carrots are the ones shown in the FN’s photo, not the ones you get in a big bag at the grocery store all wet and suspiciously slimy).
So, if you are just learning how to cook, or are looking for simple suggestions to get out of your weekly cooking ruts (and, let’s face it, we’ve all got ‘em), I would give this recipe a whirl. But don’t feel bad about not giving the Food Network any credit when you serve it up, because honestly, this is just instructions on how to roast chicken and vegetables, plus a few suggestions for veggies that will play nice together.
FINAL SCORE: Bourdain 1, Food Network 0
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Tags: Anthony Bourdain, asparagus, basic cooking techniques, carrots, chicken quarters, dill, Emeril, fingerling potatoes, Food Network, Food Network Magazine, garlic, Medium Raw, Monday Munchies, radishes, Roast Chicken With Spring Vegetables, roasting, rosemary, Sandra Lee, scallions, Semi-Homemade, shallots
