Vegan Lentil Salad w/Cardamom

Tasty lentil salad:

http://bevcooks.com/2013/01/lentil-salad-with-roasted-red-peppers-parsley-and-almonds/

We used black lentils.  Served this with roast chicken.

Roast Chicken, again

After this effort, I feel like I'm finally starting to make some progress on Roast Chicken. The surfeit of cooking blog posts on the topic all talk about how perfectly crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside their chicken is. I've always fallen short of that ideal. This was in the right direction, though! And it was all rather straightforward, too.

Prep:

What I did:

- Salted the chicken pretty heavily (using Trader Joe's Sea Salt, in case that mattered), placed the bird in the roasting dish, and placed the dish in the refrigerator.
- Went to the store, did miscellaneous things, etc. I wasn't paying close attention but suspect it amounted to 2 hours worth of salting time for the chicken.
- Used paper towels to remove as much moisture from the skin as possible. I did this until the skin really started to feel dry.
- Cut slits in the skin over the breasts divided about 3 T. of butter into slices and distributed them on top of the meat.
- Peeled and crushed a head of garlic into a bowl and mixed it with 1-2 t. of black pepper.
- Applied the garlic and pepper mixture to the skin
- Poured a thin layer of olive oil over the whole thing -- probably 3 seconds worth of light pouring.

Cooking

I used the "Classic Roast Chicken" recipe in The Science of Good Cooking for time and temperature guidelines, and mostly followed them to the letter. As should be clear from the picture, the bird was cooked in a V-rack.

My steps:

- Preheat to 400
- Cook the chicken for 15 minutes
- Flip the bird, then cook for another 15 minutes
- Flip again, then cook for another 20 minutes

After this, I was having my usual self-doubt about whether I had cooked it for long enough. Knowing that I have more often undercooked than overcooked meat -- and the extent to which people are put off by undercooked poultry -- I put it back in for another 5-10 minutes.

After letting it rest for 15 minutes, I cut it up, and was pleasantly surprised to have attained a roast chicken with both crisp skin and juices bubbling out when I made my first cut. So, I'm beginning to suspect that the salting, then dry method so beloved by food bloggers may have something to it -- though I didn't let it hang out nearly as long as is often prescribed.

Now, I just need to learn how to carve such an animal in a manner more dignified than my usual caveman style.

Flourless Chocolate Cake

The year we were invited to a potluck Passover seder, which calls for flourless desserts.  Since J. loves to cook w/chocolate, we went for this:

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2007/01/shf-27-chocolat-1/

The seder was lovely and had too much food, as potlucks often do.  The density of this cake led to very little of it actually being consumed.  We were sent home with the remainder.  Luckily, we were invited to another casual potluck Passover seder the following weekend.  Guess what we brought?

This cake is rich, intense, and can cover your social obligations at two potlucks!

Indian Kale

In keeping up our goal of cooking one dish from each issue of Sunset we receive, we made this:

http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/winter-greens-curry-50400000133934/

We used pre-chopped kale from TJ.  The dish did not impress for several reasons:
- the kale stems were still in
- the seasoning was overwhelming and way too sweet