Stories

For me there is no food more appealing than roast chicken. I'd be happy to subsist on it all the time. Instead of roasting a whole chicken, which can take an hour or more, I prefer roasting chicken in pieces. It's so much faster especially for a weeknight meal. I love roasting chicken breasts, sometimes a whole bunch at one time. This way I have leftovers for dinner the following night or I can enjoy it for lunch atop a salad the next day. For dinner though, especially when I'm pressed for time, I like to make simple sides. And there's nothing more simpler than roasting vegetables alongside the chicken. Plus with this recipe the chicken and the vegetables both finish at the same time. Now that sounds like a simple supper.

For this recipe I chose to roast carrots and kohlrabi. Their flavors concentrate and sweeten from the high oven heat. Kohlrabi, a turnip-like vegetable with a broccoli flavor, which many people would most likely pass in the market without a second thought, is actually one of my favorite vegetables. I love them in soup, but this roasting method makes them taste even better. With only seven ingredients, this is probably the least fussiest recipes you will ever find. And the end result is so rewarding that you will want to make it again and again. With so little preparation spent in the kitchen there's more time to kick back, relax, and enjoy a glass of wine, perhaps a Chardonnay, to toast the mellow evening.

After seeing their amazing performance of “Devil Went Down to Georgia” at the Country Music Awards my wife and I became hooked on the Zac Brown Band – a group we had never heard of before that moment. Seeing talented musicians who love what they do and have a huge appreciation of all music genre’s is refreshing in this age of studio wizardry and lip sync’d concerts. A quick YouTube search of the band found many videos of them mixing classic tunes with songs from their debut album, "The Foundation", and it converted me into a full-fledged fan club maniac. My wife and I had stopped going to concerts many years ago unless a friend was performing, but this band was different and I jumped at the chance to see them in person – even if it meant a 100 mile drive to Santa Barbara. Getting the opportunity to “Eat and Greet” with the band before the show sealed the deal.

A unique take on the pre-show meet and greet, they look at it as a way to treat their fans as family and sit down to dinner before they hit the stage. In that vein they ask guests to defer autograph or photo requests. (You wouldn’t sit down to dinner with your uncle and ask him to sign the napkin.) All the musicians want to do is mingle, talk music, and share stories.

If indeed the Mayan belief is correct and December 20th was guaranteed to be my final supper, I would choose my menu with great excitement and freedom.

Just the thought of the world coming to an end, generates a tantalizing excitement in my belly, the mere fact, that I could devour my most favorite delicacies without consequence, guilt or social shame!

Most of my favorite foods, or “Treats” as we call them at home, are all either endangered, illegal, incredibly expensive, or so fattening, that the pleasure of eating is ruined by the consequence.

Here is my menu –

Russian Beluga caviar, straight up – great big spoonful’s please!

Hot seared Fois Gras on a slice of toasted brioche.

Fresh orecchiette with soft poached quail eggs and lots of shaved white truffle.

I’m a middle-aged step-dad with a bad back. I’m unable to jog. But I have a better shot at qualifying for the one-hundred-yard dash in the next summer Olympics than I have at getting my thirteen-year-old to voluntarily eat a vegetable. Any vegetable. And the same can be said for fruit. “I hate them,” he insists, decrying, at one fell swoop, all means of natural nutrition. “Hate is a strong word, pal,” I tell him, trying to lend some perspective to this same conversation we repeat night in and night out. But if this isn’t hate, I think to myself, what is it? The smell of broccoli makes him nauseas. The sight of a mushroom incapacitates him with fear; one found its way on to his dinner plate a couple of weeks ago and he yelled out, panicked “Get it off of there!” as if it were some alien species about to attack him.

Complicating his life, not to mention mine, is his mother, who insists he eat, at the very least, one serving of a vegetable at dinner. After negotiations rivaling the Geneva Talks in intensity, we have agreed to let him eat the vegetable of his choosing – peas, peas, and occasionally some peas – at the very end of his meal, and on a separate plate – his vegetable plate. This is the only way he’ll consider, in his words, “giving it an honest attempt.”