When Céline Bénitah cooks this dish, she blanches the olives for a minute to get rid of the bitterness, a step that I never bother with. If you keep the pits in, just warn your guests in order to avoid any broken teeth! Céline also uses the marvelous Moroccan spice mixture ras el hanout, which includes, among thirty other spices, cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, cloves, and paprika. You can find it at Middle Eastern markets or through the Internet, or you can use equal amounts of the above spices or others that you like.
This is a simplified version of the traditional Palestinian dish m'sakhan, in which chicken is spiced with sumac and then roasted in the oven over bread. Sumac and za'atar that we love and use so much are combined here with fresh lemon to give the chicken a powerful sharp kick. It works fantastically well and is almost addictive. Try serving the chicken with warm pita bread and a garlicky yogurt sauce, made by mixing Greek yogurt with crushed garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper.
Chicken Larb (Laotian Chicken and Herb Salad)
This is what I call a sleeper recipe. At first glance it doesn’t look like much — a whole chicken rubbed with a little fresh ginger, roasted, and served alongside elbow macaroni tossed with diced tomatoes and the roasting juices. Exactly what makes this dish so remarkable is hard to pinpoint, but there’s a wonderful alchemy that occurs when the chicken, ginger, and tomato all come together. It’s comforting, a little exotic, and truly delicious. To create a maximum of pan juices — since these become the sauce for the noodles — I add the giblets to the roasting pan and pour a bit of white wine over the chicken partway through roasting. During roasting, the drippings, the wine, and the roasted giblets cook together, creating a savory jus. The chicken also roasts on a rack to encourage the drippings to caramelize a bit as they hit the hot pan, developing even more flavor. I make this year-round using canned tomatoes, but if you make it in the summer, by all means use fresh ripe tomatoes.
Ingredients
This butter fried chicken recipe is in my head more often than not. That's saying something. It's one of our monthly meals at the Zimmern house, and it's yet another brilliant way to do chicken for a crowd that includes kids. Paired with a bright citrus punch and salty capers, this fried chicken entrée makes everyone happy. My son starts screaming "butter chicken" and runs up and down the hallways when he comes home from school and learns what's for dinner. I first ate this dish 30 years ago, served for a family meal one night at a restaurant in Florence where I was a stagiaire. I hadn't seen butter during my first few weeks in Italy and almost fainted when I tasted this.
We're always game for a good ceremonial burning.
It’s taco Tuesday! Or any day! Who wouldn’t overuse exclamation points?! I loved taco night when I was a kid, when it meant yellow cheese, seasonings from a packet, and machine-molded tortilla shells—essentially, an insult to all of Mexico in one convenient box. It is, of course, better to make real tacos with sweet fresh flour tortillas.
This is the best method I know for making perfect roast chicken. Even novice cooks find it foolproof. By some mysterious chemistry (the discovery of Marcella Hazan) roasting a chicken with a lemon in its cavity guarantees exceptionally crisp skin, very moist flavorful flesh and abundant pan juices, with no added fat: in short everything one could ask of a roast chicken but which ordinarily achieved by slathering the bird with butter.
How many times have I made roast chicken over the years? Thousands.