This recipe comes from my mother-in-law, Mary. She’s taught me a lot of great cooking tricks and is an absolute force in the kitchen. You know Mary is cooking when you walk into the house and the music is pumping at full volume. I’ve changed some of the seasonings and herbs, but the timing and technique here are all hers. This is an easy, totally hands-off method of cooking fish, which makes it an ideal recipe for new or nervous cooks—for all cooks, really!
This is a classic roast chicken—herb-scented and bronze-skinned—that’s been vamped out with crispy mushrooms cooked in the same pan.
Tarragon was made for chicken and mushrooms. Its muted aniseed flavour is somehow both bold and gentle; the sponginess of the mushrooms just soaks up the tarragon and their earthiness marries with it beautifully. The second wonder of this dish is its simplicity – just throw everything into the pan, place the chicken on top and roast.
It’s an unlikely scenario—early season vegetables cooked at a low simmer to amplify their fresh flavors—but it works.
When it comes to beet salads, it’s hard to escape the ubiquitous combination of beets and goat cheese. The pairing works because the tangy, creamy, salty goat cheese is a great foil for the beets’ earthy sweetness. (Interestingly, beets’ sweetness is actually the result of a winter survival strategy. The sugars in beets act like antifreeze, keeping the fluid in their cells from freezing and forming destructive ice crystals.) But that doesn’t mean the combination hasn’t gotten a little tired. To reinvigorate the classic beet salad, we looked for ways to deal with the sweetness itself. By charring the cooked beets—essentially burning some of the sugar—we cut down on sweetness and add some complementary bitterness. We amplify that bitterness with crisp radicchio and toss it all with a dressing made from the beet cooking liquid. And to replace the goat cheese? A simple spread of feta and Greek yogurt adds plenty of creaminess. A final flourish of tart pomegranate seeds provides pops of bright acidity (while staying on message with the ruby color scheme), while fresh dill and tarragon round things out with some herbal notes.