March 10 – March 16, 2025

 

 

Monday:                             Refrigerator Salad

Tuesday:                             Spaghetti and Meatballs

Wednesday:                        Ham and Bean Soup

Thursday:                             PFC

Friday:                                  Labriola’s Fried Cod Sandwiches

Saturday:                              Sausage and Mushroom Pizza

 

Sunday:                              

Roasted Chicken with Sweet Onions, Baby Potatoes with Lemon and Arugula, Mixed Greens with tomatoes, Cucumbers and Feta; Long Grove Apple Pie

Note:  Didn’t take many pictures this week – an opportunity to use your imagination.

It was a glorious week of weather – until the storm blew through on Sunday – but on that stormy Beez and I celebrated our anniversary with excellent friends and the food was amazing – from Hilda’s appetizer to the Long Grove apple pie with ice cream, courtesy of Paul and Nancy.  The Roasted Chicken with Sweet Onions is a Sunday staple at our house and I’ve included that recipe below. But just now, the day after the feast of St. Patrick, potatoes are on my mind.

I remember being stranded among the malls and shopping centers of Northeast Philadelphia during one of Billy’s many soccer tournaments and eating dinner with him at a Boston Market franchise.  After we ordered chicken and a side, our waiter, with a thick Irish brogue suggested, “Yee’ll want some padadas with that, roight?”  Well, asked by a man with that accent and Irish background, yes, we had some padadas with that.

I also remember my brother-in-law, Bill, who has abandoned the Midwest for Georgia, leaving us a gift (on the porch? – I’m not sure where) of 4 potatoes, a hand mixer and a six-pack of Iron City beer with a note attached that read something like – Enjoy these fixings for a traditional St. Patrick’s Day dinner.

The Irish will be forever associated with the potato, with which they have lived since the late seventeenth century,* through thick or thin.

*Potatoes, like snakes, are not native to Ireland and began to be cultivated only after the Columbian exchange (discovery of the New World) which brought the potato to Spain and then Ireland, England, Germany and France, the tomato to Italy and peppers to Thailand and China.  The potato was a great gift for the impoverished, oppressed people of Ireland but, alas, a gift with a hidden worm.  When the potato blight hit the Irish crop in 1845 it led to a decline in the population of 25% over the next decade – maybe two million emigrated and one million starved.  When the British stopped supplying off aid and absentee landlords kept exporting food from a starving Ireland, Dean Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, wrote his famous Modest Proposal, which suggested that, since the Irish were not allowed to eat the crops they grew for export they should eat the other crop that the notoriously fertile Irish were good at producing – babies.

Wait a minute, is this a history blog or a food blog?  Well, I am a discursive writer and, if you haven’t stopped reading me by now, you’re probably used to my wandering into other areas of knowledge and interest.  But, after all, this is about food and, specifically, the padada.

I don’t want to suggest that you change any of the other ways in which you have learned to cook the potato – baked whole, au gratin, the French fry, the wonderful comfort of mashed, the irresistible halved new potatoes roasted to a crisp, salty outside and a creamy interior, the buttery gift of parslied potatoes.  But I will strongly suggest that you add one more dish to your repertoire – Geoffrey Zakarian’s Lemon-Arugula Potatoes.  These go superbly well with roasted chicken, or meatloaf, or roast pork, or simply as a warm side-salad with almost anything.  The bright pops of tartness from the supremed lemon sections and earthy flavor of salt and olive oil or butter put the sharp vegetable taste of the arugula firmly in its place – a perfect dish.

Enjoy – and I hope you had a happy and blessed St. Patrick’s Day.

 

Celery Salt Roasted Chicken with Lemon Arugula Potatoes (adapted from Geoffrey Zakarian)

Note – picture of the potatoes is at the end of the recipe

Timing           About 3 hours (includes 1 hour for chicken to come to

                                                        room temperature)

Ingredients                                           Serves 4

Chicken

  3 ½ lb. chicken, trussed

  3 tablespoons softened butter (get it out in the morning or by noon to sit at  room temperature)

  1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon celery salt, plus more to season the onions

  Kosher salt, ground black pepper, 2 sprigs thyme, 2 sprigs rosemary

  1 lemon quartered, 2 large Vidalia onions (sweet onions), sliced ½-inch thick

   lengthwise from stem to root

  Optional – parsley for garnish from stem

Potatoes

  2 lbs. baby golden potatoes, scrubbed

  2 lemons, supremed and juiced

  1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil – more to taste

  5 ounces of arugula (large leaves work best)

Prep

Earlier in the day, get the butter out to soften – if you’re like me, you leave the butter out all the time, except that Beez keeps putting it back in the refrigerator.  Our shanty-Irish ancestors would have laughed at this and called us soft or, worse, acting British.

1 hour or more before cooking, unwrap chicken, pat it dry and let it come to room temperature.

  30 minutes before cooking, place a cast-iron skillet in the oven and heat oven to        450F, you want the skillet very hot.

   Slice onions

   Quarter lemon, assemble thyme and rosemary

   Assemble celery salt, kosher salt and pepper

   Scrub potatoes

   Supreme and juice the lemons

Cook the chicken

Pat the chicken dry again and sprinkle 1 teaspoon of celery salt in the cavity, then fill the cavity with the thyme, the rosemary and the quartered lemon.  Truss the bird.

Now brush the chicken all over with the butter and sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of celery salt, then sprinkle the entire surface generously with the kosher salt and pepper.

  Remove the pan from the oven – wear a mitt, it’s hot – and carefully distribute the onion slices in the bottom of the skillet.  Drizzle with white wine and sprinkle with salt, pepper and some of the celery salt.

  Arrange the chicken in the skillet over the onions.

  Roast until the chicken is a deep golden brown – about 40 minutes, then turn off the oven and allow to rest in the warmth until the thickest part of the leg reaches 160 F. 

  Remove the chicken from the oven and let it rest in the pan for 20 minutes before carving and serving with the onions and the pan sauce.

NOTE – Ovens run at different temperatures.  You may need to cook the chicken a bit longer – but you don’t want to overcook or it will begin to dry out.  This is the mystery of being a good cook – good luck.

Cook the potatoes

Place the potatoes in a pot with 1 ½ tablespoons of salt and cover with water by about an inch.  Bring the water to a boil, lower to a simmer and cook until the potatoes are fork-tender – maybe 17 minutes or so.

Drain the potatoes and place in a large serving bowl and mash a bit with a wooden spoon – you can even tear some in half.  You don’t want whole potatoes, but you don’t want mashed, either.

While the potatoes are hot, pour the lemon juice and segments and the olive oil over them and season with salt and pepper – I like to finish with a little Maldon salt for extra flavor and crunch.  Now add ½ of the arugula and toss well.  Add the rest of the arugula just before serving and adjust seasoning.