all dressed up

I have long wanted a picture of my sweet beagle boy wearing my husband's red bow tie. I think he looks fabulous but he was just not wanting to cooperate with the camera at all. I think I have mentioned before how he is really camera shy. Such a handsome boy has nothing to be shy about. I think this picture make him look like an old dog when he is really a young adult beagle. Maybe 3 or 4 years old. That is a drawback to getting dogs from the pound - you don't know their birthday. Of course, the rewards of rehabilitating a scared little guy is more than worth it. We celebrate "gotcha day" around our place.

The chicken is all dressed up, too. That is Cornell chicken from this last month's issue of Cook's Country. Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country are both rather picky about their recipes, so I will just post a link here for the recipe. I believe you have to register to get their recipes from the website. It is basically a chicken brined in cider vinegar and then cooked with a coating of dijion mustard, cider vinegar, and sage and rosemary. I did not grill mine but roasted it in the convection over with pearl onions. I really enjoyed this chicken. I brine my turkey for Thanksgiving and I believe that the brine makes all the difference in the flavor and texture of the turkey. I gave a recipe for my brined turkey to a young friend who said she will always make it that way now!

I used a whole bird, which I "spatch-cocked" which brings up a lot of controversy. I guess spatch-cock is now a slang term that means much what it sounds like. It is also a cooking term which means to remove the backbone and keel bone from a whole bird so it lays flat and cooks much better and more uniformly. Alton Brown (love him!) did this in step by step directions on a Cornish Game Hen on his show "Fowl Territory" which is worth a read. He writes very well about cooking technique, which if you have ever tried to do, you know if not as easy as it sounds.

I made the mistake of Googling spatch cock to find out the origins of it. I mean, I believe originally, spatch was the verb and cock referred to the chicken itself but now it is all a verb. The results from my Google search cause me to weep for humanity. Just saying.