The Longleaf Bar & Grill

Roast Chicken with Herbes de Provence

This past Monday morning, when late-season Tropical Storm Ida was still a hurricane and looked like she might swamp Pensacola, I went on a shopping spree at our neighborhood Publix grocery store. Among (many) other items, I bought a whole roasting chicken. Luckily for us and others in Ida's path, she pooped out, and didn't cause much trouble.

Yesterday, I got around to thinking about that chicken in the meat drawer. Originally, I was going to roast it with lemon and tarragon, or lemon and thyme, but then I remembered a Navel orange on the counter that needed to be used, and a jar in the pantry of Herbes de Provence. Ooh, baby, that started sounding good.

And when I Googled "roast chicken with orange juice and Herbes de Provence," I found Janée. She is the proprietress of a marvelous food-themed blog call Revel & Feast. I used her recipe. Click here to visit Revel & Feast. (I like the name, too.) This link will take you straight to the Roast Chicken with Herbes de Provence recipe I used. 

Just look at the photos below. Imagine how fabulous our kitchen smelled last night. Did I mention several cloves of garlic are squished up and put inside the bird along with the orange? By the way, the recipe was easy, and the chicken turned out moist and loaded with flavor. Okay. The green peas are unattractive, I admit. But it was the only green veggie in the house besides a half bag of frozen okra. As for the wild rice, I haven't cooked any of that in years, but the little box languishing in the pantry called to me, so I cooked it in some chicken broth, and you know what? It was great!

  

 

Thanks, Janée!

Shellfish Tapas

Tropical Storm Ida behaved herself rather well, and left us free to ponder the joys of Gulf Coast living: like the abundance of fresh seafood.

I think the less you fiddle with pristine ingredients, the better they are. These shrimp are sauteed, and then mixed with a light sauce of Dijon mustard, lemon juice and zest, capers, fresh dill, scallions and olive oil.Shrimp with Dill and Capers

 I never order baked oysters in a restaurant. They are usually offered in thick, gloppy sauces, covered in bacon and/or cheese, with a poor shriveled up oyster unrecognizable somewhere underneath it all. Even this recipe has a little too much for my tastes, but it's still simple and good. Garlic, parsley, fresh bread crumbs and olive oil are mixed and sprinkled on the oysters. I added a teaspoon of Pernod, too.  My favorite oysters are icy cold on the half shell with a squeeze of lemon and a shake of Tabasco. Yum. (Not for those with damaged livers or polluted shellfish beds.)
Baked oysters with Garlic and Parsley

Rooster in the Hen House

I feel like I've been running around like a chicken with its head cut off all day today. Gruesome image. Seems like we've been having a lot of those "it's time for dinner, do we have anything we can eat or do we have to go out or go to the grocery story" kind of evenings.

In truth, anyone who has a few eggs, a couple of potatoes, an onion, and if they're really lucky, a small chunk of ham, can have a cast-iron skillet feast. Like we did tonight.

Heavy ironstone plates are great because they hold heat. The rooster peaking out from a pile of eggs is just for fun.

   He looks pretty smug, though.

Asparagus and Grilled Yellow Pepper

Our neighborhood Publix grocery had the prettiest asparagus at the store today. Best of all, they were on sale. I got a huge package for $1.43 -- fixed half tonight and saved the other half for tomorrow. Usually, I will grill a sweet red pepper as a go-with for a chunk of broiled salmon, but the few red ones were old looking and had begun to wrinkle up and get soft spots. Oh, but the yellow ones! They were singing. "Take me! Take me!"

 

Uncomplicated Food

I've realized recently that I don't make fancy, complicated food anymore. Huh. The more I write, the less I cook. Or, if not less, more simple. A meatloaf to cut for sandwich lunches all week. A pot of bean soup for suppers and lunches and some to stick in the freezer. A boiled shrimp bust is a Saturday night splurge, but even that is simple to the core.

My conclusion?  Liberation. A good thing.

 
Whole chicken, cooked outside on the grill, served with raw green onions and baked potatoes.  Leftovers great for breakfast with Komodo Dragon coffee.

Salmon Patties & Cheese Grits

 
Buck and I stayed out until almost dark, walking in the woods on this chilly bright day, and so a simple, quick supper was in order. I found a can of red salmon and a bag of yellow grits in the pantry. We balanced plates on our laps and ate supper by the fire.  

Bean Soup Decadence and Cornbread

When the first cool front of the season blows out the blanket of 90 degree heat and 110% humidity we've been sweltering under, Buck starts rhapsodizing about bean soups past. Out of a sense of enlightened self-interest  filial duty, I cooked a huge pot of U.S. Senate Bean Soup yesterday. Soupsong blog has a hiliarious twisted history of this soup here. Please note that I don't smush up any of the beans. No mashed potatoes, either. And lots of garlic.

 
Cornbread can be healthful. But the recipe I used included sour cream and canned creamed corn - delicious, but not totally virtuous. It tasted like tender corn pudding, quivering within a corn bread crust. I whispered endearments to it and ate it with a spoon.

Buck and I walked four miles around Longleaf in the brisk late afternoon air. For a supper like this, that was just about enough. As long as we do it again today.

p.s. Check out the clever Rancho Gordo beans web site here.

Lemon Lust

  The broiled fish and blue crab were good. They always are. But they leave an aftertaste that cries for something with a lemony twist. Something sweet, but not too sweet.

  First it was "Sin in a Tin." Now it's "Lemon Lust." Makes me wonder what Pensacola Chef William Guthrie will come up with next. . .

 

Lunch at Jesse's in Magnolia Springs

Sometimes a short, impromptu drive through the countryside is much larger than the sum of its obvious parts. Buck and I went in search of a restaurant I had heard of in a tiny hamlet I had never seen.  The restaurant is Jesse's.

 

I would have been inclined to like it just for the name alone. I like saying the name, "Jesse."  I think it reminds me of the old Janis Ian song, "Jesse." The version that always plays in my head was sung by Joan Baez. It was popular at a time in my life when I was so lonely I didn't know what to do.

 

The Magnolia River winds around and through the village of Magnolia Springs. The town's web site is lovely. I think you would enjoy the slide show, with photographs of canopy roads, live oaks dripping Spanish Moss, and old boat houses on the river.

Jesse's has one room in the restaurant that is a cool, dark cave. It's called "The Cold Hole." It can be a nifty sports bar, music venue, or as on this day, quiet as the charming old Episcopal church across the street. "The Cold Hole" was the perfect spot for Buck and I to eat our lunch. He enjoyed a salad topped with six jumbo (really) grilled Gulf shrimp. My choice was a boneless grilled chicken breast over garlic Basmati rice with a side of really nice fresh asparagus. Check out Jesse's at their Facebook page here.

Good folks at Jesse's. Our server, Kayla, somehow found her way to Magnolia Springs all the way from New Jersey. She was friendly, professional, and made us feel at home.

 

Jesse's shares their building with the Moore Bros. Village Market, where you can eat ribs, chicken and greens from Hazel's Hot Bar, or take home a sack full of baker Jennifer Haffner's banana-peanut butter-chocolate chip scones or "kitchen sink" cookies. They stock a wide variety of barbeque sauces and fine wines -- just the sort of contrasts that make my head buzz in a pleasing way. It smelled so good in there, I was almost sorry I had already eaten lunch.

 

Buck and I look forward to a return visit to Jesse's soon.  Next time, I think we'll drive over for dinner early enough to sit in their outdoor garden area and sip a glass of wine while the weather is just exactly right, like it is now.

 

Patina

 
Buck and I used to go down to one of the local oriental-style restaurants that please their American guests with deep-fried everything, from heavily battered cubes of pork in a high-fructose version of sweet and sour sauce,  or heavily battered chunks of chicken in some other mystery sauce, to battered and fried sweet potato slices, egg rolls, won tons, and globs of fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar. I'm not kidding. This kind of food that is called Chinese (but isn't) is indemic to little town and  suburban strip shopping malls all over the country. It's relatively cheap food, filling, and if eaten frequently enough, just might help a person on down the road toward diabetes and high blood pressure. It bears the merest whiff of resemblance to any of the authentic cuisine of China.

We haven't visited the nice folks at our local version of one of these buffets in a long time, and have marked them off our list of places to eat along with other fast food drive-through joints. We are fortunate to have the luxury of time to shop for healthful ingredients and to cook at home.

The wok pictured  is not new, but it hasn't been used enough yet to achieve the fine patina of a classic wok. It is just now beginning to get speckled. We enjoyed our one-pot supper of sitr-fry chicken breast with onions, green and red peppers, and mushrooms over brown rice.