Weekend Cooking.

by Emi

For me the only time I have the time to cook is on the weekends, primarily Sunday. This weekend though was special, and instead of cooking Sunday dinner for me and my parents, I cooked a big Saturday dinner with my sister Kei and my cousin Max. We prepared a big South Carolina BBQ themed meal for our families. The idea evolved from the original idea of making a roast chicken and sides to pulled BBQ chicken sandwiches, potato salad, coleslaw, macaroni and cheese, and baked beans. It was pretty great, and we had a good time making it, which made it even better.

Everyone has heard of pulled pork, but you can pretty much do the same for chicken. Obviously my family's house isn't outfitted with a smoker, which would be pretty awesome, but cumbersome, so instead I made a really simple roast chicken with just salt and pepper. This was a big chicken (7.5lbs), so it took around two hours to cook at 450 degrees. It was super easy to prepare though. You just dry the chicken, generously salt and pepper the outside and inside, and truss it so it cooks evenly. I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.


After that basically you just pull all the chicken off the bone in small pieces minus the skin. Max and I made a South Carolina style BBQ sauce which is vinegar based, rather then the traditional tomato based BBQ sauces. It uses 2 cups of cider vinegar, and I don't know if it was the quality of the vinegar we bought or maybe we maybe some kind of mistake, but when it was supposedly done cooking it was cough inducing vinegary. We had to alter it using some sugar, molasses, and a rue to mellow it out and thicken it up a bit. I wanted to use cornstarch to thicken it, but we didn't have any. Once we added those ingredients it made it much better. Once the sauce was finished we let the chicken soak up all the juices so it would be nice and flavorful and tender.



After that we made the baked beans. Traditionally baked beans are slow cooked for hours, and you would have soaked the dry beans over night. I've had bad experience with soaking dry beans before, and we didn't have five hours to prepare the beans, so I found a quick baked beans recipe on Martha Stewart which came out pretty awesome. I highly suggest adding slab bacon to the recipe. Most other long cooking recipes include it, but for some reason this one didn't. We added it anyway when we were cooking the onions and garlic, and everyone thought it tasted amazing. It also smelled delicious while it was cooking. My sister and I bought the slab bacon at a local farm about 10 minutes from our house called Hemlock Farms. If you can buy local or artisanal products like that, everyone will thank you for it. The majority of the time when you buy any pig product, including bacon it comes from this producer called Smithfield. If you see a Smithfield label on your bacon you should probably put it down immediately in-disgust. I won't go into it here, but if you want to learn a thing or two about the largest pork producer in the US, then you might want to read this article, but be prepared to be horrified. (Unfortunately Rollingstone's new site doesn't have it online anymore, but this article is about the original article.)

Anyhow, back to the food...

After the baked beans, we made the coleslaw which was just a simple vinegar mayonnaise sauce and red cabbage. My cousin brought some macaroni and cheese, and my sister made a classic potato salad, and for dessert sweet biscuits with fresh whipped cream and strawberries. If you've never made fresh whipped cream before, it couldn't be any easier and taste better. All you do is whip heavy cream with sugar. If you have an electric beater it takes less then two minutes, and tastes so much better then Ready Whip or god forbid Cool Whip. Plus you can control how sweet you want it. If your eating ice cream then maybe you don't want it super sweet or maybe you do. It's up to you.

Here is a picture of the finished table with all the food.



The camera stopped working for me to take a picture of the dessert, but we did get one photo of this mutant strawberry! It looks like three in one.


Anyhow I really had a great time cooking with sister and cousin, and getting to share a tasty meal with our families. It was a nice way to spend a beautiful Saturday, and we plan on doing it again sometime this summer.

P.S. I loved Liz's how-to bow, so I gave it a try myself. Mine was not nearly as successful as her's because I didn't measure anything, and I screwed up the 3-3-2-1 ratio, I did 3-2-3-1. If you don't look at it too closely though it looks decent. I call mine a free form bow. I'll definitely give it another go in the future.