Grilling a whole naked chicken

There have been a plethora of wonderful chicken ideas coming from Cook's Illustrated, and even though this recipe came from the May/June 2013 issue, I only got around to trying it recently.  I used one of the same tricks as the Barbecued Chicken techniques that I shared with you earlier, namely aluminum pie pans full of water under the grate on the cool side of the grill.  But the biggest aha came from the directions to cut out the chicken's backbone and flatten it for grilling.  In order to stabilize it, you run skewers through the legs and body in a few spots.  Easy peasy to flip and move now!

See how the meat is slashed?  That's to allow a marinade of lemon, rosemary, Dijon mustard, and butter to penetrate deeply into the meat.  Yum.

Three great panini for Autumn

We usually scale back on the weekly panini during the summer, but once Autumn hits, I'm back to looking for tasty new combinations.  At least new to me ;-)

Ham, sliced Granny Smith apples, brie cheese, mustard (shown above)

Tomato slices, chopped fresh basil leaves, pepper jack cheese

Prosciutto, sauted mushrooms, greens, cranberry mustard (shown below)

Locavores?

Apple chai muffins

When you end up with an apple harvest like we had this year, you've got to figure out what to do with all the Applesauce you make besides just slurp it down!  I always end up making several types of apple cake, apple dumplings, and apple pie, but this year I experimented with the spices a bit and made my Apple Muffins into chai spiced apple muffins.

Apple Muffins

3 c flour
2 t baking soda
1/2 t allspice
1/2 t ginger
1/2 t cinnamon
1/2 t salt
1 c light brown sugar
1/2 c sugar
1 1/2 c unsweetened applesauce
1/2 c butter, melted
1/2 c sour cream
2 large eggs

Heat oven to 350.  Combine flour through sugars in a medium bowl.  Beat the applesauce through the eggs together in another bowl and add to the flour mixture, stirring until just combined.  Divide the batter into 24 muffin cups.  Bake for about 30 minutes.  Add a nut-based icing to make them into cupcakes.


For the Chai variation, reduce the brown sugar to 1/2 c and replace the allspice through salt with the following mixture:
1 t cinnamon
1 t ground ginger
1/2 t allspice
1/2 t cardamom
1/4 t freshly ground black pepper

Bumper crop of apples this year

Maybe it was worth putting up with the rainy spring and scorching summer.  This is just a small sampling of our apples this year.  Our applesauce and apple butter stock is going to be refilled!

Nice try!

Pumpkin donuts...so much easier than you'd think!

Thanks to my friend Cherie Burbach, a woman of many many talents, I found out that Real Simple magazine has a recipe online for baked Pumpkin Donuts!  I've been wanting to make donuts again ever since I was a kid and Mom and I spent an enjoyable afternoon deep frying a ton-load of plain sugar donuts.  The biggest problem (besides the mess and the extra calories) was that they tasted soooo much better when they were still warm.  Thus, one on the plate, one down the hatch.  Repeat all afternoon!

Yikes!

Baked donuts are (usually? always?) of the cakey variety, which are my favorite anyway.  I'm not a big fan of Crispy Cremes...please don't yell at me, they're just not my thing.  But this recipe looked promising, and indeed, it was awesome.  I plan to use the base of this recipe to try some Apple Cider Donuts and maybe some other cake types.

Wilton Donut Pans, 2 of them stacked

They don't turn out perfect like deep fried donuts...
the batter is more like muffins

Plop them on a pretty plate...

...and add the glaze

You can eat them before the glaze hardens if you want,
and actually, it's pretty hard not to!