One Simple Roast Chicken = At Least Three Dinners

It's the dinner that keeps on giving. Not just a single feast-like meal, roast chicken fits in the category of those magical dinners that, if you can whisk away the platter before there are just scraps left, you've got the makings for at least two more meals, not to mention a decent lunch. And even with just a few scraps left over you can have a big pot of soup and enough stock for risotto.

You can see where I'm going here.

Say you make a roast chicken for your Sunday dinner (left). (Shopping hint: I always buy the biggest one in the case because there's a better chance for leftovers, and it only takes a few minutes longer to cook.) After it's been ripped apart by your ravenous family/fellow diners and they've gone off to their postprandial pursuits, take the plates into the kitchen. Scrape the bones into a pot along with any innards that came with the chicken. Then pull off the meat from any pieces left on the platter, scraping the bones into the aforementioned pot.

Now it's time to attack the carcass with your hands, pulling off even smaller shreds and adding it to your growing pile of meaty bits. Break the carcass in half—this is super easy once all the meat is gone—and put it in the pot. Add water to cover the carcass and put it on the stove to simmer for about an hour (this can be done anytime, really—just put the pot in the fridge until you've got an hour to make the stock). Notice I don't add any other vegetables to make the stock…I like to add those when I'm making whatever the final dish calls for. Put the leftover meat in the fridge.

So what do you have? Well, you'll probably come away with two to three quarts of stock once the bones have been strained off, which you can freeze for soups, risottos or whatever other quickie dinner you choose to make later in the week. Depending on how much meat I've yanked from the mouths of my family and scavenged from the carcass, I usually get upwards of a couple of cups of meat or maybe more. It's enough to throw in a pot of chicken soup, a chicken pot pie or a risotto, with perhaps enough left for a chicken curry sandwich for lunch.

As for that first, lovely roast chicken dinner, if you make the recipe below, in 90 minutes you'll have a one-pot meal, if you count the carrots as your vegetable. Which, of course, I do.

Roasted Chicken with Root Vegetables

3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 carrots, halved and cut in 1/4" slices
3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1 tsp. dried thyme
3-4 c. root vegetables like sweet potatoes, yams, squash, parsnips, potatoes, turnips, etc.
1 roasting chicken or large fryer
1/2 c. white wine or dry vermouth
Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375°. Pull the chicken out the fridge, removing any wrapping, and let it sit on the counter on a couple of paper towels to come to room temperature.

Pour 2 Tbsp. oil into a large frying pan over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add onions and sauté until translucent. Add carrots and sauté till tender, then add garlic and sauté briefly. Turn off heat and stir in the thyme and root vegetables. Put mixture in 9" by 12" Pyrex casserole dish. Pour wine over vegetables.

Rub chicken with remaining 1 Tbsp. oil and throw 1 tsp. or so salt into the cavity and place the chicken on its side on top of the vegetables. Place in oven and roast for 25 minutes. Remove from oven, turn chicken on its other side and roast for another 25 minutes. Remove from oven, turn chicken so it is breast-side up, baste with pan juices and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast another 15 minutes, remove and baste, then roast a final 20 minutes or, for our tastes, until an instant-read thermometer reads 150° on the inside of the lower thigh and the inner side of the breast next to the rib cage. Remove from oven, allow to rest for 10 minutes. Cut it into pieces, removing the breasts whole and slicing them crosswise.

Don't Toss Those Tops!

For years I've been ripping off the tops of bunches of carrots and tossing them in the compost. When a checker at the store would ask if I'd like the frilly greens removed, I'd say, "Why, yes, thanks!"

Then a couple of months ago I stumbled across a reference to carrot greens in cookbook author Diane Morgan's "Roots," an encyclopedic tour of those edibles that grow beneath the soil. In it she describes that she, too, was a carrot top tosser until she found out they were edible, and I've since had several conversations with other former carrot top naïfs who now use the frilly, slightly carrot-y tasting tips in salads, sauces and sautés.

So now not only am I not wasting a perfectly edible source of greens, I have yet another delicious, vitamin-rich addition to my repertoire. Who knew?

Roasted Carrots with Carrot Top Pesto

My friend Hank Shaw, a forager and hunter of some reknown, loves to serve the game animals he hunts with the food that they may forage in the wild. Serving the carrots with their tops, while not quite the same thing, gives me a similar thrill.

1 bunch carrots with greens
1-2 cloves garlic
2 Tbsp. pine nuts (toasted in a dry skillet, if desired)
1/4 tsp. salt
4 Tbsp. olive oil

Preheat oven to 400°.

Remove greens from carrots, leaving 1-2" of stems attached. (I try to get long, slender carrots for roasting, but if the carrots are thicker, halve them lengthwise or chop into 1/2" coins.) Brush with olive oil and arrange on parchment paper on a baking sheet. Roast in oven for 30-40 min. until fork-tender.

For the pesto, remove leaves from carrot stems as you would with parsley or cilantro. Put the leaves in a blender and add garlic, pine nuts and salt. Add 2 Tbsp. of olive oil and purée, drizzling in remainder of olive oil, plus more if needed, to make a finely textured sauce.

Place roasted carrots on platter and drizzle with pesto, or serve carrots plated with drizzle of pesto. I usually put the remainder in a bowl on the table for pesto addicts to serve themselves.

Farm Bulletin: Roots and Tubers

Much as I try to avoid publishing gossip and innuendo, in this essay contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm makes a convincing case for a heretofore unacknowledged familial connection. Please try not to be too shocked.

Books on food take pains to point out that the potato (Solanum tuberosum) and the sweet potato (Ipomea batatas) are not closely related. In a true/false test, the books are correct. The potato belongs to the large, economically important family that includes tobacco, tomatoes, eggplants and peppers, and many important medicinal plants. The sweet potato is a member of the morning glory family, and is the only food plant in a family better known for its weedy and toxic members, a belle among ne'er-do-wells and brigands. Moreover, the potato is a tuber that develops from the stem, whereas the sweet potato's tuber is a root. But the lack of a relationship is a dull thought, a conversational dead end. Certainly, there are something that links them if, at least since the time of Gerarde's Herbal (1597), both have been called potatoes.

The winter roots and tubers on our market table, and prepared for our holiday feasts, deserve a closer look. They evolved within two separate traditions of agriculture that arose independently about the same time, roughly 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. The American and Eurasian foods are very different from one another in a way that reflects the differences in how agriculture developed on the two land masses.

The Eurasian roots on our table evolved from temperate biennial plants—plants that produce vegetative growth during the growing season of the first year, and in the early spring of the following year produce a flowering stalk for seed production. The root stores the energy and minerals needed for flower and seed production, nothing more. When the seeds mature and disperse, the original plant is dead. All of these plants are perpetuated by seed alone and, because they cross pollinate, each generation has a new combination of genes.

These biennials, also called winter annuals, are clustered in four economically important plant families. The beets belong to the Amaranthaceae; radishes, turnips (right) and swedes belong to the Brassicaceae; carrots, parsley root, celeriac and parsnips belong to the Apiaceae; and gobo, salsify and chicory belong to the Asteraceae. In fact, other biennials from these four families account for most of the Eurasian vegetables familiar to us, including lettuce, spinach, chard, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, escarole, fennel and endive.     

In marked contrast, the American cultivated "roots" are perennial tuberous plants, mostly originating in the tropics, and they are scattered hither and yon among various plant families. The tubers allow the plant to enter complete dormancy during dry or cold periods, and resume growth when conditions are favorable. Although they will produce seed, cultivators perpetuate the variety by replanting the tubers, called clonal reproduction, and each generation is substantially identical to the previous ones.

The sweet potato (left) originated in the lowland tropics of Central America, where there is a dry season. The Andean potato, or the spud, evolved in the region around Cuzco, Peru, at approximately 11,000 feet in elevation, but still within the tropics, an area also marked by a dry season when the plants go dormant. Oca, Oxalis tuberosa (Oxalidaceae),  ulluco, Ullucus tubrosus (Basellaceae), yacón, Smallanthus sonchifolius (Asteraceae) and ysaño, Tropaeolum tubrosum (Tropaeolaceae) are four other perennial tubers of local commercial importance originating in the Andes. Alan Kapuler of Peace Seeds in Corvallis has done a fair amount of work promoting oca for the Pacific Northwest.

The cultivated perennial tuber that has its origin outside of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn is Helianthus tuberosus, the Jerusalem artichoke, a member of the Asteraeae. This is the one American tuber that grew in New England at the time of the Mayflower's arrival and most certainly graced the table of the ship's survivors, yet it is unlikely to find its way onto Thanksgiving menus today. The name is probably a corruption of Terneuzen, the Dutch port where vegetables from the fertile lowlands were shipped to England. (Why can't the English teach their children how to speak…)

So what do we make of these two clusters, the temperate biennials of Eurasian lands concentrated in four families, and the American perennials originating mostly between the tropics and all belonging to different families? 

Eurasian agriculture developed simultaneously with iron and draft animals. These were essential for the plowing necessary for the preparation and maintenance of a seed bed, originally to plant small grains such as barley and wheat. Annual cultivation was conducive to the growth of small-seeded biennials, first as volunteers and then as cultivated crops. For the most part, plowing works against the growth of perennial plants.

In contrast, pre-Columbian American agriculture employed neither iron implements nor draft animals. This agriculture was swidden-based. During the dry season, fire is used to open areas for cultivation (left), and these patches are maintained for a few years until the fertility released by the burning is depleted. The land is allowed to revegetate with woody perennials and the cultivator moves on to a new patch. The shrubs and vines that recolonize the untended swidden bring up a fresh load of minerals from the deep within the ground. Often the first plants to grow in the opening are nitrogen fixing legumes, further restoring fertility to the ground. The land is not abandoned. The cultivators return to forage for quelites [edible greens] and, after a few more years, to reclaim the lands again for cultivation. The cycle is on the order of three to four years of cultivation followed by ten years of rest. Within this form of agriculture, perennial tubers survived the dry season burning and sprouted with the return of the rain. Just as the Eurasian biennials, initially volunteers, were eventually domesticated in the plowed fields, a similar pattern followed with the American perennial tubers in the swiddens.

Despite the attempts of aid agencies and modern agronomists to eliminate shifting cultivation or swidden agriculture, it persists in many places, including Central America, Asia, Africa and parts of Northern Japan. Although traditional agronomists cast swidden agriculture as wasteful and polluting, the modern farm field spews forth far more pollutants, albeit invisible, than the farmers tending their milpa in Oaxaca or yakihata in the mountains of Japan. Their external combustion methods consume but a few years of accumulated wood, while our internal combustion engines and synthetic fertilizers have burned through whole geologic epochs. And the plant remains we burn in fossil fuels return no minerals and nutrients to the land.

The roots of winter provide the wonderful illustration of how agricultural practices lend shape to our foods. And when someone tells you the sweet potato and the Andean potato are not related, you will know that the story has a more interesting wrinkle rarely discussed in general conversation.

Photo of burning milpa from Dr. Darlene Applegate of Western Kentucky University.