I normally wouldn’t bother to write about a side salad. But this was quite possibly the most sublime salad I’ve had in a good long while.

For dinner, we had some manicotti that my mother-in-law had brought over for us. A pint of tomato sauce in the fridge meant essentially a no-cook night for me, and I figured a salad would be a good accompaniment. I had on hand some roasted beets, a package of mixed baby greens, and my pantry staples — olive oil and a very good balsamic vinegar.

So the salad was composed thusly: I tossed the greens with some olive oil and vinegar and divided it onto a couple of salad plates. On top of that, cubed roasted beets that had been lightly dressed with the same olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Sprinkled a few pine nuts on top, and the real kicker — I sprinkled this very lightly with some fleur de sel.

Like I said — best. Salad. Ever.

For the roasted beets:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Trim the ends of the beets and wash them well. Put them on a piece of foil large enough to enclose them. Drizzle them with a bit of olive oil, and bake them for 45 minutes to an hour depending on size. When they’re cool enough to handle, peel the skin off them and cut them into cubes. These can be dressed with a vinaigrette. They taste like the earth — dark, substantive, and mysterious. They are beautiful.

I’ve tweeted about this recipe often enough and am posting it now at the request of a young acquaintance named Charlie Olvera, so that he might enjoy this dinner on a cold Long Island winter’s night. This is true comfort food — the chicken poaches in a small amount of liquid that forms the basis of a sauce. It’s like chicken soup, but better. It’s a meal in a pot, although I am rounding out our dinner with a tossed green salad and a crusty baguette.

You’ll need a Dutch oven for this. I’m using my beautiful (and inexpensive!) enameled cast iron one, but any deep covered pot will do. Your pot needs to be big enough to comfortably hold a 4 or 5 lb. chicken, and it needs a cover, and it needs to be oven-safe.

Ingredients:

• One 4- to 5-lb. chicken, washed and patted dry
• 1 medium onion, peeled and halved lengthwise
• 4 medium carrots, peeled and cut roughly into one-inch pieces
• 2 stalks of celery, cut in half
• 5 or 6 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
• 1 lb. baby potatoes, white or red (about 1 inch in diameter; if they’re bigger, cut them accordingly)
• 1 cup of chicken stock
• 1 cup of white wine
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• Bay leaf

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Heat about 1 tbsp. of oil in the Dutch oven over medium-high heat until shimmering. Pat the chicken dry and season it liberally with salt and pepper; tie the legs together with kitchen twine, and tuck the wings behind the back. When the oil is ready, put the chicken in the pot on its breast and let it brown for about 5 or 6 minutes. When it’s nicely browned, turn it over on its back and brown that side as well. When both sides are browned, remove the chicken to a platter, and add another tablespoon of oil to the pot.

Add the onion, celery, and carrots to the pot and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables begin to brown and form a nice fond on the bottom of the pan, about 5 or 6 minutes. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the stock and wine and bay leaf and bring to a boil, scraping the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon to incorporate the fond. Add the chicken back to the pot on top of the vegetables, breast side up, season the potatoes with salt and pepper and add them to the pot around the chicken, and cover the pot. Put the pot in the oven for at least an hour. You’ll want to cook the chicken until the thigh temperature registers 170 - 175 degrees (this takes roughly an hour to 70 minutes, and it’s extremely forgiving, i.e. this is hard to overcook). When it’s done, take the pot out of the oven, remove the chicken to a serving platter, and tent it while you fix the sauce.

Remove the potatoes and carrots to the serving platter with the chicken. Take the onions, bay leaf,  and celery out of the pot and discard. Boil the remaining liquid a little until it thickens slightly, and serve with the chicken, carrots and potatoes. If you’d like a slightly richer sauce, you can whisk a couple of tablespoons of unsalted butter into the sauce off the heat.

You can serve this with whatever starch tickles your fancy, but I really love a good baguette with this. Any simple green vegetable makes a nice accompaniment. Or if you’re lazy, just eat the chicken and veggies and call it a day.

With a little input from the folks who will be at the table, I put together my menus for Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner. I’ll be cooking Christmas Eve dinner at home this year, which is a change for us, and one I’m looking forward to. I’ll keep to the Italian tradition of having fish or seafood, although I’m certainly not making seven kinds. We’ll start with a shrimp cocktail (Jim will make his excellent cocktail sauce) and some puff pastry pinwheels filled with spinach and cheese. Our main course will be poached salmon served with a dill/creme fraiche sauce, accompanied by roasted white and green asparagus and a nice loaf of bread (served with truffle butter). Dessert will be Christmas cookies (and I will cheat and buy them at our local Italian pastry shop) and molten chocolate cakes.

Christmas breakfast at our house has, for the past several years, consisted of freshly made cream scones with clotted cream, lemon curd, and jam. There’s always a big pot of coffee and some tea for Jim. We see no reason to stray from this path.

Unlike the Cratchits, I’m not looking forward to putting a roast goose on my dinner table. At our house, dinner on the big day will be a small prime rib. This isn’t actually one of my favorite cuts of meat, but the menfolk adore it, and I certainly don’t mind roasting one once a year. We’ll have roasted brussels sprouts and garlic mashed potatoes with that, and dinner rolls (I’ve not yet gotten up the nerve to do Yorkshire pudding). I feel like we should have something a bit lighter to start, so I’m thinking we might actually begin with a salad of mixed greens dressed simply with olive oil and my good balsamic vinegar. Dessert will be those Christmas cookies again, and some pound cake.

We’re looking to make some homemade eggnog this year, too, although where it fits in to all this I’m not sure. One thing I can tell you is that it’ll be good.

Although I originally started making granola using a recipe from the Morning Glory Farm Cookbook, I’ve modified the basic formula enough that I think I’m evolving my own granola style. This past weekend I made a batch of almond-apricot granola that came out really good, and I’m posting it here (at least partly at the request of my friend Stephe). I used sunflower seeds alone because they’re always available at the supermarket, but if you  have other seeds (or nuts) that you like, you should feel free to mix and match and substitute to your heart’s content. I may experiment a bit once I locate a good online source of nuts and seeds in bulk.

Ingredients:

• 5 cups oatmeal (I use Quaker Old Fashioned rather than the quick-cooking stuff — it has a better texture)
• 2 - 2.5 cups unsalted sunflower seeds (or a mixture of sunflower seeds and your seeds of choice)
• 3/4 tsp. salt
• 1 cup pure maple syrup
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 1.5 tsp almond extract
• 1 cup slivered almonds
• 1 cup dried apricots, chopped

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Mix the first six ingredients together in a large bowl and then spread in a large baking pan (you should have enough room in the pan to comfortably stir the ingredients without spilling them over the sides. Bake at 325 for approximately 30 minutes, stirring once or twice. Lower heat to 250 degrees and continue baking for approximately an hour, or until the granola starts to turn a nice nutty brown. Stir it frequently to brown it evenly and keep the stuff on the bottom from over-browning. Add the almonds and bake for another 30 minutes. Remove granola from oven and then add apricots. Stir thoroughly and cool in pan. When granola is cool, pack it into an airtight container, where it will keep for quite some time.

You can serve this like cereal, or enjoy it with yogurt (and fruit if you’d like). It also makes a nice snack for eating out of hand. If it doesn’t taste as almondy as you’d like you can experiment with increasing the amount of almond extract a bit.

That’s my pronouncement for the week.

Last year, after reading a ringing endorsement of this pan on Cook’s Illustrated, I ventured to Wal-Mart and bought one of these 6.5 quart Tramontina enameled cast iron Dutch ovens. My winters are full of soups, stews, and other things that call for slow cooking, sometimes on top of the stove, sometimes in the oven, and I wanted a pot that would serve me well. The truly amazing thing is how well this Dutch oven performs, and how (relatively) inexpensive it was — this year, Wal-Mart’s website lists it at $45 (still a bargain), but I think I might have paid $40 for mine.

The enamel coating on this pan is great because it allows you to brown things very nicely — you end up with a nice fond on the pan bottom which will serve your dish well if you deglaze the pan with some wine or broth. I like to make giant batches of tomato sauce with meat in this, and it’s also great to make chicken in a pot. I brown the chicken on top of the stove, remove the chicken, add some aromatic vegetables to the pan to brown them up a bit, return the chicken to the pot, add a little wine or stock, and stick the whole thing in the oven for an hour and a half. I also trot this baby out when it’s time to make a pot of kielbasa and sauerkraut, or corned beef.

It’s easy to clean, too — the enameled interior cleans up almost like a nonstick coating, and on those few occasions when you’ve got something really stuck, you just need to put some water in the pot and soak for a couple of hours and it’s good to go.

The one drawback? It’s heavy. It’s really heavy. It’s so heavy that once you put a few pounds of ingredients into it, you don’t want to pick it up if you don’t have to. It’s heavy enough that when you wash it out you’re very careful not to drop it. Not in the sink (it’d probably chip the porcelain off your sink), not on your foot. Other than that, it’s a relatively inexpensive workhorse, and it looks pretty on the stove.

A couple of weeks ago, Jim and I took a ride to the Penzeys Spices store in Norwalk. I’d been ordering spices online from Penzeys for a while, but never bothered to make the trip to a brick-and-mortar store. I’m so glad we went. It’s not a very big place, but the aroma is huge — you walk in and your senses are immediately stimulated by a wide variety of spicy/herbal fragrances. One of the things I bought was a small bag of jerk pork spices. According to the bag, it’s hand-mixed from paprika, allspice, ginger, red pepper, sugar, ground Grenadian nutmeg, black pepper, garlic, thyme, lemon grass, cinnamon, star anise, cloves and mace. It smells — well, it smells warm and inviting, and familiar and exotic at the same time. In the Caribbean, jerk pork would traditionally be made from a whole roast pig. I, um, didn’t go that route.

So, last night’s dinner consisted of a jerk pork roast and Caribbean rice. I served the pork with a jerk dipping sauce that was made by a co-worker of Jim’s with hot peppers from her vegetable garden. I picked up a bag of plantain chips in the Latino section of the grocery store and called it a theme dinner.

Caribbean Jerk Pork Roast

• 2-lb. boneless pork loin roast
• Jerk spices (I highly recommend using Penzeys if you’re not inclined to mix your own)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Pat roast dry with paper towels, and then rub generously with spices (I spread a little of the spice mixture on a sheet of wax paper and rolled the pork around in it until it was well-coated). Bake for one hour and 15 minutes, or until the pork registers 160 degrees on a meat thermometer. Slice and serve with or without jerk dipping sauce.

Caribbean Rice

• 2 teaspoons vegetable oil
• 3/4 cup shredded coconut (I suspect the idea is to use unsweetened — they don’t carry that at my supermarket, so I went with sweetened)
• 1/2  onion, minced
• 2 cups rice
• 4 cups chicken stock
• 1 firm ripe mango, peeled and cubed

Heat oil in large saucepan over medium heat. Add coconut, and cook, stirring, until coconut is lightly browned. Add onion and cook until translucent. Add rice, and stir to coat. Add stock, bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, or until stock is absorbed and rice is tender. Remove from heat, add mango, and serve.

NOTES: The jerk season is fairly spicy, so be forewarned. The dipping sauce we had was very hot as well (I can’t remember if she used Scotch bonnets or jalapenos, but in either case, we used this sparingly). The rice is absolutely delicious, but it needs some green. Given the other flavors, I would be inclined to throw in a handful of chopped cilantro. The mango adds a wonderful touch to the dish, and cuts the coconut nicely. I will look for unsweetened coconut for next time.

Thanksgiving dinner has come and gone. I’m a little frustrated at not having found the time to pre-blog the menu and some of the recipes, but things have been pretty hectic at work and at home. We did have a good dinner. Here’s what we ate:

Roast Turkey with Sausage Stuffing and Gravy
Cranberry Sauce
Mashed Potatoes
Green Been Casserole
Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Brussels Sprouts with Garlic and Pine Nuts
Pumpkin Cheesecake

The turkey was good. My stuffing doesn’t vary from year to year — it’s essentially a bag of Arnold’s herb stuffing, a stick of butter, chopped celery, chopped onion, and a pound of Italian sausage meat. The cranberry sauce recipe was pretty simple too: two bags of cranberries, two cups of sugars, two cups of water, the peel of one orange, and a cinnamon stick. The mashed potatoes were just plain ol’ mashed, the roasted sweet potatoes were chunks tossed with salt, pepper, and fresh thyme leaves. The green bean casserole was the standard Campbell’s mushroon soup/French’s onion rings deal, but I did use fresh green beans. And the brussels sprouts were cooked in a little water first, and then finished in a pan with olive oil, minced garlic, and a handful of pine nuts.

Dessert was a fabulous pumpkin cheesecake that Jim made.

I drank way too much coffee today but I’m relaxing now with an after-dinner cordial (Cuarenta Y Tres). Thanksgiving was good.

Okay, I admit it. Salad isn’t my favorite thing to do with pasta. In fact the phrase “pasta salad” immediately reminds me of those godawful concoctions of elbow macaroni, diced celery, and mayonnaise that we’re occasionally forced to endure at a potluck picnic. But this one is really good, I promise.

Ingredients:

• 12 oz. rotini (I used tricolor, but that is purely optional)
• 1 jar marinated artichoke hearts
• 1 jar sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil
• 1 jar pitted Kalamata olives
• 1 jar roasted red peppers
• Olive oil
• Balsamic vinegar

While the pasta is boiling, prep the jarred veggies. I should note here that I don’t use the entire jar of any of these things — add the ingredients in the proportions and amounts that suit your personal taste. I halve the olives, slice the sun-dried tomatoes, chop the artichoke hearts, and slice the peppers about 1/4 of an inch wide. Add the drained pasta to the rest of the ingredients, and add just a couple tablespoons of your best olive oil, followed by a splash of balsamic vinegar. It really doesn’t need any seasoning.

I served it for lunch today with a couple slices of fresh mozzarella, and it was really tasty. It reminds me of a hot pasta dish I used to make fairly often. I think I need to practice that one and post the recipe. In the meantime, this makes for a very nice lunch. A piece of crusty bread would go nicely with this, too. And even a slice or two of salami. It’s a bit like an antipasto, so anything in that same spirit would do well here.

Almost as soon as I returned from Las Vegas it was time to pack a suitcase again, this time to drive up to Danvers, MA for a three-day class in geodatabase administration. Yeah, I realize that only sounds interesting to about two other people, but that’s my life.

What a truly weird hotel experience I had. I had booked myself into the Sheraton Ferncroft, mainly because it was across the parking lot from the office park where I needed to go for the class. Since driving in that neck of the woods can be less than pleasant (oh people of Connecticut, think of metro Boston next time you’re tempted to complain about traffic), it was nice not to have to go anywhere. The Sheraton gets props for the things you really want in a hotel: the room was nice (and spotlessly clean), and the staff (what there was of it) was friendly and helpful.

On the other hand, located as it is in MA’s tech corridor, the Sheraton seems to be suffering as much from the economic turndown as everything else around here. How did this manifest itself? Well, the main hotel restaurant was mostly closed. It opened for breakfast in the morning, closed at 10:00 am, and that was it. Similarly, the Starbucks in the lobby (how nice, I thought, a Starbucks in the lobby!) opened in the morning, and closed its doors before noon. Coffee in the afternoon? Sorry, traveler, you’re screwed.

A sign outside the restaurant directed would-be diners to the lounge for lunch and dinner. So for the first two nights of my stay, I ate in the bar. On Sunday night, it was just me and the bartender, who was friendly but sensitive enough to leave me to my book (I always bring a book when I dine alone in a restaurant at night — because really, what else is there to do?). Surprisingly, the food was very good. I had pan-seared salmon, grilled asparagus, and fingerling potatoes. I washed that down with a Harpoon IPA, which was one of the select group of very good beers they had on tap.

Monday night was just a tad better. There was at least one other woman in the lounge (seemingly also traveling on business), and a couple of guys sitting at the bar for their dinner. I had a very good pasta dish with grilled chicken, roasted red peppers, and artichoke hearts in a white wine sauce, a glass of Chardonnay, and molten chocolate cake for dessert.

On my last night there, I drove down to Brookline (there’s that traffic again) and dined at Legal Sea Foods in Chestnut Hills with Bryan and Caitlin. The food was delicious and the company was good. It was nice not having to eat with my face in a book.

Finally, I got to drive home after class on Wednesday night. Between the traffic and the rain, it took me three and a half hours. When I got home, Jim made me a meatball sandwich and served that with a glass of red wine. Quite possibly the best meal of the whole trip.

I coined a word today, inspired by the weather. We’re creeping toward the end of October — somehow I feel like I’ve missed some of it (I blame you, Vegas). Today’s skies have been darkly overcast, and it’s been blustery and cold. It makes me feel nesty… i.e. like nesting. You know… curling up on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, comforting things to eat and drink, the company of my loved one and my cats. Nesty.

Frequently on Fridays we have what we call a nosh for dinner. By the end of the week, everyone wants a break, and what we most like to do on a Friday evening — especially a chill one like this — is enjoy a nibble of this and that, usually washed down with an alcoholic beverage. Sometimes the noshes are store-bought, sometimes I make them. They’re always simple.

Tonight’s nosh: country pate on a crusty baguette, accompanied by a (homemade) spinach ranch dip (yogurt, chopped spinach, an envelope of ranch dressing) accompanied by baby carrots, baby zucchini, and pita chips. I’m planning on starting with a bourbon and water, accompanied by a little pre-dinner snack — the best home-style maple kettle corn I’ve ever had.

Oh, and there’s two choices of Ben & Jerry’s for dessert. Yay Friday.