Culinary Adventures with Camilla

Roasted Chicken with Fresh Herbs inspired by Laurey Masterton's  The Fresh Honey Cookbook: 84 Recipes from a Beekeeper's Kitchen Ingredients 2 t fresh ginger, minced 1/4 t fresh ground Indian long pepper 1 T sea salt 1 sprig of rosemary, de-stemmed and chopped 1/4 t dried sage, crushed 3 sprigs of thyme, de-stemmed and chopped pinch of ground sumac 1/4 t dried, ground Thai dragon pepper 1 chicken, cut into pieces 2 T champagne vinegar 2 T local pine honey Procedure In a bowl, combine the first eight ingredients and rub both sides of the chicken with equal amounts of the mixture. Drizzle each side with 1 T champagne vinegar. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Cover your baking dish with foil and roast for an hour. Turn up the heat to 450 degrees. Drizzle with honey and return to the oven, uncovered, for 10 minutes. The chicken should be crisped and golden. Serve hot.

This round Simona, at Briciole , selected Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens by Andrew Beahrs   for our February-March  Cook the Books   project. I thoroughly enjoyed this book which was rooted in the past - with the food history - and the present - with the writer's own kitchen trials. If you like reading about food, give this tome a try. I really had no clue that Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens was such a champion of American foods; while others were lauding the sophistication of European cuisines, he longed for some down-home cookin'. Here is Twain’s “little bill of fare,” in full, from A Tramp Abroad, 1880. About eighty different American foods that he wanted as soon as he repatriated... Radishes. Baked apples with cream. Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. American coffee, with real cream. American butter. Porter-house steak. Fried chicken, Southern style. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken...