I made Larry roasted chicken for our Valentine’s Day dinner tonight. I skipped the Zuni bread salad and made a baked goat cheese salad and butternut squash orzo instead.
– I couldn’t find any chickens smaller than 4.5 pounds at Trader Joe’s. I was worried that the Zuni method wouldn’t work as well with a chicken this large, but I just used the upper time limits in the recipe and it turned out beautiful as always. I used cast iron this time, and I’ll save the drippings in case I want to make a bread salad later this week.
– Amy suggested this salad last month when I was visiting her in Austin. She’s been making it for years, using a recipe clipped from the paper. We liked the salad. It’s really elegant and a nice change from a plain green salad. We each had some crusty french bread with it, and spread the warm goat cheese on it.
– We had a similar butternut squash orzo at ZAP’s Good Eats and Zin event this year. The only difference was the ZAP version had crispy bits of fried sage and serrano ham in it. This was a nice addition, and I’m going to modify this dish the next time I make it. The version we had tonight was still very good.
– The cake was easy to make, and is really pretty and oh so delicious. Amy gave me the recipe, cut from a newspaper. The original recipe calls for Amaretto, but I followed Amy’s lead and used Grand Marnier. The only problem I had was that my ganache became a bit grainy as it cooled. McGee says that “With chocolates high in cocoa solids, the cocoa particles can eventually absorb so much moisture that they swell and stick to each other. The water-deprived emulsion then fails, allowing the fat globules and droplets to coalesce, and the fat to separate from the swollen particles. This is why high-chocolate ganaches are often unstable and coarsen with time.”

• Zuni Roast Chicken (The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, p. 342)
• Baked Goat Cheese Salad (The Cheese Lover’s Cookbook & Guide, Paula Lambert, p. 126)
• Butternut Squash and Sage Orzo (Bon Apétit, March 1998)
• Chocolate-Amaretto Heart

Wine: Sanford 2001 Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir (Santa Rita Hills, California). Yum. Sanford makes wonderful Pinots. Larry and I picked this up last summer at the winery, on our way back from a trip to the winery. Really intense and chewy. It could have easily sat in the cellar for another year or more because of the firm tannins.