I am one of these people who are highly susceptible to the marketing ploy that are flavored condiments. To give you an example: right now in my fridge there are seven different kinds of mustard, each flavored with different spices (there’s horseradish mustard, honey mustard, tarragon mustard, and so on). If you look further you’ll see a bunch of oils (rosemary oil, chili oil, garlic oil) and right next to the oils, there are the vinegars (raspberry vinegar, apple vinegar, pomegranate vinegar…). You get the picture. Put anything flavored and nicely packaged in front of me and I’ll compulsively buy it. But, in the meantime, I have a vague feeling that I am being scammed. The husband just raises his eyebrows when he sees me putting yet another olive oil or vinegar in the shopping cart while explaining frantically why I really, really need to buy them. (Sometimes I sneak them in when he isn’t looking and make an innocent face at the cash register when the cashier rings it up). I think he thinks I’m an addict… a flavored condiment shopaholic. He’s right. So, in order to appease my addiction without feeling like a gullible advertising monkey, I decided to make my own herb-flavored olive oil. And let me tell you, I was shocked, shocked by the outcome. It was as easy as can be.
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It’s a dreary winter here in Düsseldorf, with plenty of rain and snow. Also, it’s very, very cold, which always puts me in a nasty mood. To the surprise of everyone I know, I intensely dislike being cold. Throughout my life, whenever I complained about the cold weather, someone was bound to say: But you’re from Poland, aren’t you used to it? The answer is: No, I’m not! Being from Poland does not equip you with a furry skin or any supernatural resistance to low temperatures. Just because we have unforgiving winters does not mean that people enjoy them. What they do enjoy, is warming themselves up with vodka and eating plenty of hearty soups. I like soups. They’re my secret weapon against below zero temperatures and overall misery they induce in me. Also, soups are very forgiving dishes, you can throw anything in and they’re almost always guaranteed to taste good. And they taste even better the next day when the flavors had some time to mix and marry. Yes… soups are the best thing about suffering through winters.
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I vividly remember my first attempt at roasting a chicken. I was thirteen and my mom left me with detailed chicken operating instructions. I followed them to the best of my capacity, which was scarce, since back then I didn’t know anything about anything (something which, sadly, continued well into my twenties). Anyway, it seemed to me that the chicken was sticking out of the roasting form unnecessarily much… so I took care of it. The look my mother gave me, when she saw the final product of my culinary zeal – the product being a chicken splashed out like a frog in water after I gave it my best push to make sure it would be nice and flat – the look she gave me, indicated that she firmly believed, at that moment, that I was nineteen shades of crazy and counting. It took me about fifteen years before I attempted to roast a chicken again, but this time with dramatically different results… The below recipe is possibly the juiciest, tastiest, most mouth-watering and world changing roasted chicken recipe in existance. It is, in fact, the über-chicken…
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