On Facebook I claimed Heat Wave + First Week of School = Total Exhaustion; perhaps that's the correct equation and it was the exhaustion that kept me from cooking, but I think the temperature and lack of time contributed directly as well. I'd have nothing to post about if it weren't that I'd decided to give my dad lots of grilled chicken for his birthday because he'd liked it so much earlier in the summer. I regretted that decision the night before his birthday when I was outside grilling at midnight in 82-degree humidity. (I know 82 degrees doesn't sound that bad, but it is when it's been in the 90s all day and night doesn't bring coolness.)
I wasn't expecting it to take so long; it was 6:30 when I headed to the grocery store. I had to go to a second store when the first didn't have whole legs, coming home in between to refrigerate other purchases because the car was so insanely hot. I'd skipped trimming the extra skin and fat last time, but as that was a possible cause of the flare-ups that had burned the first batch, I took the time to do it. Then it had to brine (I made the Mediterranean paste while it was brining). But I'd still have been finished at a somewhat reasonable hour if the coals had stopped flaming at some point. The cookbook said to leave them in the chimney until the flames subsided, so I waited, and waited, and waited. Now I'm thinking the flames were more visible because it was dark and in daylight I'd have considered them gone long before the point when I gave up. By the time I dumped the coals out, they were less than half the volume I'd started with.
Even after all that trimming, flames still leapt and chicken still burned, so I had to peel off the worst of the burnt parts just as George had. I noticed too late that I was supposed to rinse the chicken after brining. Did George do that? Maybe the sugar in the brine was part of the reason we both had such problems with burning.
Despite the burning, the chicken was a success. It had plenty of time to re-brown and the lemon/parsley/garlic/etc. smelled and tasted wonderful. My garage still smelled good the next day (I'd grilled right outside the open garage door so that I had enough light to see what I was doing).
I haven't done much else in the way of cooking this week. I did steam an enormous artichoke to eat with lemon-butter for dinner last night (it was a gorgeous day but my exhaustion hadn't gone yet, so I wasn't up to much). My mom admired its beauty and freshness and bought it for me at Nature's Bin.
Today is delightfully cool and I'm thinking about baking. I wanted to make vanilla bean pound cake but one of the three ways vanilla beans are involved in the cake is vanilla sugar which needs to sit for a few days. You can see my vanilla-sugar-in-process (pieces of vanilla bean in sugar) next to my vanilla-extract-in-process (vanilla beans halved lengthwise in vodka) that I started a couple of weeks ago. (The process is taking place in a dark cupboard; they're just out for the photo.)
The Kahns are coming to Dorothy's for a Labor Day barbecue on Monday, and Barbara asked if I could bring her some of my sourdough starter so she can make English muffins, so I fed my neglected starter today and am thinking of experimenting with whole grain flour in my sourdough bread. But it's almost five-o'-clock and I'm very tempted to collapse in front of my last day of Netflix Watch Instantly, so it's probable no baking will actually happen.
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