Sunday Cooking Fest

Yesterday was Vietnamese, today was more French/Mediterranean. We started with roasted tomatoes filled with tapenade and lemon-verbena ricotta cheese (recipe to follow) as an app, then for dinner had roasted chicken, fresh peas with pearl onions and lettuce, and roasted potatoes. We'll be having an apple galette for dessert if we are ever hungry again... the galette is sitting in the kitchen waiting to be eaten.

This was a great meal. Some notes:

1. For the chicken I made a paste of garlic, parsley, cumin, sweet paprika, pimenton, salt and black pepper. I rubbed this in the cavity and under the breast skin. I stuffed the chicken with onions and put more onion in the pan. To make a sauce I deglazed the pan with white wine, strained the sauce into a clean saucepan and thickened with potato starch. The pan drippings didn't need to be defatted as I had already removed a lot of the larger fat deposits for the potatoes.
2. We roasted the potatoes in the body fat from the chicken, which I removed from the bird before cooking and rendered down. Andrea seasoned the diced potatoes (1/2" dice) with salt, pepper, sweet paprika, and cumin.
3. The pea recipe is from JPT, and it's great.