Charred Foods

So, I've been following this new blog called Confessions of a Pioneer Woman and it is the coolest thing. It's about this woman who was a hard-core city girl from LA who married a guy (she calls him "Marlboro Man") and moved to a big honking ranch somewhere in the middle of nowhere. She has four kids, a fabulous camera and HER OWN TRACTOR. I think I have the equivalent of a man crush. (What exactly IS the equivalent of a man crush? In fact, what IS a man crush? Oh, Google to the rescue: man crush.)

Anyway, in addition to her really amazing blog, she also has, are you ready for this? A COOKING blog. Well, I'm a pretty good cook (um, at least once a month or so), so I decided to take a page from her book blog and try to document my effortless cooking style --my EASE in the kitchen, as it were.

I had intended to document all this ease on Saturday night when I grilled chicken but unfortunately, I had already had about two glasses of wine BEFORE I PUT IT ON THE grill so it turned out like, um, well, THIS:

Those black parts certainly document my style and grace with poultry, don't you think?

The accompanying dish was roasted asparagus. I had bought a huge bunch of it when my parents were in town. This was now looking a tad tired, so I chopped the ends off and submerged it in water --hoping that maybe it would respond like wilted flowers.



It didn't show noticeable signs of perking up.

Bummer.

I put it in a pan with olive oil and kosher salt and put it in the oven at 450 for about 20 minutes. Maybe a little longer --depending on how fast I drank that last glass of wine.

(Have you ever noticed how people who cook take great pains to detail the type of salt they use? I took the obligatory picture of mine --here:
but honestly, I'm just as likely to use the cylinder with the girl and the umbrella on the label. I'm only using this Kosher salt because I bought a huge number of boxes of it once when I was baking a whole salmon in salt and I had forgotten about them until my mom came down and cleaned out my pantry while I was confined to bed after my foot surgery. (She's sneaky like that.) I will say that it feels good to pinch some coarse salt and throw it around like Emeril.)

(Wow! THAT, my friends is what I call a DIGRESSION. I may not be a great cook but DUDE, I can digress like no one else. I even use PICTURES!)

So, anyway, here's a picture of the chicken on the grill when I first noticed that it was looking a bit well done.

In the ensuing panic, I managed to somehow get the chicken marinade all over the window to the door that leads out to the deck where the grill is. I thought this was so funny that I took a picture of it.

Is it just me or does it look like there's a noose in that picture? It would figure that we wouldn't have a FACE in OUR window. Just some veiled threat if I don't get the freaking chicken off the grill and the marinade off the window...

Did I mention that I'd had wine?

Did I mention that in the middle of all of this, my husband called us all outside to take a look at General Frog--who is this huge frog who lives beneath our hot tub heater?

Did I mention that I honestly did manage to document a soberly cooked, successful meal? It's just that it wasn't until our regular Sunday steak dinner, and, well, it wasn't cooked by me.

More about that tomorrow.