Meyer Lemon Gastrique Brightens Up Roast Chicken

A Meyer Lemon Gastrique Sauce Jazzes Up Weekday Roast Chicken.

I've been doing a little experimentation lately, with exotic fruits and with gastrique sauces. When the world is cold and gray, there's nothing like playing around with unexpected tastes in the kitchen, waking up your mouth with some unusual flavors, while getting your heart racing that dinner might be a disaster or something new and thrilling.

Melting brown sugar into caramel is the start of this gastrique sauce.

Until the latest issue of Bon Appetit featured a blood orange gastrique, I'd only seen gastrique sauces on very fancy restaurant menus and I had no idea that it was actually a fairly easy sauce to make. Gastriques are sweet and sour sauces made from caramel (from various sugars or honeys) and vinegar and fruit juice. I was worried that it would make a sticky and hard to clean mess of my saucepan, but the sauce comes together easily and neatly. Now that I'm armed with the technique, I've been having a field day with gastriques.

Meyer Lemons Brightening Up my Kitchen.

Because I'm tired of being disappointed by tasteless melons and mealy blueberries, I've also been trying out unfamiliar exotic fruits like Ugli fruit, Meyer lemons, and star fruit. Why settle for a bland strawberry when you can stimulate your tastebuds with something completely new? These exotic fruits are fun to combine with a gastrique sauce to put something really exciting on the table.

The other night, I used Meyer Lemons  in a gastrique for roast chicken. I had never cooked with Meyer Lemons before, and I wanted an excuse to taste and handle these sweet lemons without committing to a full dessert with an unfamiliar ingredient. My roast chicken was really something special.

Roast Chicken with Meyer Lemon Gastrique
Ingredients:
One Whole Chicken
1 Tablespoon of Butter
Penzey's Old World Seasoning
For the gastrique:
4 tablespoons of brown sugar
juice of 2 Meyer lemons
4 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar

1. Roast the chicken according to your favorite recipe 
2. During the last 20 minutes of cooking, pour the brown sugar into a heavy bottom medium saucepan. Heat on medium flame until the sugar melts, about 5 minutes.
3. As soon as the sugar has melted into a caramel, reduce the flame to low, and add the vinegar, stirring vigorously until blended. There will be lots of frothing and hissing, stir until you have a brown, viscous, substance.
4. Now add the Meyer Lemon juice, stirring again until all blended. Heat on low, stirring frequently, for 2-3 minutes to reduce the sauce.
5. Combine the gastrique with the chicken pan juices, or just add a tablespoon of butter to finish it off and serve on top of the chicken.

Fresh Salsa Inspired by Stress

For the last week or so, we've been busy saying goodbye to friends and wrapping up our lives in Ohio. Last night we had some friends over for a goodbye barbecue, a great excuse to get them to help empty our shelves. I've been on a mission for the past two weeks, pressuring virtual strangers to accept jars of exotic marinades or mint flavored hot fudge, all in the spirit of purging.

When our friends arrived for the barbecue, I was staring at a large bowl filled with our CSA produce for the week, made more ecclectic by the crippling heat wave: one cucumber, a dozen heirloom tomatoes, a tiny melon, one garlic head, and a couple of onions. I wasn't sure what to do with it all, emphasis on all, until I realized that I was staring at the ingredients for a mean bowl of fresh salsa.

A few minutes of vigorous, stress-reducing chopping later, and we were all happily digging into some fresh and vibrant tomato and melon salsa. I didn't reach for a recipe book - that would have meant confronting another room I needed to think about packing up. I went by instinct, tossing in some white vinegar, some cayenne pepper, a little salt, and some fresh parsley, and tasting along the way.

Sometimes inspiration strikes at the most unexpected moments. If I hadn't been completely overwhelmed, staring at the piles of stuff I've accumulated in a year's life, I might never have thought to combine all that fresh produce together, in the perfect summer appetizer.

Homemade Melon Salsa
3 Beautifully Ripe Tomatoes
1 large cucumber
1 vidalia onion
1/2 cup of parsley (or cilantro if no one objects!)
1/4 cup of white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon of cayenne pepper (or less if you don't like it hot)
1 teaspoon of Kosher salt

1. Chop all vegetables.
2. Toss veggies together.
3. Season with vinegar, salt, and pepper.
4. Sprinkle parsley on top. Taste and season again if needed. If you have time to refrigerate it for an hour, the juices will meld. But you will need some serious restraint to hold off eating all this freshness until then!