CSA Chicken Supper

Take a Green Fence Farm Chicken, a couple of our eggs, and, if you are lucky enough to be one of our CSA members, your Swiss chard, beets, herbs, and shallot scape – and you too can have the delicious dinner pictured above (OK, I am no Phil Karsting in my food photography abilities – and you’ll have to make the Olive bread on your own).

The nice thing about this dinner, which consists of chicken stuffed under the skin, garlic greens done in the Jaleo way (see the recipe in an earlier post that Lynn submitted), and beets in sour cream and mustard sauce (which consists of sour cream and some Dijon like mustard – not exactly a Culinary Institute of America level endeavor) is that it can all be done ahead of time – the chicken can be prepared all the way through stuffing, then refrigerated until you are ready to cook; the beets can be cooked and dressed, then refrigerated, anytime; and the spinach can be cooked then just left on the stove until you warm it before dinner. Perfect dinner party fare: Pop the chickens in when your guests arrive (or are supposed to) then 90 minutes later, you have dinner all ready to go, 90 minutes you can sit be out of the kitchen with your guests making sure you get your share of the decent wine they brought or, depending on the quality of your friends, making sure they don’t steal stuff.

To make the chicken you need:
· One 3-4 lb GREEN FENCE FARM chicken (I do not guarantee the results unless you use our chickens. With other, inferior chicken, it could well taste like dried up old chicken McNuggets)
· One finely chopped red onion
· Olive oil to coat your sauté pan
· Two or three largish Swiss Chard leaves, green part removed from stem and used in something else (I just added it to the spinach in the Jaleo Spinach recipe to turn it into a Jaleo Greens recipe), dice the stems.
· 4 cloves of garlic – or garlic and minced shallot scape (flower, for those of you in our CSA lucky enough to be getting one of these this week).
· Whatever fresh herbs you have on hand – though I am partial to oregano and basil (and again, Green Fence Farm CSA members will be receiving a little of each). If you don’t have fresh herbs, just use some dried oregano.
· 1 GREEN FENCE FARM egg and one GREEN FENCE FARM egg yolk.
· 12 oz. cream cheese or cream cheese like goat cheese.
· ½ cup dry cheese, grate (like Parmesan or Asiago)

The steps to making the chicken:

At least two hours before cooking (but actually, you could do this part even 24 hours in advance):

1. Sauté onions in heated olive oil until translucent (about 5 minutes). Add chopped chard stem, garlic, and shallot scape. Continue sautéing over medium high heat, stirring often, until the the stem is soft but not too damp, another five minutes. Turn down the heat, add the fresh herbs and season, sautéing just until the herbs are wilted.
2. In your cuisnart, mix the cream cheese, egg and egg yolk, and dried cheese. Add the sauté mix and pulse 4-5 times – enough to mix and further dice the sauted veggies but not enough to make a bizarrely colored paste. You want to continue to see the dots of color the chard stem adds. Refrigerate for a minimum of one hour.
3. Anytime after the hour is up, prep the chicken. Cut out its backbone and reserve with the neck for stock (and yes, I do have 3000 back and neck bone baggies in my freezer). Turn the chicken on what used to be its back (breast up) and press down with your hand on the breastbone between the wings to break the bone. Loosen the skin by slipping your hand between the skin and breast – be careful not to tear it.
4. Put the refrigerated cream cheese mix in a pastry tube with the biggest tip you can find (or else it will get jammed up with Swiss chard bits and, when you impatiently keep trying to squeeze the tube anyway, even though you know it is jammed, it will blow up in a royal cream cheese, chard disaster. Don’t ask me how I know).Place the point under the skin and pipe the mixture in. You can work it around to go evenly over the breast and into the thighs, even a bit of the leg. Place in a baking or roasting pan skin side up (and though I didn’t make it this way when I was testing this, you could brush butter on the breast to give you an even more golden finished product – I’ll probably do that next time). At this point you can cover the chicken and refrigerate until you are ready to pop it in the oven, Doris Day like, and sashay into your guests who will marvel at how calm you are.
2 hours before dinner:
1. Preheat the oven to 375. Put the chicken in, uncovered, from 75-95 minutes depending on the size. Let sit at least five minutes and cut into quarters for four servings.

To make the beets, boil until fork tender (15-30 minutes depending on size) or roast, and peel. Chop into bite sized pieces if they didn’t already come that way. Mix sour cream or crème fraiche with a teaspoon or two of grainy French mustard and mix that with the beets.

To make the Jaleo greens, follow the Jaleo recipe posted last month, but add your chard and beet greens to the spinach (you may have to remove the beet greens from the stems if the stems are large enough to look chewy).