Is it spring yet?

It's spring, right? We did have 30 bags of manure delivered today and as I type Christopher is outside manning the grill.

Of course we live in New England so it's also raining and chilly and foggy.  But at least it's not snowing.  Tomorrow promises some breaks in the clouds and so my plan is to spread some of that manure and plant grass seed in our new front garden.  At the moment it's just 12 yards of our friend Froggy Frazier's topsoil but soon it will be verdant.  And maybe, if I'm feeling brave, I'll even put in some lettuces

For the first time since winter began we did our evening walkabout.  A walkabout is when we mix the signature cocktail of the day (today, Negronis), and then we walk all around the cottage from Old County Road to the back 40, getting a sense of what's thriving, what's dying, what needs to be moved where, how we should next augment our screen-of-shrubbery that shields us from Old County (currently we have 10 winterberry bushes on order from Bayberry).  Today we examined the stump of a pine tree that was felled in the last storm.  And we talked about what vegetables should go where in this year's kitchen garden.  All the lettuces are moving, as are the tomatoes, as are the dahlias.  And we're putting in an asparagus bed.

Even though it's Good Friday, we couldn't resist putting a chicken on the rotisserie.  When we got the cottage years ago my mother bought us a grill--a gigantic Weber--and insisted that we get a rotisserie attachment, which seems foofy and useless.  Long story short, we use it all the time.  Rotisserie chicken, rotisserie pork loin.  All amazing.  The rotisserie porchetta was a particular success last summer.

For the chicken we dry brine it in the ice box--we like the free range chickens we get from Drew Locke at Hillside Farms (though we don't have one today).  Historic Truro chicken farm.  Destruction by lightening in the 50s.  Revived by Drew in recent years.  It's a great story and he's a nice guy (read the Edible Cape Cod story here).

Oops, got off track.  Dry brine the bird by rubbing half a cup of kosher salt all over, inside and out.  Let it sit for as long as you can up to overnight.  Rinse and dry well.  Truss (you can put aromatics inside the cavity--quartered onions, herbs, lemon halves, etc.) and put on the rotisserie or in an oven preheated to 425 degrees.  Inside this causes alot of smoke but it's a dream on the grill.  Roast to an internal temperature of 160 degrees and let it rest of 15m.  Delicious.

We had carrots and asparagus so we grilled them too and tossed in the butter-spice rub that Martha Rose Shulman stole from Susan Goin in this recipe (similar flavors to Ludo Lefebre's roasted carrot salad--we made that a couple of times last year--to die for.  Here's the recipe).  Thyme, cumin, coriander, tumeric pounded in sweet butter and mixed with grilled vegetables.  We didn't have any mint but we did have some garden parsley in the the freezer and it was still delicious.  A very satisfying meal with a game of dominos, some mezcal from our recent trip to the Yucatan and some Truro Chequesset Chocolates for dessert.  All in all--a good spring day.

Bake bread--just do it!

It's almost spring--it must be, my seeds have arrived.  But it's still frigid in the mornings and that just makes me want to bake bread, which warms up the kitchen and fills the house with amazing smells and makes getting up worthwhile.   My father-in-law (now in all 50 states!) turned me on to bread-baking and now I can't seem to stop.  While I'm longing for the plants in the garden to poke their way through the warming ground, I'm still savoring the warmth of a morning baking bread and the sound of the crackle as the loaves cool. Best sound in the world

Peter Bellonci's bread recipe