The winter sun is descending slowly and the warm light of afternoon is bathing our Sunday dinner in golden hues, the chicken in the roasting pan a heavenly glow. This is how life ought to be.  The unfathomable pleasure of a slow Sunday afternoon, tucked in and tucked away from the intrusion of life, and dinner cooking gently, perfuming the kitchen with home cooked goodness. Slow days and slow food.  The perfectly roasted chicken with its crispy skin now glistening, seasoned with fresh thyme and rosemary, both aromatic and glorious. The bird sits atop a receptacle of chopped celery, onions, and carrots made soft like a pillow of roasted goodness, flavoring the pan juices trickling from the chicken during it’s two hour nap in my oven. Can you smell the poultry love?

I once worked with an aspiring young chef, quite full of himself as they all are, who trying to impress me with his culinary prowess asked, “Are you sautéing the mirepoix to get carmelization on it?” My informed response was very simple, “well, I’m just frying some celery, carrots, and onions to make them taste good actually”.  Shot down over Paris he was.  Get over your pretentious self already young Escoffier. Through the years I have learned there is nothing as delicious as a perfectly roasted chicken on a Sunday afternoon, especially when the “mirepoix”, I mean the celery, carrots, and onions form a marriage with the chicken juices and the little bits you scrape off the bottom of the roasting pan to make a simple gravy, as my mother did. Simple but effective is my culinary mantra. Pretention be damned.  Home cooked goodness, now there’s the true essence, the roots, and the origins of culinary greatness.  Simple food prepared with the best and freshest ingredients available, and attractively presented. It’s my culinary heart and soul. Nothing “foofy” or overdone.

Coming up through the kitchen ranks in the 1970’s, I was often one of the only females, and I fought for my place at the stove.  My work used to be considered blue collar until the proliferation of celebrity chefs. The number of television reality shows based on food is astounding, and the stakes are high in the food entertainment sector.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the rise of a style of pretentious cooking that thumbs it’s nose at the more informal bistro style approach to good food.  Throughout culinary history, most of the great chefs began at their mothers and grandmothers’ sides, learning classic and simple technique, and preparing hearty fare that soothes the soul and fills the belly. So many of the current TV celebrity chefs are so full of themselves and their architecturally defiant food creations. It humors me.

Several recent food encounters strengthen my resolve to continue promoting what I call real food using good old-fashioned techniques and simple execution, producing a magnificently flavored result.  Although I consider myself somewhat social media savvy, I never engage in fighting or snarky discourse.  I recently encountered an online chef “wannabe” sprouting off about his new souvide machine.  Souvide is a cooking technique where you place food in airtight plastic bags then place the bags in a warm water bath or temperature controlled steam.  Foods such as chicken, fish, steaks, pretty much anything.  The intent is to cook the item evenly, insuring it retains its moisture and juiciness.  Fair enough.  As I interacted with the online wannabe professional chef I jokingly mentioned, “ah souvide, it’s boil in a bag like Uncle Ben’s rice”. Apparently I hit a culinary nerve.  I thought my comment was somewhat humorous.  Come on now, you place a steak in a sealed bag and drop it in a warm bath – I don’t care who you think you are, it’s boil in a bag, plain and simple!  This guy tore into me like I had committed culinary genocide or something. He was hot under the collar and accused me of being a simpleton!  “Hold on there cowboy, back off.  It was just a little joke, a little culinary humor.”  Very little apparently.  Just another example of the propensity toward “more is better” when “simple but effective” would suffice.  Another food item and culinary technique that makes me smile with bemusement is “culinary foam”.  It has recently become all the rage, and part of a movement call molecular gastronomy.  Sorry, but I want my dinner not a science project.  We have probably all ingested culinary “foam” in the form of whipped cream out of a can, or the head on a beer, or perhaps meringue on the top of your pie. But that’s as far as I go.

The winter sun has dropped below the horizon, the shadows darkening the afterglow of a glorious sunset.  My simply prepared roast chicken is sitting on my plate next to the oven-roasted potatoes and mashed rutabagas.  Maybe someday I’ll cook the chicken in a “boil in the bag” souvide bath of warm water for hours to ensure its juiciness. This Sunday’s chicken will be showered instead with the scrumptious pan gravy made from the roasted chicken juices, and scraped up bits from the bottom of my roasting pan.  I could always top it with chicken foam and call it a day.  Maybe. Someday.  But today its a little bit of home cooked goodness, the old fashioned way.