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Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

Barbecued Ribs or Santorini Grilled Chicken?

May 29, 2016 by Mary 12 Comments

BBQ ribs on a platter ready to serve.

BBQ ribs – perfect for this holiday weekend. Those are fiddlehead ferns garnishing the platter – they’re in season now!

If you’re thinking of ribs for today or tomorrow, I’ve got you covered with my great rib recipe here. People rave about this recipe and it’s so simple and easy. Or if pork is not your thing, how about a Santorini Grilled Chicken recipe that’s sure to please everyone as it’s stuffed with tomatoes, cheese and onions and oregano. And I’ve added on for you some salads too – one tomato and two potato. So fire up the grill, whip up the salads and enjoy this lovely long weekend with your family – and don’t forget to thank our fallen heroes for their service to our country, as that is what Memorial Day is all about. WWII cavalry hat with flowers and pie in the background.

Here’s a shot of my Dad’s cavalry hat from WWII. We proudly display it on the wall as a piece of art. (That pie in the back gives a hint of one of our products coming up in our summer box!)

These recipes are all reprise recipes so I’ll just show you the pictures, which all link back to the original post.

We are all out of sorts today. My mother-in-law is passing. She is 96 years old, almost 97, in August. She lived a good long life. I’ve dealt with a lot of passing of people close to me. My mom passed in 1995, my dad in ’98 (of a broken heart from losing my mom. He always thought he would go first.), and then we lost a brother to MS in 2000. All of these were sudden events and a surprise. This, with Steve’s mom is maddening. His sister is in Baltimore with her and has called in hospice. We are both on pins and needles.

Today I spent an hour tearing through the house looking for my reading glasses and then I went to wash my hands in the bathroom and looked up in the mirror – there they were on my chest – hanging from my necklace. Hope this isn’t a sign of things to come! Once I left my car keys at a greeting card store and then they closed and I couldn’t drive home! I was so engrossed in reading funny cards and laughing so hard, I got comfortable, sat on the carpeted floor and left my keys there too. That was a tough one to retrace. Then there was the time I left my keys in the freezer. Don’t ask.

Love your family more. Our time here is precious. Cook with abandon and always serve with LOVE!

Greek Roasted Chicken

Santorini Grilled Chicken

Greek Salad, salad with feta cheese tomatoes cucumbers greek

Tomato, cucumber and feta Greek salad

Best potato salad with fennel, parmigiano cheese, cippolini onions and piccholine olives.

Best potato salad with fennel, parmigiano cheese, cippolini onions and piccholine olives.

Midwest potato salad in a white Le Crueset bowl garnished with parsley.

Or here’s a great mayonnaise-based potato salad – my Midwest Potato Salad – that was featured in the Tanglewood Cookbook!

Filed Under: Dinner, Meat, Poultry, Salads, Sides Tagged With: Greek roasted chicken, Greek salad, Memorial day recipes, potato salad, ribs

Going to Greece

September 23, 2012 by Mary Frances 12 Comments

Greek sweatshirt artWith autumn officially here, even though I love the season, here’s a way to hang on to summer for just a little bit longer.

I think it’s fun to plan a dinner around a specific theme. Not like the crazy tablescape lady on Food Network. I just learned that she is our Governor’s live-in partner! Yikes! She’s probably a nice woman but really, she’s a bit much.

We had some new friends over for dinner last Saturday. Well not really new. Anne and I did business with one another some 20 years ago! She had a creative placement agency. In those days, my company did a lot of package design for a fragrance company called Tsumara. We often needed textile designers to design the background patterns on these packages. Anne supplied me great ones on a freelance basis.

I ran into her recently at a New York Times /AMEX Business Summit. I gave her a LOVE card and she checked out the blog and recognized Ethel and Ethel’s garlic from an earlier post! We discovered our weekend houses are very close to one another. Isn’t that great?

So for our dinner together, I wanted to take them to Greece. We made a grilled Greek chicken recipe that my husband and I used to make all the time after our visits to Santorini. You take a whole chicken and stuff under the skin: slices of tomatoes, covered with dried oregano, sliced onions and thin slices of feta cheese. Grill it with a lemon-based sauce and voila, you’re in Greece. They do this all over Santorini on the street outside of small restaurants and everything is so fresh and good. Serve it with a simple Greek tomato and cucumber salad and you are set. Try it – it’s delicious!!

And grab a little bit of summer one last time.

SANTORINI GRILLED CHICKEN
– serves 4

1 whole chicken – about 3.75 lbs
1 large tomato – sliced 1/8” thick
Dried oregano
Feta cheese, sliced 1/8” thick
1 small onion – sliced 1/8” thick
salt
pepper
1/2 lemon
Lemon/garlic basting sauce

Wash and thoroughly dry the chicken. Trim off any excess fat. Refresh it with a half of a lemon, squeezing the juice out all over, inside and out. Pat the chicken dry again. Cut the tomato in 4 or 5 slices. Sprinkle each slice liberally with dried Greek oregano. Carefully, use your fingers to separate the skin from the meat on both sides of the breastbone and on both sides of the backbone. Into each quarter slide one tomato slice, oregano side down, one onion slice and one good slice of feta. If you need to cut a tomato slice or onion slice in half, to fit it all in, do so. If you accidentally tear the skin, use a small skewer to sew up the tear. Salt and pepper the chicken all over to your liking.

Grill the chicken at about 350 degrees, basting with the sauce 3-4 times throughout the cooking time. It should take about 45 minutes.

You could also do this in your oven. Preheat the oven to 550 degrees. Place the chicken in for 10 minutes, then lower the heat to 350 and roast for 45 – 50 minutes, basting three times with the lemon garlic sauce during this time, every 15 minutes. Check to see if it’s done with an instant read thermometer. It should register at 155 degrees.

LEMON/GARLIC BASTING SAUCE
1.5 tbs. unsalted butter
2 tbs olive oil
4 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tbs. finely minced onion
6 tbs. fresh lemon juice
1 tbs. Dijon mustard
1 tsp salt
1 tsp. light brown sugar
1 tbs. Worcestershire sauce
20 grinds of black pepper
¾ tsp. Sriracha sauce
3 tbs. water

In a small saucepan, melt the butter in olive oil over low heat. Add garlic and onion, cover and sweat for 15 – 20 minutes. Check often, stir and do not let it brown, but you want it to be meltingly soft. Add the rest of the ingredients, except for the water, stirring well. Raise heat to medium-high and whisk in water. Stir until mixture boils and then remove from heat. This can be made a couple of hours before you’re going to use it. Keep it at room temperature.
Greek salad overhead

GREEK SALAD
– serves 4

2 – 3 large tomatoes, preferably heirloom, cut in large chunks
½ of a large red onion, cut in ½” chunks
1.5 hothouse cucumbers, peeled, halved lengthwise & cut in 1/2” chunks
1/2 cup Kalamata black olives, pitted, cut in half
Greek feta cheese, crumbled in large pieces
Extra virgin olive oil
Red wine vinegar
Salt
Fresh ground pepper
Chopped fresh oregano leaves

Place tomatoes, red onion, cucumbers, olives and feta cheese in a large bowl. Drizzle with the best olive oil you have and a few splashes of red wine vinegar. Sprinkle with a little salt (the feta will be salty so not too much), fresh pepper and 2/3 of your chopped oregano leaves. Toss lightly to combine. Garnish the top with more oregano leaves.
Greek dinner plate with Santorini grilled chicken, Greek salad, corn, and red wine.Greek dinner plate with Santorini grilled chicken, Greek salad, and corn.

Filed Under: Dinner, Poultry, Salads, Travel Tagged With: cucumbers, feta cheese, Greek roasted chicken, Greek salad, grilled chicken, kalamata olives, lemon basting sauce, oregano, red onion, Santorini, tomatoes

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Mary Frances

Mary Frances

Spread love through cooking.

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