Foodie Friday - Lemon Thyme Bars

I was watching the food network and during a commercial break Giada De Laurentis showed how to make Lemon Thyme Bars. I had all the ingredients and decided to make it with my Daughter-in-Law.

The recipe can be found here: Lemon Thyme Bars.

First we made a trip to to Perennial Herb Garden to pick Thyme. We separated the leaves from the stems and then chopped. We needed 2 Tablespoons. We had one.
So we repeated the whole thing over again.

I let my daughter-in-law be the hand model. She lives in the city and does not garden, so her hands look nicer than mine.
We combined 1 cup of flour, the thyme and 1/2 tsp. salt.

Then we beat 1 stick of unsalted butter with 1/2 cup powdered sugar until it was light and fluffy.

To that we added 2 Tablespoons of Lemon Juice and 1/2 tsp. vanilla and beat that with the butter and sugar.

We turned the mixture on low and gradually added the flour/thyme mixture.

My daughter-in-law pressed it into a greased and floured dish.
The dish was supposed to be 8 x 8, Mine was 10 x 10. That explains a lot about how these turned out.

After pressing we baked them for about 30 minutes. I say "about" because I forgot to turn on the timer. This was about the time we discovered the Black Widow Spider (featured in my last post).

We baked it until it was golden and looked set.
We don't know how long that was.

It seemed longer than 30 minutes though.

As you can see in this shot, there was too much pan and not enough dough.  And what we ended up with was much thinner than Giada's looked.

But pressing onward, we mixed 2 Tablespoons of lemon juice with 1/2 cup of powdered sugar until smooth and spread it over the Lemon Thyme Bars. Then we let it sit for a half hour to firm up.

In the end, in spite of the mistakes, these were pretty tasty. I never really thought of using an herb like Thyme in a baked good.

We gave them two thumbs up, but will look for an 8 x 8 pan if we decide to make them again!

Foodie Friday - Rosemary, Thyme and Turnips

I have decided to share  what I'm cooking from the garden on Friday. On the menu today is Lemon-Rosemary Grilled Chicken with Turnip Thyme Puree.
Let's start with the chicken. In full disclosure I used an Ina Garten recipe from the food network. You can get the whole recipe here: Ina Garten's Recipe.

This is my attempt at a butterflied chicken. Ina removed all the bones. First variation. I actually like bones in the chicken. They add flavor. So all I did was remove the backbone and try to make the chicken flat. This chicken wasn't having any of that. It never got really flat. (By the way - this is an organic chicken - happy chickens make happy dinners. )

I chopped up about 1/4 cup rosemary from the garden and kept two sprigs whole, chopped three cloves of garlic, zested 1 tsp. lemon peel and then squeezed out about 1 1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice.

These were added to a small bowl and mixed with salt, pepper and olive oil to make a paste. The paste was rubbed under the skin of the chicken and also on the outside of the skin. (It smelled wonderful!)

The remaining lemon was sliced and put on the non-skin side of the chicken along with the two sprigs of rosemary. The whole thing was wrapped in plastic and put in the refrigerator to marinate for about an hour.

Because it wasn't very flat, I placed my bacon press on top of it hoping to compress it a bit.

While it was marinating I was able to cleanup the kitchen. Nice.

The chicken was placed on the grill, skin side down and hubs took over. (I did have him put the bacon press on the chicken while it cooked to try to flatten it more. )

I went in and prepared the turnips.

These are the last of the turnips from the Potager. They were pretty small. The recipe I am using is a Tyler Florence recipe, also from the Food Network, that can be found here: Tyler Florence's Recipe.
His recipe says 3 large turnips. I had 7 small to really, really small turnips. I figured I did not have as many turnips as he would have had, so I stopped measuring and just eye-balled stuff.

I peeled and chopped the turnips.

I put them in a 2 quart saucepan, added milk to cover (I never have whole milk in the house, but I did have organic 2% milk, so I used that), 1 smashed clove of garlic and added a handful of thyme from the garden.
The instructions were to keep the heat at medium and bring to a gentle simmer until the turnips are tender. But I went outside to look at the garden and the milk was boiling over when I got back in. Oops.

In any case, the turnips were eventually soft enough for a paring knife tip to go through with no resistance, so I drained them into a bowl, removed the thyme, then added the turnips back to the pot with a little bit of milk, salt and pepper and a bit of butter (Tyler Florence's recipe calls for a whole stick of butter. I have arteries to think about. I used about a teaspoon and it was fine.)
Then, using my favorite tool - the immersion blender, I pureed the turnips, adding milk as I felt it was needed from the bowl.

About this time, the chicken was done.

I wish there was a way for you to smell this wonderful chicken. And I wish I knew how to photograph food better, because in spite of what it looks like here, this chicken was beautiful!

The chicken was moist and so flavorful. The rosemary was perfectly balanced by the lemon, without  overpowering the chicken itself. The turnips were really good. Hubs looked at them (I may have added a bit too much milk) and said no thanks, then he tried them and liked them. He thought they would be a good substitute for potatoes. The thyme flavor was in the background, but not overwhelming. It was a good thing they were filling - I could have eaten the whole pot!  I also served leftover carrots and broccoli from the Potager to round out our meal.
These will definitely appear on our dinner table again this summer. A very delicious way to cook both chicken and turnips using fresh herbs from the garden!