day 3.

Day 3

The greens are still simmering when I get up, so I turn those off and take them off the heat so they'll cool down a little faster.

French press pot of coffee - same as yesterday - yogurt with strawberry preserves. The preserves are runnier than I wanted, despite just saying that that would be okay - the syrup runs off the yogurt and pools up. When I get a chance later I'll reboil it.

When I put the greens away, I have a mug of pot liquor - not just because it's good, but because it lets me check the seasoning. Despite the Marmite, the greens are woefully undersalted, probably because there were just so MANY of them. I add some Tony Chachere's seasoned salt. The pot liquor is sort of flat and green-tasting at first, but there's a bitter undertone from the dandelion greens - different from the sharpness of mustard greens - followed by a little bit of kick from the sriracha and the Tony's. Not quite as sweet as I expected, because the turnip greens got crowded out.

See, this is one reason I like cooking a mix of many greens, though - the flavor is surprisingly complex, for what it is.

Lunch is approaching. I reboil the strawberry preserves and put those aside. Juice mixed with Kool Aid has accumulated in the watermelon bowl - I pour that into a glass and transfer the remaining watermelon into a smaller container so I can free up the bowl and run the dishwasher.

I spatchcock a chicken - oh, the look you're giving me, your dirty mind - cock is simply chicken and of course spatch means cunt - and cover it in some hot sauce I had concocted a few weeks ago, with sriracha, sherry vinegar, Marmite, Vegemite, and miso - throw it in the oven at 460 and go back to work.

The chicken comes out of the oven after an hour. The skin is blackened in places, but not problematically so. I scoop the chicken out of the pan with a spatula, put it on the extra-large cutting board, and let it rest a while. A cook's treat - grab the heel end of bread and swipe it through the fond in the pan - the reduced juices from cooking. In this case in addition to the rich chicken flavors of the fond, it's pretty seriously spicy, with some tang from the reduced vinegar. Heady stuff.

Lunch - after the chicken has rested for half an hour, I spread a little fond on a piece of bread and top it with one of the breasts and a little thigh meat. Greens and a pimento cheese foldover on the side. Now if the heatwave does arrive tonight, I've got cold roast chicken in addition to the leftover smoked pork and salad fixings, and don't need to "cook," in the sense of heating anything up, for a few days.

When the chicken's fully cooled, I remove the bones and toss them in the crockpot. Another cook's treat - I eat the pope's nose.

Before it gets TOO hot I decide to run the dehydrator - I'd read about sun-dried squash and decided to try drying it a bit in the dehydrator. I'm generally not a big fan of summer squash except in Keller's ratatouille, but it's the watery texture that I don't like, not the flavor - maybe partially drying it will intensify the flavors the way Keller's slow-cooking does.

Okay, so those get dried, which brings us to dinner - a taco - sliced smoked pork skin, fresh fava beans, greens, salsa, garlic, sriracha, cheddar.

Tonic water, a little rum, and a lot of Maurin Quina (which tastes kind of like cough syrup but in an awesome way).