Having a freezer full of our own fat chickens is really fun; certainly more fun than a pen of fat chickens that need to be processed, its good to get any harvest into the barn. During the 10 to 12 weeks they grew I would idly consider how I’d cook them and we’ve tried some good ways so far. The first was pollo en escabeche, which is a wonderful synthesis of spanish, moorish and mayan styles from Merida in the Yucatan. The bird is marinated in sour orange juice with achiote and habanero and vinegar then grilled over charcoal and served shredded on tostadas with a spiced orange juice and chili dressing and pickled red onions.

This is typical of what much of my cooking is, trying to reverse engineer dishes I’ve had on the road. I like Merida a lot and have returned time and again. The food there is wonderful and I really like the their trio musical style with its caribbean harmonies and soft rhythms. One of the last places in Mexico to be ‘conquered’ they had a short lived boom in henequen, a rope fiber made from agave. The American conquest of the Phillipines and the subsequent dominance of ‘Manila’ rope put Merida on the skids where its stayed since, mostly. There’s enough industry to make it noisy and polluted, no longer the ‘White City’ it called itself in the good times but it has a decayed elegance I’ve always found comfortable. An odd ethnic mix that includes Lebanese, Cubans, Spanish, Mexican and Mayan makes for interesting cooking and music and there are some fun old cantinas downtown. One nameless place I frequent has a malfunctioning freezer they use as a beer cooler because it drips freezing water on the liter bottles of Montejo beer coating them with a centimeter of ice. Merida is hot, hot, hot and a liter of Montejo coated with ice is a wonderful thing come happy hour, accompanied by botanas drenched in searing habanero/orange salsa.

While I have enough experience of Mayan cooking to be able to reproduce it well, Indian cooking is more of a challenge. Only recently, since we found Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking have I been turning out respectable Indian favorites. We asked the woman behind the counter at Kalustyan’s, explaining we’d been disappointed with every Indian cookbook we’d tried and she was unhesitating in her recommendation. The spicing and the rich glossy sauces are just right. We both really liked the hardboiled eggs in spicy cream sauce on rice with spinach. And tandoori chicken is another great way to use our birds.

One craving that kept coming back was the 60’s style barbecued chicken my mom used to make. I’m sure it was a bottled sauce poured on baked parts but I kept thinking about it. For this kind of reverse engineering we have come to rely on Ruth Reichl’s new Gourmet cookbook. Every single recipe we’ve tried from it has been right on, some of them things I’ve been looking for for years. Sure enough there is the tomato barbecue sauce and wow was it good. As with most recipes I substitute honey for brown sugar, always an improvement, and habanero for the guajillo that was recommended. We brine our birds for 3-5 days and then grill them slowly over a low charcoal fire, applying the barbecue sauce for the last few minutes. Ellen said it was the best chicken we’d ever made with the right 60’s red sauce notes updated for our modern palates. I put a bird in brine today for later in the week; it gives one time to muse on methods.