"When a Guest Doesn't Love an Entree . . ."

It’s been an interesting week in Can’t-Stand-the-Heat Kitchen. Tel Aviv is once again going into shut-down mode, just on the cusp of the Holiday season. Lots of last-minute orders coming in. A shortage of butter (again!). Some of the most beautiful baby back short ribs popping up out of nowhere. Beautiful okra. Shitty cauliflower.

And in the midst of all this hurly-burly, a guest of mine calls to say that the whole roasted chicken he ordered for his dad was, according to the dad, under-cooked.I immediately apologized and refunded his order, no questions asked. I was in the midst of watching once again the Chef’s Table segment on South Korean buddhist/chef Jeong Kwan and trying very hard to embrace her notion of harmony and meditative peace in our soul food kitchen. And this little tempest comes along. Turns out, finding that harmony and inner peace is a helluva lot harder than it looks.

It’s a venerable dish, this whole roasted chicken, running back from the classic French approach to Julia Childs to Thomas Keller’s slightly and I mean slightly contemporary update. This dish calls for brining in a 10% salt solution for 12 hours, followed by trussing the bird up and letting it air cool for 2 to 3 days, then roasting on a bed of vegetables at a high temperature (232 C, then 205 C) for roughly 65 minutes or until the internal temp hits 160 F.

Just to be on the safe side, I cook mine to 170 F. I’ve got 3 separate thermometers monitoring the process. And before serving, I plate the dish, so that I can both see the bird for myself to check for doneness and to taste it. The roasted root vegetables serving as the bed for this whole chicken: beets, turnips, onions, carrots, yams, jerusalem artichokes, red peppers, whole garlic head. I taste everything to be damn sure. The dish is amazing.

And here it was being rejected. Well, not exactly rejected, since while the order has been totally refunded, dad is reheating pieces of the bird in his oven to the doneness he wants. There’s enough there in that 2.3 kg bird to enjoy free dinner for the next 4 days easily.

Let it all go, Martin, I tell myself. And frankly, part of that letting go is this particular piece of writing, a bit of catharsis. How would Jeong Kwan approach this, I ask myself. Don’t judge. It’s all for the better. This is simply another lesson in taming your ego. You fed someone who was hungry, right? That’s the main thing. Jeong Kwan is a fucking saint.