November 20th: keeper chicken with sage, lemon and garlic + gingerbread cookies

This Saturday night I went for pure indulgence again (two nights in a row!). Baked potatoes loaded with toppings (no bacon, even though I was tempted to pull some from the freezer) and one of my favourite chicken recipes: from Epicurious: Lemon, Sage and Garlic Roast Chicken. I should note, this is one of my favourite recipes, but not so for G or O. O is funny about meat. She'll eat it with ketchup, but I didn't give her any on this night, so she didn't eat much chicken. G likes the recipe but doesn't love it, though he indulges my obsession with lemon, and he shares my obsession with garlic.

The best part of cooking this meal was that I got to put my new cookware to the test. The last two years in a row, Tee has given me a gift certificate to Ma Cuisine for Christmas. This is a cookware store in Ottawa that I hadn't found time to visit apparently, as I still had both gift certificates, unused, set aside. At the same time, I busted one of my frying pans and our two others were old and probably weren't great ones to begin with. All of which led to: frying pan shopping! We hit Ma Cuisine, salivated over the copper pots that were literally chained to the shelf, and then got a run-down on the others that we could actually afford. With the gift certificates and Greg's impending riches in mind if not in hand, we bought two amazing frying pans from a company I've never heard of: Scanpan.

Let's be clear that I shill for no one. However, if Scanpan would like to hire me to talk about how amazing their product is, sign me up, because I am in love with these frying pans. They are oven-proof to 500°F, so I shouldn't have any mishaps as with my poor Paderno pan.

One other thing: I made gingerbread dough last weekend, and today pulled one of four packs out of the freezer to make gingerbread men with Olivia. AWESOME. This is a recipe from November 2009's Chatelaine: Classic gingerbread cookies. I didn't make the cookies last year, but saved the recipe as I knew someday I would want to make them with O. One note: the recipe says it makes 50 cookies. With my 1/4 dough package, I made only 7. Also: a shout out to Kat, who gave me a piping bag and tips a million years ago and I have finally used them! I knew I would one day.

broken leg in cast, t-shirt & hat, bow tie, hula skirt, snowsuit, girl, boy