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Sesame Chicken with Orange and Soy Glaze from a magazine that’s a new favorite

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        Even with the demise of “Gourmet”, our mailbox isn’t exactly empty of food magazines. I still subscribe to at least 6 of them.  And since I started a course called “Food Writer’s Boot Camp”, our house is practically a library for food magazines.  Even just sticking to the English language, we’ve now been introduced to “Delicious” and “Donna Hay” (Australia),”Clean Eating” (Canada) “Cuisine” (New Zealand), “Jamaican Eats” (terrible and strangely aligned to Canada), “Food and Travel”, “Jamie” “Waitrose Food Illustrated”, “Good Food Italian” from the BBC of all places and, our favorite, “Olive”, all from the U.K. 
Not to ignore the American entries that were completely new to us, we’ve discovered “VegNews” and “Vegetarian Times” “Gastronomica”, “Food” “Tastes of Italia”, something called “Southern Lady” which featured upfront an ad for a “Faith building weekend with ‘Southern Lady’ and Christian women from across the nation”.  Well, “Chacun a son gout” as the French say.  But far and away the best discovery among the American magazines was one I’d seen but never picked up before: “Fine Cooking”.

In the interests of full disclosure, Food Writing Boot Camp is led by Laurie Buckle who is the Editor of “Fine Cooking”, from  Taunton Press. She was responsible for the re-design of the magazine last year and she is a wealth of information about food writing. She started her career at Bon Appetit and it’s been on a quite a trajectory ever since.   But since I am not pursuing a degree and will not be graded for my course work, I promise you this is not an attempt to curry favor with my teacher. 

What I like about “Fine Cooking” is it is sort of a much more beautiful “Cook’s Illustrated”.  It’s very step-by-step, very informative and consumer-friendly.  I think what frightened me off about it the past was I imagined its recipes were going to more complicated, that my non-cooking school education would be a real setback for using the magazine.  Instead, it’s easy to understand and it really goes into depth:  The February / March issue has an eight page article with everything you could possibly want to know about Braised Short Ribs.
The recipe I’m sharing with you today was excellent.  I include it here even though I had to change the instructions and you can see from the photo why:  I do not have a broiler with any kind of temperature control.  The original recipe had the chicken in a 450 broiler for 20 minutes.  Then it further browned under a 550 broiler for 5-6 minutes.  Instead, I roasted the chicken in a very hot oven 450 degree oven. It was crisp and beautiful and I should have stopped there.  Unfortunately, I was determined to follow directions and stick the chicken under the broiler after it had roasted for 30 minutes.  This was not only unnecessary but, as you can clearly see, did not ‘deeply brown’ the chicken. It went a little too far beyond brown.  Stick with the oven and stay away from the broiler.   This is perfect for weeknights, it’s inexpensive and just exotic enough to be interesting.  It pairs beautifully with Jasmine or Basmati rice.   Here is the recipe:

 



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