FFWD Olive-Olive Cornish Hens

We’re leaving tomorrow for a 10 day trip to visit Paul’s family in Oregon.  This week was also my birthday (30!) so we ate out more than usual.  All this to say that I had a lot of cooking to do on Sunday.  I wanted to use up our CSA vegetables, make the FFWD recipes for this week and next, and also make some cookies as a thank you to the friend who got us the Wilco tickets.

Apple pie for my birthday

As soon as I finished watching the Redskins game (and watching Dallas lose to Detroit!) I headed to the kitchen to get started.  I made the cookie dough, finished making the blini (which I’ll write about next week), made jalapeno mini quiches and greens to serve with the blini, pickled a bunch of jalapenos (the jalapenos at our CSA did great this year), and roasted a butternut squash to make soup.  I also roped Paul into grilling a bunch of vegetables to make wraps for lunches this week.  

After that was finished it was time to move on to the FFWD recipe.  I really loved this recipe.  I made my own tapenade and I still had everything ready to go in the time it took the oven to preheat, and the hens came out really well.  I usually try not to eat the skin, but it was so crispy and had such good flavor that it was hard to stop.  The meat also came out very moist, and it was all so easy.  When I make this again I think I will use more of the tapenade, though, I could barely tell it was there.

Black olive tapenade

The cornish hens at my grocery store were very small (I’ve never really eaten them before, were everybody’s hens small?).  When I checked out the cashier actually looked at my two hens and said she hoped I didn’t have a lot of people to feed!  It was only my husband and I, but I wanted to have leftovers for lunch the next day so I knew I’d need substantial side dishes to stretch the meal.  I decided to serve the hens with arugula salad with tomatoes and homemade ranch dressing, a grilled pepper salad with cheese, and some Potatonik.  

Hens out of the oven

The tomatoes are the last from Paul’s garden and the ranch dressing really needed to get used up before we leave for vacation.  Our CSA gave us tons of green peppers this summer, and the green pepper salad is my new favorite way to use them up.  I don’t really like raw green peppers, but once they’ve been grilled until their black, steamed/peeled, and tossed with good cheese and balsamic I really like them.  The Potatonik is a new recipe for me.  I got the recipe from George Greenstein’s Secrets of a Jewish Baker and really enjoyed it.  It’s more similar to a potato latke than to a bread, but I thought it complemented our meal very nicely.  All in all, I was very pleased with how the dinner came out.  We had leftover flip over plum cake (from Dorie’s Baking book) for dessert.  It was a nice way to end the weekend.  

Dinner plate

Dinner with leftovers for lunch