Slacks for Ella Funt

My company published The Zuni Cafe Cookbook a few years ago, and I had never really gotten around to making anything from it. Everything seemed too involved. And since our grocery store is small and not very well stocked with anything not Polish, it seemed like too much of a pain to get a long list of fancy ingredients.

Various people at the office had raved about the Roast Chicken and Bread Salad though, and I finally managed to give it a try. It was well worth it, and didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. I salted the chicken in the morning instead of a day or two in advance because a coworker said that days in advance wasn’t necessary. Then, about an hour and a half before we sat down to eat, I toasted the bread and then roasted the chicken while assembling the salad.

It was well worth it. The crusty chunks of bread are saturated with vinaigrette and chicken drippings, contrasting with the bitter arugala and sweet currants and pine nuts. And the roast chicken pieces were the best roast chicken I’d ever had.

The only real problem was that cooking the chicken on very high heat managed to set off our smoke detector over and over. Lucky for us, we have an extra-safe one that’s wired into the building and only has battery for backup, so we couldn’t even take out the battery to make it stop. We finally pointed the fan directly at the smoke detector for the rest of the cooking time. If I ever make this again, I’m definitely turning on all the fans and opening all the windows before I start.