Joe Yonan, Pineapple Butt Chicken, and Me

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Okay, so Joe Yonan gives the dish a classier title (“Pineapple-Juice-Can Hen and Baby Potatoes”), but let’s be real. It’s a little chicken with a little can of pineapple juice shoved up its bottom. And you know what? It. Is. Amazing.

Like, eat-with-your-hands-and-lick-your-fingers amazing. Which is perfect if you’re cooking for yourself, and if you happen to be cooking with a friend (as I was, with my favorite partner-in-crime ever, Kelly from Fountain Bookstore), and you don’t feel like you can do the eating with hands and licking of fingers thing, well, then, you need to find new friends. For reals.

Yonan (who happens to be the food & travel editor for the Washington Post, how’s that for a kickass day job?) has written a fabulous cookbook filled with grown-up food for grown-up people. Because, you know, most of those “cooking for one” books are basically college food, and that’s really not so great once you’re, erm, out of college. The recipes in Serve Yourself are designed to be made for one but can easily be adapted if you’re cooking for two (as Kelly and I did), and let me tell you, it was really refreshing to not have to do crazy math involving fractions of fractions just to figure out how to cook for two people.

There’s a reason I’m a book person, y’all, and if you’d seen my math scores on the SAT, you’d know what it is.

So back to this chicken. I have to admit that I was skeptical. I’m relatively new to roasting chickens (I know—it’s a cooking basic, but it just always seemed somehow magical and difficult to me), and I prefer mine savory and crispy (and by crispy, I mean coated in butter and kosher salt because, come on, the skin is the best part), and I didn’t really know what to think about chicken cooked with something as sweet as pineapple. But fear not! There is rosemary and salt a-plenty.

And there is sauce made of pineapple juice, lime juice, and—you guessed it—butter, and the sauce gets thick and tastes delicious and is totally what makes the dish. Well, except for the potatoes, which are roasted in the pan with the chicken and are drizzled doused in olive oil, salt, and pepper, and are so completely fantastic that you’ll eat most of them straight from the roasting pan while you wait for the sauce to simmer. True story.

But first, first you have to wash the hens and giggle uncontrollably when one of you (*coughKellycough*) accidentally creates chicken porn while arranging them back on the prep plate. Because that’s what grown-ups do when they cook together.

Then you put the hens in the oven (after you make lewd jokes about lubing up pineapple juice cans with cooking spray) and wait for ‘em to do their thing. Oh, and you drink wine. The good stuff, like this one recommended specifically for this dish by our friends at River City Cellars.

Then you twiddle your thumbs, talk about books, drink some more wine, check on your chicken babies, and rejoice when they come out looking like this.

(Okay, we helped them with the whole putting-their-wings-around-each-other thing, but we’re just cool like that.)

Devour, contemplate going face-first into the plate to get all of the saucy goodness, finish your wine, and think about how you wish the camera on your phone lent itself better to taking pictures of food.

Want a taste for yourself? Check out Joe Yonan at Fountain Bookstore next Tuesday, April 26th or hit up his website for more info and other appearances.

P.S. This post is part of my Fountain 360 in 365 project, for which I am attempting to read one book from every section of the bookstore, recommended to me by its booksellers.