Roast chicken, veggies and ginger

It's still a few days away from Thanksgiving, but this weekend I decided to roast a chicken anyway. It was a 4 1/2 pound chicken (about 1 1/2 pounds more than I normally roast); I followed Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything. Rather than using a rack, I piled the chicken on top of a bed of chopped potato and carrot chunks, plus a few unpeeled garlic cloves and some sliced ginger (a couple of inches worth of ginger, sliced thin); also two cups of homemade chicken stock to keep everything from burning.

The ginger was a last-minute inspiration, but it worked great. It gave a certain zing and clarity to the roasted veggies (possibly abetted by the chicken stock). You don't have to eat the ginger if you try this; it's intended to add flavor to the dish only (in the vein of adding a bay leaf to soup or stew).

A bit o' business

I've been remiss here, but I suppose you folks who visit the blog can notice the Foodbuzz banners and such (and yes, I know the top one is off-center, but rectifying that will require a heart-to-heart with the template, which I haven't had time for yet). Yes, I have signed on, and I have to say so far I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I haven't begun to dig into all the features it offers, but I look forward to it. Already, I've discovered that a blog I thought was inactive and had missed quite a bit is very much alive. I've also found new blogs.

Foodbuzz takes the model of social networking you might know from sites like Facebook and applies it to food. There are slots for blogs, restaurant reviews, chit-chat, recipes and more. Given that there are lots of foodies on the internet, and they're all passionate about food in various ways, it seems like a great idea for a social networking site.

Yes, there are ads, and I have to say that I gave this some serious soul-searching when I was first contacted by Foodbuzz, but I decided to gamble and try to get some sort of income stream from the blog. Call it an experiment.

More cooking coming soon.