Creamy Blue Cheese Dressing

Oh, hello blog!  I haven’t seen much of you lately.  Sorry about that, it’s just that August is Wedding and Catering month here on Pender Island, so I’ve been pretty busy…

Howard and I are still eating well — leftovers from wedding brunches and catered lunches mostly — no complaints yet, anyway…

But on Sunday night, after a lazy afternoon recuperating from a very busy weekend, I finally had enough time to put together a real dinner for the both of us.  Comfort was on the menu, and retro became the theme.

And while this blue cheese dressing and the iceberg wedge salad it rode in on are actually the stars of this post, it didn’t start out that way.  In fact, the salad and dressing kind of tagged along to the table at the last minute, so please excuse me if I take a moment or two before I get to the recipe…

  

Garlic was actually the seed of inspiration that planted the idea for a comfort meal in my head (and belly).  I came home, exhausted, from the Farmers’ Market on Saturday afternoon to find a large box full of garlic on the doormat.  A gift from my friend Jenn, who despite having three small children, manages to grow more food in her big, beautiful garden than any other home grower I know.

Her elephant garlic is big, sweet and juicy.  One look at those stalks in the box and I knew it was roasted garlic mashed potatoes for dinner.  If you look closely at the roasted picture, you can see a “web” of dried garlic juice in the roaster.  The frothing action when I pulled it out halfway through for a quick look was startling — that’s some of the juiciest garlic I’ve ever seen!

Two full heads went into our mash, then I kept another 2 bulbs for later use.  The rest (another 8 or 9 heads) are currently in the dehydrator so that I’ll have garlic flakes to last through the winter…

With roasted garlic mash on the menu, a roast chicken was a no-brainer — add a little gravy and you have a comfort meal that spans across the ages — and since we were having the mashed potatoes I made throughout the 90′s, I figured a little more retro wouldn’t be amiss…enter a beer can chicken from the 80′s.

Those with keen eyes will notice that this is, in fact, a Coke can.  We don’t like canned beer around here, but we do like canned Coke and we do have BIG bottles of beer, so everything got sorted in the end.

I massaged that chicken with a little of my dry rub, plopped it on it’s prop can, and then the 2 of us hung out on the deck while the oven warmed up.  Sure, we could have taken a walk to the back deck and the barbecue, but I wanted gravy, and you need a pan for that.

I deglazed the pan drippings with another cup of beer, let it boil down and reduce for a few minutes, then added a couple of healthy pats of butter off the heat to thicken the sauce up a little more and give it that glorious sheen.

That was actually my first beer can chicken, an I think I’ll call the experience a success.  The skin was crispy, the meat was juicy and, best of all, the clean-up was minimal!

After the meat and potatoes were taken care of, it was time to consider the veg.  And while I could have continued the retro theme by serving some over-boiled frozen peas of my childhood, I chose instead to go with iceberg lettuce from the same era.  Is there a more iconic 70s salad than a wedge, complete with chopped tomato, bacon bits and blue cheese dressing?  A Waldorf, maybe — but while we didn’t have any grapes, we did have a big hunk of blue cheese.

Case closed.